“Mara,” he pleaded, his voice suddenly soft and desperate. “Mara, please. Look at me. We can fix this. I love you. We can make a deal.”

There it was. The last Ashford illusion. Not love — cold calculation wearing the stolen clothes of love, trying to manipulate its way out of a trap.

I turned my head on the stretcher and looked him dead in the eye. “You shoved your pregnant wife to the ground in front of two hundred witnesses, Daniel.”

His eyes filled with panic.

“You paraded your pregnant mistress into my baby shower,” I went on, calm. “You called my child worthless trash. And you stood there and let your parents applaud while I lay bleeding.”

“Mara, I didn’t mean it, I was angry—”