My ex’s new wife showed up at my recently buried dad’s house and blurted out, “Start packing!” While I was pruning the roses in the garden, I let her talk… until she made the mistake that would ruin her.

Chapter 1: The Intruder in the Garden

“You should start packing your bags right now, because the moment they read that will tomorrow, this entire estate is going to be ours.”

Tabitha’s voice cut through the air above the white rosebushes before I even had a chance to look up from my work.

Her expensive heels sank deep into the damp soil of my father’s garden, as if she were strutting down a runway instead of standing on the ground where he’d spent half his life.

I kept snipping the dry branches with my pruning shears, moving slowly and carefully, just the way my father had taught me when I was a little girl.

He always told me to work without a trembling hand, but never to cause the living plant any unnecessary harm.

He’d planted these particular rosebushes on the day I married Calvin, telling me that white was the color of clean beginnings.

Looking back on it now, the irony was almost unbearable—those flowers standing there, witnessing the end of my twelve-year marriage.

The roses had held steady even after my ex-husband left me for his assistant, the very woman now standing in front of me, reeking of expensive perfume and radiating pure arrogance.