Hill Sydney Aryane

At the party Julian threw to welcome his “son,” I had a gift delivered. Inside were the final divorce decree, a restraining order, and a box. The box held my daughter’s cut-off NICU bracelet and a bloodstained baby blanket. He probably thought I’d lost my mind. But he had forced my hand. In the third year of our marriage, I was pregnant with our daughter. And he turned around and legally acknowledged another woman’s child as his own. When I caught him, all he said was, “It’s temporary. For the insurance.” I believed him. My reward was watching him carry another woman’s son into an ambulance, leaving me—his bleeding wife—to be questioned by the police. In that moment, I knew we were over. I gave birth to our daughter alone. She fought for her life in the NICU while her father ran himself ragged for someone else's child. He even sent me a voice message: if anything happened to that other child, he would never forgive me. Fine. He’d cost me my husband and nearly my daughter. So I would make him “kill” his own flesh and blood with his own hands. Let him taste what it felt like to lose the one person closest to him. He would discover the truth—that Theo wasn't his child at all. He would come looking for me, a man unhinged. But he would never know that my daughter, Lily, was alive and well. And that she had already taken my last name. She would never be a Price. ... When I returned home from the hospital, the sprawling Price mansion in the Boston suburbs was filled with the clinking of celebratory champagne flutes. My husband, Julian Price, had just legally become the father of another woman’s child. I had watched him sign his name on the acknowledgment of paternity, and every stroke of his pen felt like it was carved into my heart. Sloane Reed, his so-called old flame, clutched a baby boy named Theo and wept pitifully. To soothe her, Julian told me to “stop making a scene.” He’d come home ah......