Chapter 2Waking Up to His Rival

At midnight, I climbed the narrow brownstone stairs to Dr. Henderson’s private practice on the Upper West Side.

He was a retired neuropsychiatrist who specialized in deep hypnotic trauma recovery, someone outside Ethan’s incestuous professional network. I sat in the leather reclining chair, the hum of the white noise machine vibrating in my teeth.

"You understand the risks, Lauren," Dr. Henderson said gently, his notebook resting on his knee. "If your former practitioner used chemical facilitators and deep hypnotic anchors to wall off a trauma, forcing the door open can be agonizing. The brain builds those walls to survive."

"Break the door down," I whispered.

I closed my eyes. The pendulum of his voice swung slowly, rhythmically, pulling me down through layers of manufactured fog. My teeth clenched until my jaw ached. Then, the black ice gave way, and I fell through.

When I opened my eyes, my blouse was soaked in cold sweat. My hands were clawing at the leather armrests, every muscle in my torso locked in violent, shuddering spasms.

The dam had broken.

It hadn't just been one betrayal. It had been two.

The first time I caught them was five years ago. My grandmother’s memorial service at a country church in Vermont.

I had walked into the basement vestry looking for extra hymnals and found them pressed against the radiator. Haley’s fingers tangled in Ethan’s hair, sucking a dark purple bruise onto his neck. She had laughed against his mouth, whispering, Let’s see if your dumb little charity-case girlfriend even notices.

I had shattered. The betrayal was so sudden, so foul, that the grief for my grandmother curdled into homicidal rage. I grabbed a pair of floral shears from the counter and lunged at them, screaming.

The blade sliced Haley’s forearm, drawing a bright red stripe. She shrieked, cowering behind Ethan. And Ethan—the man I had worshipped—grabbed the iron shears with one hand and shoved me backward with all his weight.

My lower back and stomach slammed into the sharp mahogany corner of the communion table.

I was sixteen weeks pregnant.

I had miscarried on the cold linoleum floor of that church basement, the life bleeding out of me while Ethan knelt over Haley, bandaging her scratch.

When I woke up in the rural hospital ward, Haley was standing over my bed, smelling of lavender and antiseptic. Ethan and I have been together for six months, she told me, her voice smooth and venomous. You were nauseous, you were tired, you couldn't touch him. I was doing you a favor, Lauren. You should be thanking me for keeping him warm.

Blind with fury, I tore the IV out of my arm and wrapped my hands around her throat. I wanted to crush her windpipe. I wanted one of us to stop breathing.

Ethan had pulled me off her. He had called two orderlies, pinned my wrists to the bedrails, and administered high-dose midazolam. Then, sitting beside my restrained, weeping body, he pulled out his therapeutic anchors. He rewrote the narrative. He buried the grief, the blood, the baby, and Haley. He made me forget I had ever bled.

A year later, the subconscious crack showed. I walked into our brownstone and caught them in our bed.

By then, my soul was already tired. I didn't reach for a blade; I took off my ring, packed a suitcase, and walked out. I was done.

But Ethan couldn't accept being abandoned. He couldn't stomach losing the woman who had built him. So he drugged my evening tea, locked me in his study, and conducted a second deep-state hypnosis. He wiped away the second betrayal. He reset my emotional compass to the summer we first met, when I looked at him like he was God.

Now, sitting in the cab heading downtown, every memory was razor-sharp.

When I unlocked the front door of our apartment, Ethan was sitting on the sectional, a half-empty glass of scotch on the coffee table. The dim amber lamp cast deep hollows under his eyes.

He stood up quickly, his face twisting into an expression of desperate contrition. "Lauren... God, where were you? I was terrified."

He reached out to touch my arm. I flinched back so hard my knuckles struck the doorframe.

"Don't touch me," I said, my voice shaking with pure revulsion. "You make me sick. You cheat on me, you replace me, and then you steal my mind so you don't have to face what you did. Does it get you off, Ethan? Playing God with my brain?"

