After I Freed My Husband for the Fake Heiress, His Whole Family Begged Me Back

### Chapter 1

"I'm sorry. We've verified it. Your marriage license is a forgery."

The pity in the clerk's eyes set a high ringing going in my ears.

"Miss Henson? Are you all right?"

Her concern came from very far away, and the tears blurred everything in front of me.

It had all started a week ago, when I was six months pregnant and drank the prenatal herbal tea Melanie Henson, the family's fake heiress, pressed into my hands. Then the cramping tore through me, and I went down in my own blood.

Cyril Weiss came when they told him. He saw the blood pooling under me, and the first thing he did was cover Melanie's eyes.

"Disgusting. Don't look."

He scooped up the pale, trembling Melanie and walked out without a backward glance. Then the pain swallowed me whole, the world went black, and I was gone.

When I opened my eyes again I was in a hospital bed, and the doctor told me, with that careful regret, that the delay had cost me too much. I would never carry a child again.

I couldn't believe my own ears. I called Cyril ninety-nine times through the pain before he finally picked up.

"Cyril, the baby's gone. I can never have a baby again—"

He cut me off, bored.

"Julie, enough."

"Melanie mistook the abortion pills for the prenatal tea by accident. She feels so guilty she's threatening to kill herself. You just can't get pregnant. It's not like you're dying."

Just before the call dropped, I caught the faint sound of Melanie crying.

Cyril went straight to soothing her, his voice so gentle it was like a knife, and it left my heart in ribbons.

For the whole week after that, he never came once.

So I went to the county clerk's office to file for divorce, dead inside. And that was when I learned that the grand, talked-about proposal five years ago, the husband who had loved me for five years, all of it had been fake.

I drifted home like a ghost. There was a used condom thrown in the corner of the bed. The meaning was simple enough. Not long ago, the two of them had been in my bed.

The pain reached a place where even my throat felt clamped shut, where I couldn't pull in air.

After a long while, I took out my phone and dialed a number I'd buried a long time ago.

"That thing you said, about marrying me. Does it still stand?"

1.

"Julie. I've waited too long for this call." The man's voice came through low and pleased and faintly sensual. "I'm coming to get you right now. We'll have the wedding tomorrow."

I shook my head, my gaze cutting through the dark outside the window until it went hard.

"Edwin James. Give me five days to finish things here."

How could I just set down everything they'd done to me, light as air? Before I left, I had to give something back.

Edwin went quiet for a beat, and when he spoke there was something dangerous in it.

"In five days, even if you change your mind, I'll come and take you anyway."

I pressed the crumpled fake marriage license in my hand, thinking of the five years I'd spent living inside an absurd lie, and nodded, certain. "All right."

I hung up and opened the door to go downstairs for a glass of water, and that was when I heard the voices coming from the living room below.

It was Cyril's lawyer friend.

"Five years now. You still won't think about giving Julie a real title?"

I stopped where I was and held my breath.

Cyril's low voice came up the stairs.

"Wait a little longer. I promised Melanie a grand wedding."

The lawyer pressed:

"Your marriage to Julie exists on paper and nowhere else. She can walk out on you anytime."

Cyril lowered his eyes, thought about it, then spoke.

"She loves me too much. She'd never leave."

He paused, and his tone left no room for argument:

"And now Melanie's carrying my child. The Weiss heir's seat is that baby's. No one takes it from them."

It was the deep heat of August, and I felt like I'd dropped straight into a pit of ice.

So he and Melanie hadn't betrayed me for the first time. He'd even made a child with her.

"So you just had the doctor take her uterus while they were at it?" The lawyer dropped his voice. "If she ever found out the truth—"

"Back then she broke completely with her adoptive parents just to get back to the Hensons. Where would she go if she left me?"

My pupils shrank.

I clamped both hands over my mouth, and that was all that stopped the scream.

Cyril added: "I'll bring Melanie's baby home under the cover of an adoption and let Julie raise it. Call it granting Julie's wish to be a mother."

"Years ago I almost died in that car crash. Melanie gave me a kidney, gave me a second life. She wants a baby. I'd give my own life to make that dream come true for her."

The whole room spun, and my stomach heaved hard against me.

Melanie was his life.

Then what was the surgical scar still riding low across my belly? What did that count for?

Seven years ago, in that brutal wreck, I was the one who dragged him out of the crushed car. I was the one who signed the donation papers. I was the one lying on the next table, watching his bloodless face, telling him without a sound, you have to live.

When I woke, I hid every trace of it, only because I didn't want him to feel he owed me anything.

I'd come back to the Hensons not long before that.

Everyone decided I'd come to fight Melanie for the title of the Henson daughter, called me greedy, said I'd thrown away my disabled adoptive parents for money.

Even my own birth parents and my brother said it.

Only Cyril stood firm and said I wasn't that kind of person. He shielded me from all the gossip outside, promised he would protect me for the rest of his life.

So I fell into that fatal tenderness, and I was willing to sacrifice anything for him.

But now the one who saved him had become Melanie.

Cyril knew exactly how badly I wanted a child of my own. And for her sake, the way you'd crush an ant underfoot, he had killed the most important thing in my life.

I stumbled back to the bathroom and knelt at the toilet, retching until there was nothing left but bile.

"Julie? Why are you out of the hospital?" Cyril's voice came from behind me.

"Are you feeling any better? I've been so busy these past few days, that's the only reason I didn't come see you."

Busy?

Yes. Busy "caring for" Melanie in bed, day and night. Of course I understood.

My mouth twisted into something bitter, and I stood to face him.

"That car crash seven years ago. Your kidney—"