
After ten years of marriage, my husband's old flame returned to Seattle. To be with her, he bribed a doctor to forge a terminal diagnosis. On my birthday, he knelt before me, papers in hand, begging me to let him go. I stared into his eyes. "Ethan, this illness… is it real?" His voice was firm. "It's real. A late-stage neurodegenerative disease." A bitter laugh escaped me. What he didn't know was that everyone in my family gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance to turn spoken words into reality. And he'd just used it to curse himself with a very real, very terminal illness.


Drowned in a river of lies, can Amber bring herself to trust again? Will you be willing to follow her during the unexpected twists and turns of her usually peaceful life?

I once believed the simple life I shared with Pierce, my husband—an ordinary construction worker in our small, rented house—was one I would cherish forever. Six years of marriage and a beautiful son later, I had willingly filed down the sharp edges I'd honed as a top negotiator, all for him. Until that day, when I saw him in an online magazine. The man in the photo, dressed in a bespoke suit and embracing another woman on a private yacht, was nothing short of divine. He belonged to another world entirely. I should have just laughed it off, but my gaze froze on his bare forearm—on the compass tattoo he’d gotten for me, the one he said would always help him "find his way home." With a trembling hand, I enlarged the photo. Beneath the compass, I spotted a new line of Italian I couldn't decipher, followed by a date—one that marked no anniversary of ours. In that single moment, the six years of love I’d cherished—my entire world—shattered.