Chapter 1 — The Invitation

Grayson invited me to his wedding for one reason: to humiliate me in front of a hundred and eighty guests.

That was the whole of it.

He wanted me to stand at the edge of his beautiful new life and watch him marry a beautiful new woman, so that I could feel, in front of everyone who mattered to him, exactly how far he had risen and how far I had not.

In his mind I was still the same defeated, penniless woman he had thrown away seven years earlier, and he wanted to see that woman’s face when she understood what she had lost.

The wedding was held at an oceanfront estate on the Monterey Peninsula — clipped gardens, stone fountains, long tables spilling white orchids, the Pacific flat and silver behind it all.

Grayson Winslow, newly made a senior partner at a commercial real estate firm, moved through the crowd shaking hands with executives and old-money families, wearing the particular smile of a man who has finally been let into the room he always believed he belonged in.

Beside him stood Serena Sinclair, daughter of a hotel dynasty, posing for the photographers as though the wedding were also the press launch of a corporate merger, which, in a sense, it was.

Only a handful of people knew that the invitation mailed to my apartment had been his idea.

“I want her to see what she lost,” he’d told his groomsmen days before, laughing over scotch.

The sentence would have landed even worse with his friends if any of them had known the truth of what I’d actually lost, and what I hadn’t.

Chapter 2 — What She Lost

When Grayson had nothing, I had carried us both.

I worked morning shifts at a diner and cleaned commercial offices late into the night.

I paid down his overdue credit cards.

I loaned him the whole of my savings for his master’s program.

When his first startup was weeks from collapse, I sold the antique jewelry my grandmother had left me — the only truly valuable thing I owned — and handed him the money, and told him to go build his life, and meant it.

And then his life started to build, and the moment it did, I became something to be embarrassed about.