Page 14 of My Husband’s New Fiancée

4. Back From the Dead

Dante

She’s alive.

Those three words loop endlessly through my head as I drive across Paris, my hands locked tight around the steering wheel. The city lights blur past unseen.

My heart leapt before my mind caught up with reality. One fraction of a second of pure, brutal joy—before the truth hit, ice-cold.

She had been alive all this time while I tore the world apart trying to recover her body. While I signed her death certificates with shaking hands. While I died from missing her, night after night, in a bed that still smelled like her perfume.

She let me believe she was dead.

Rage floods through me.

It has nothing to do with the anger I use in boardrooms. That kind of anger is cold, calculated, strategic.

This one is personal and it wants blood.

What kind of woman does that?

If she wanted to end our marriage, one word would have been enough. I would have let her go—I would have respected her choice, even if it had meant tearing my own heart out.

She could have kept her shares. I never cared about the money.

Instead, she vanished. She made me go from hope to the certainty of her death. She made me grieve her while she was still alive. Hidden somewhere. Never once sending word.

And tonight, she had the nerve to reappear before the entire world, unharmed and radiant, on another man’s arm, as if nothing had happened.

As if she owed me no explanation.

I slam my palm against the steering wheel.

“Fuck!”

A memory rises—sharp and precise as broken glass.

It was December, three years ago. Same car. Same avenue. She had rested her hand on my thigh, a simple gesture she always made when we drove together. I’d asked where she wanted to have dinner.

“Nowhere,” she’d said with a smile. “Let’s go home. I just want to be with you.”

That night, we made love against the front door, unable to wait until we reached the bedroom.

Afterward, she stayed curled against me, her head on my chest, and whispered,

“I love you so much it scares me. I don’t know what I’d become if I lost you.”

“You have no reason to be afraid. I’m here. I’ll never leave you.”

A bitter smile pulls at my mouth.

What irony. She was the one who left. She was the one who broke us.

My phone vibrates. Bianca, probably. I abandoned her at the gala without a word.

I should answer.

I can’t.