Second Chance, I Abandoned Everyone Who Betrayed Me

The year Vivienne Whitmore turned twenty-eight, her father selected two arranged-marriage matches for her and her half-sister Noelle.

The first was Leslie Mason, Ridgeport's most eligible bachelor, handsome and impossibly wealthy. He and Vivienne had grown up side by side, and everyone considered them the perfect golden couple.

The second was Tristram Simmons, the sickly youngest heir of the Simmons family. Born premature and ravaged by illness as a child, he was sometimes so weak he needed a wheelchair to get around.

Everyone assumed Vivienne would never choose him. After all, every unmarried woman in Ridgeport steered clear of the man.

And besides, Vivienne and Leslie had always been close.

But in her previous life, Vivienne hadn't turned Tristram away.

When both men arrived at the Whitmore estate with their betrothal gifts on the same day, she discovered that her sister and Leslie had been sleeping together for some time. She turned on her heel and married Tristram without looking back, cutting herself loose from a home her stepmother and half-sister had already claimed.

After the wedding, she learned to prepare medicinal meals for him, brewed herbal soups with her own hands.

At every gala and dinner party where someone dared mock him, she was the one who stepped forward and shut them down so thoroughly they couldn't utter another word.

The Simmons family elders and Tristram's friends all said he'd married well above his luck.

Whenever she heard those words, the tips of Vivienne's ears flushed pink.

But Tristram himself never showed much of a reaction. He would simply watch her with those dark, unreadable eyes, something hidden behind them that she could never quite decipher.

Until the day she and Noelle rode in the same car up to the ancestral cemetery. On the Serpentine Mountain Highway, the vehicle crashed, left teetering on the edge of a cliff with Vivienne's life slipping away.

Vivienne was terrified of heights. Tears streaked her face as she reached a trembling hand through the shattered window toward Tristram, who had climbed out of the car behind them, begging him to save her.

He didn't even glance her way. He circled to the other side, seized Noelle, and pulled her through the window into his arms.

As the car lost its balance and plunged off the cliff, drifting alongside the feeling of weightlessness was Tristram's murmured whisper.

“I'm sorry. Noelle has a heart condition. She can't wait for the rescue team. I have to get her down the mountain now.”

“I married you instead of the woman I actually love. I already owe her that debt. So you can die in her place and call us even.”

So the person Tristram had loved all along was Noelle.

So Tristram had never been frail at all. He could lift a grown woman in his arms without breaking a sweat.

So all of it had been an act, performed for her benefit alone, just so Noelle could marry Leslie as planned, and so he could steal one more glance at her sister whenever Vivienne brought him home for family visits.

Every last detail raced through Vivienne's mind like a film reel on fast-forward, and in an instant, every cause and every consequence clicked into place.

The car hit the bottom of the ravine. The explosion was so massive it nearly burst her eardrums.

Alongside the searing heat came the pain of her organs shattering, one by one.

After the fact, with no surveillance footage and no one to fight for her, her death was ruled an accident. Her killers were never punished.

When she opened her eyes again, she was back on the day Tristram and Leslie arrived at the door with their betrothal gifts.

The scene before her was exactly as she remembered. Both men's attention was fixed on Noelle. Pain lanced through Vivienne's chest like a needle driven straight into her heart, and the rage that came flooding back with the memories nearly tore through her ribs.

It was her stepmother's voice that pulled her out of it, coaxing from the side：

“Vivienne, Noelle and Leslie have been together for a while now. She's already two months along. You don't want to be the villain who tears apart a happy couple, do you?”

“Tristram might be a little on the fragile side, but with the Simmons family's fortune, you'd be marrying into a life of comfort. I just hope you can learn to appreciate what you're given.”

Vivienne slowly lifted her gaze and met Tristram's cold stare.

In her previous life, she had been drowning in the grief of Leslie's betrayal. She went along with her stepmother's words almost out of spite, agreeing to marry Tristram on the spot, too blinded by heartbreak to notice his expression.

Now she could see it clearly. He had never wanted to marry her. Not from the very beginning.

She steadied herself, let the storm inside her settle, and spoke：

“No. I won't marry him.”

This time around, Leslie who had betrayed her and Tristram whose heart had always belonged to someone else, she was done with both of them.

She was going to live. Live well. Live better than all of them. And make every last one of them pay for what they did to the woman she used to be.

The moment Vivienne's words landed, the vast living room went still.

Tristram's attention finally pulled away from Noelle：

“Vivienne, what exactly do you mean by that?”

“I came here today to ask for Noelle's hand. I only settled for you as a favor to her. What makes you think you get to be picky?”

Vivienne turned to face him slowly, studying the man who was at once so familiar and so foreign, her eyes stinging with heat：

“Who you want to marry is your business. Whether I say yes is mine.”

“Since it's Noelle you really want, why don't I pick Leslie instead? That way you get your chance.”