Chapter 1

My husband satisf brought his mistress to my grandmother's will reading.

He satisf held her hand. In front of my face. In front of the cameras. In front of the entire Harrison family.

And he smiled.

"Relax, Elise. Once this is over, we'll finalize the divorce. You'll be free, and so will I."

Free. That was the word he used — as if our three-year marriage was a prison and I was the warden.

I sat in the front row of the lawyer's conference hall, my hands resting on my stomach. Eight weeks pregnant. He didn't know. He wouldn't care if he did.

The woman beside him was Karina — my best friend since college. She wore a black dress to my grandmother's will reading as if she were the grieving granddaughter. Her fingers intertwined with my husband's, and she didn't even bother hiding it.

Everyone stared at me.

Nathan's mother, Vivian, sat across the aisle with her lips curled in open contempt. "I told Nathan from the beginning — you were never good enough for this family. Your grandmother's little bakery empire doesn't impress anyone."

Nathan's father, Richard, didn't even look at me. He was on his phone, probably calculating how much of Grandma's estate he could funnel through Nathan.

Nathan's sister, Brooke, whispered loudly to Karina, "After today, you won't have to hide anymore. She'll be out of the picture."

They spoke as if I were already gone. As if I were already dead, like Grandma.

Grandma.

She was the only person who ever truly loved me. She raised me after my parents died in a car accident when I was four. She built her bakery business from nothing — one oven, one recipe, one city block at a time — until it became a brand worth hundreds of millions.

And now she was gone.

Three weeks ago, she passed in her sleep. Peaceful, the doctors said. But nothing had been peaceful since.

The day after her funeral, Nathan served me divorce papers. He said he'd been in love with Karina for over a year. He said I was "emotionally cold" and "obsessed with my grandmother." He said Karina understood him in ways I never could.

When I cried and asked how he could do this, he looked at me like I was being unreasonable.

"Don't make this harder than it needs to be, Elise. Just sign the papers, walk away with whatever your grandmother left you, and let's both move on."

What he really meant was: *Give me my share of the inheritance and disappear.*

I knew the truth now. Nathan never loved me. He married me because Grandma was rich. His family's real estate business was drowning in debt, and my grandmother's fortune was their life raft.

Now Grandma was dead, and they wanted every cent.

But Grandma was smarter than all of them combined.

The lawyer, Mr. Donovan, stepped to the podium. He was Grandma's attorney for over thirty years — a stern man with silver hair who had never liked Nathan.

"Before we begin," he said, adjusting his glasses, "I must inform everyone that Mrs. Margaret Chen left very… specific instructions for how this will reading is to be conducted."

He pressed a button.

A massive screen descended behind him.

And my grandmother's face appeared on it — alive, smiling, and looking directly into the camera.

"Hello, everyone. If you're watching this, I'm dead. But don't worry…"

Her eyes seemed to find Nathan's.