He Loved Me When You Didn't

Kaitlyn Barton POV:

After three years building my family's hotel empire abroad, I came home to New York, expecting a warm embrace from my childhood fiancé, Edwin.

Instead, he greeted me with a warning. He told me to be gentle with his new girlfriend, Kacy, painting me as a villain before I even knew her name.

At my own welcome-home party, he let her stage a dramatic fall and then publicly blamed me for it, his eyes burning with a hatred I'd never seen.

He cradled her in his arms as if she were a fragile doll I had broken.

"Happy now, Kaitlyn?" he snarled, shattering twenty years of our shared history in front of everyone we knew.

In his eyes, I was no longer his love, but a monster he needed to protect his new flame from.

As he stormed out, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Everett Rowe, the man who had quietly loved me for five years.

"If you are truly ready, I will marry you. Right now. Just say the word."

My fingers moved on their own.

"Yes," I typed. "I'll marry you."

The moment I stepped back onto New York soil, a city I had once shared completely with Edwin, he greeted me not with a hug, but with a warning about his new girlfriend, painting me as the villain before I even knew her name. Three years abroad, cultivating my family's hotel empire, had prepared me for many business battles, but nothing for the cold, calculated betrayal that awaited me at home. He had replaced me, and then twisted our shared history, turning me into the aggressor he now needed protection from. This was not the reunion I had envisioned, nor the Edwin I remembered. My heart, which had swelled with anticipation, now froze into a solid block of ice.