Her fifth daughter died, so she deleted his bloodline. novel Chapter 103

Chapter 7

Marriage suited us. Within a year, I was pregnant with our first baby.

I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. Every diaper change, every feeding, every sleepless night, I wanted all of it.

Maybe I was trying to make up for the baby I’d lost, the one I never got to hold.

Before I knew it, she was old enough for preschool. That was the first time I’d had space to think about myself again.

Parker wasn’t threatened by my ambition. He didn’t expect me to stay home and play the idle housewife. He pushed me forward.

“You’re Sarah first,” he told me. “Wife, our daughter’s mom, that’s second. Don’t lose yourself in us.”

We went back and forth for weeks about what kind of business made sense. I kept coming back to a luxury postnatal retreat.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The city was in the middle of a baby boom, and we already had properties we could use.

Parker wanted to acquire the leading facility in the city and just hand it to me. I shut

that down.

Instead, I applied for a job there. I needed to see how the place actually ran before I poured capital into my own version.

I was starting from scratch, and I wasn’t about to learn the hard way.

What I didn’t count on was running into Justin and Zoe there.

One of the girls at work was scrolling on her phone when she suddenly gasped and shoved the phone in my face.

“Sarah, Sarah, look. Doesn’t she look like Mrs. Hayes?”

At first, I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at. It was just two women fighting. One

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was pregnant. The other looked like the side chick.

The pregnant one had the other woman by the hair, yanking hard enough to tear her

shirt. It was a mess.

I leaned closer. The pregnant woman was Zoe

Zoe had her by the hair and wouldn’t let go, shrieking at the top of her lungs.

“You bitch. You sent me those photos!”

“You think he actually loves you? He doesn’t! You’re just a cheap knockoff of his

ex-wife!”

“Go anywhere near my husband again and I swear to God, I’ll kill you!”

The other woman had been holding back, probably wary of hurting a pregnant woman.

But when Zoe started tearing her shirt, she’d had enough.

She shoved Zoe. Zoe stumbled back.

Zoe went down hard. Her face went white as she clutched her belly and started

screaming.

Then the other woman looked straight at the camera. Her face filled the frame.

I went still.

Beside me, my coworker gasped. “Sarah… why does she look like you?”

A few days later, Zoe showed up at the recovery center first thing.

She’d lost the baby. What goes around comes around.

Because of her, I’d lost my child and spent six weeks stuck in a place just like this, sterile and expensive and lonely. Now she was here, stuck in the same hell.

I won’t pretend I didn’t feel a flicker of satisfaction. She’d never understand what it felt like until it happened to her.

The room was trashed. Broken glass, shattered vases, debris everywhere.

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I stepped inside and started adding up the damage in my

head.

I kept my voice neutral and professional. “Mrs. Hayes, we’ll be charging this to your

room. You can settle it at checkout.”

She was slumped against the headboard, head tipped back, tears streaking down her

cheeks. She looked awful, pale, hollow-eyed.

Not the girl I’d met.

She let out a bitter laugh. When she finally spoke, her voice scraped out.

“You loving this? That woman? She’s his secretary. He hired her himself.”

“I knew the second I saw her six months ago, Justin regretted everything.”

“I could’ve dealt with it when she was just outside his office. But ever since he saw you

again, he’s been a ghost. He barely comes home.”

“I went to his office. I walked in on them in the back.”

Her voice broke.

“That bitch had on something you used to wear all the time. He was drunk. He thought it was you.”

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