The Ninth Goodbye: My Husband's Cruel Bet

Ellie POV

The worst of the storm had passed, but the ache in my leg remained.

It was a throbbing reminder, a physical ledger of the damage Marcus had done.

Sitting in Julian's gallery, safe and warm, my mind drifted back to the sterile white room of Mount Sinai Hospital. Back to the place where the illusion finally died.

It was two weeks after the elevator fell.

I was lying in the hospital bed, my leg in a cast, my ribs taped tight against my chest. I had been pressing the call button for ten minutes-not for a nurse, but for my husband.

He wasn't there.

The door opened. But it wasn't Marcus.

It was Chloe. Her eyes were red, swollen from crying. She held her phone like it was a grenade with the pin pulled.

"Where is he?" I asked, my voice raspy from disuse.

Chloe didn't speak. She just turned the screen toward me.

It was a photo from Page Six.

Marcus, standing outside the very hospital I was lying in. He wasn't rushing inside. He was leaning against his Porsche, his forehead resting against Izzy's. She was crying. He was holding her face with both hands, wiping her tears with a tenderness he hadn't shown me in years.

The headline: Thorne CEO Comforts Distraught Ex-Girlfriend After Tragic Accident.

"She wasn't even in the elevator," Chloe spat, her voice trembling with rage. "She was in the lobby. She claimed she heard the crash and it gave her a panic attack."

I stared at the photo.

He was comforting the witness. Not the victim.

"He's been down there for an hour, Ellie," Chloe whispered. "He hasn't come up once."

That was the moment the pain medicine stopped working.

I looked at the slow drip of the IV. I looked at the empty chair beside my bed.

"Call my parents," I said.

"Ellie, are you sure?"

"Call them," I said, my voice turning to steel. "Tell them to bring the car. Not the sedan. The SUV. I have luggage."

My parents arrived four hours later. They didn't ask questions. My father looked at my leg, then at the empty room, and his jaw set hard enough to crack stone.

"We're taking you to the gala next week," my mother said, smoothing my hair with a trembling hand. "We are going to show him you are still standing. And then, we are taking you home."

"Not home," I corrected.

I looked at the ceiling tiles.

"I want to go to Maine. To Nana's plot."

"It's a shack, Ellie," my father said gently. "It's abandoned."

"It's mine," I said. "It's the only thing I have left that he hasn't touched."

I sat up, wincing as my ribs protested the movement.

"I'm done waiting for him to come upstairs, Chloe. I'm taking the stairs down."

I closed my eyes in Julian's gallery, pushing the memory away.

The elevator had broken my bones. But that photo? That photo had broken my curse.

I looked at Julian, who was washing out a paintbrush in the sink.

He turned and smiled at me.

"Ready to go?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. And for the first time, I meant it.