Tears welled in his eyes. He shook his head frantically.

"I couldn't let you go," he choked out. "Lauren, you don't understand. Whatever Haley is, whatever any woman is to me, you are the foundation. You're the only one I ever truly loved. You made me."

And God help me, that part was true.

Ethan had grown up in an abandoned trailer park in western Pennsylvania, surviving on food stamps and the charity of an elderly aunt who barely remembered his name. When we met in college, he couldn't afford a winter coat or a warm breakfast.

I worked sixty hours a week—waitressing double shifts at a diner, proofreading dissertations at night—to pay his tuition through clinical psychology graduate school. When his aunt died of a stroke while he was on an academic fellowship in London, he couldn't afford the transatlantic flight home.

I drove eight hundred miles alone through a blizzard to arrange the burial, pay the mortuary fees, and stand in the frozen dirt so she wouldn't be dumped into a pauper's grave.

I gave him my youth, my money, my marrow.

"And this is how you repaid me," I whispered.

Ethan lunged forward, wrapping his arms around my waist from behind, pressing his tear-stained face into the crook of my neck.

"I swear to you, Lauren, it's almost over," he pleaded against my skin. "Once the baby is born, I’ll settle her in another city. We’ll take the boy. We’ll raise him together with Maisie. A boy and a girl. We’ll be whole again."

Before I could tear myself out of his grip, his phone buzzed violently on the glass table.

The caller ID flashed Haley.

Ethan hesitated, then reached down and tapped the speaker.

Haley’s breathless, sobbing voice filled the foyer. "Ethan... please, hurry back to the hospital. My stomach hurts so bad... the baby won't stop kicking, I think something's tearing..."

The moment her voice hit the room, Ethan’s arms dropped from my waist. The desperation on his face vanished, replaced by sheer panic.

He turned his back to me, his voice hushed and urgent. "Take deep breaths, Haley. I’m walking out the door right now."

He hung up, grabbed his jacket, and looked at me with clumsy, rushed deceit. "There's an emergency consult at Mount Sinai. A patient is in crisis. I have to go."

I didn't answer. I just turned my face to the wall.

When the lock clicked shut behind him, I pulled out my phone. My thumb hovered over the calendar app, tracing the years backward.

Four years ago.

Right after I walked away from Ethan’s second betrayal, before he hunted me down and reset my memories, I had spent two reckless, incandescent weeks with Marcus Cross.

Marcus had been Ethan’s bitterest academic rival in graduate school—a man of sharp edges and relentless integrity who had left clinical psychology to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a behavioral intelligence operative.

We had crossed paths in a quiet bar in D.C. One drink became an entire night of bitter truths, and that night bled into ten days in his rented apartment overlooking the Potomac. It was the only time in my life I had felt truly seen, truly protected.

Then came the deployment. A joint federal task force targeting an overseas trafficking syndicate. Absolute radio silence. Marcus knew the risks; before he boarded the transport plane, he transferred his family trust and his property deeds into my name.

Wait for me, Lauren, he had whispered against my hair at the gate. No matter what happens, hold on. I will come back for you.

Then I returned home to pack my things, Ethan ambushed me with a syringe, and the slate was wiped clean. When I found out I was pregnant two months later, my hypnotized mind assumed the child belonged to the man holding my hand.

A soft rustle broke the silence.

The hallway door creaked open, and a little girl in dinosaur pajamas peeked out, rubbing her eyes with a chubby fist.

"Mommy?"

Maisie stumbled forward, throwing her little arms around my knees. "Up, please."

I lifted her into my arms, burying my face in the warm, lavender scent of her hair. In the dim lamplight, I looked at her dark, observant eyes, the stubborn line of her jaw, the slight cleft in her chin.

She didn't have a single trace of Ethan Cole. She had Marcus Cross’s entire face.

Maisie rested her cheek against my shoulder, her lower lip trembling. "Mommy... is Daddy leaving us?"