I did not marry Adrian for love. I married him because the world had put a price on my child’s chance to wake up, and he was the only one who could pay it. But when I opened that crimson envelope and saw Lisa’s name threaded through his tragedy, I realized I hadn’t just stepped into a marriage of convenience. I had stepped into the wreckage of a night that had already taken everything from both of us.
Yet in that wreckage, something shifted. Adrian chose to stand beside me, not as a savior but as a witness, forcing his own family to see Lisa as a person, not a liability. When her fingers finally squeezed mine, weak but certain, the shame I’d carried began to loosen. I was not a woman who sold herself. I was a mother who refused to let her daughter be quietly erased.
