Chapter 1

I'd been married to Ethan for five years when he took my wedding ring right off my finger to please his mistress.

That ring was the only thing my parents left me.

I knelt on the floor and begged him to give it back. He didn't even look at me. He placed it in another woman's palm and said, "If you like it, it's yours."

From that day on, I stopped waiting for him to come home, stopped leaving a light on in the dead of night.

He brought his mistress home to spend the night and ordered me to buy condoms. I went.

He was intimate with her in the master bedroom and made me listen from the room next door. I listened all night long.

He had people search me in public, strip my clothes off, and threw me out of the house covered in injuries.

I said nothing.

Because I still wore the scarf he'd wrapped around my neck when I was eighteen.

I'd always thought that was the beginning of love. Later I learned he'd just casually saved someone, and I spent my whole life repaying that debt.

Everyone thought I would endure it.

But they didn't know I'd been carrying the divorce agreement he signed on our wedding day with me all along.

Five years. I'd finally gathered the courage to take it out and sign my own name.