After that, we completely fell apart.

Dante almost never returned to the house called "home."

The only window I had into his life was Olivia’s Instagram.

She often posted photos of her rounds at Mass General, captioned with nonsense like "Mercy" and "Healing."

In the background, I could always catch a glimpse of Dante.

Or his hand.

Or that Patek Philippe watch I gave him.

The comments underneath were all:

"This is simply God's best arrangement!"

"Dante and Olivia are true love!"

"Bless you guys!"

Every time I looked, it felt like a knife twisting in my heart.

Under multiple blows, I decided to burn it all down.

I posted our marriage certificate and evidence of Dante’s cheating online.

I attached undeniable proof that Olivia stole my notes on cancer gene therapy—timestamps, experimental data, even the original spelling errors were identical.

Not only that, I discovered Olivia had hacked into my private cloud server and downloaded massive amounts of raw data.

I was ready to tear this curtain of darkness wide open.

But I underestimated the Falcone Family’s methods.

Dante’s move was more vicious than I imagined.

He bought off my mother’s attending physician—a heart specialist hired for a fortune from Johns Hopkins.

The doctor suddenly used the excuse of returning to Baltimore and stopped treating my mother.

My mother suffered from severe heart failure.

Without that expert’s special therapy, she could die at any moment.

Dante called me, his voice as cold as Boston in January.

"Sophia, go post a video clarifying everything immediately."

"Say the marriage certificate was Photoshopped by you. Say the academic fraud was fabricated by you."

"Otherwise, your mother's oxygen at the hospital might accidentally be 'interrupted.'"

The moment I heard that, the phone slipped from my hand.

I knelt on the ground, screaming at the phone:

"Dante, that is a human life! she funded your education! How can you be so cruel?!"

Dante was unmoved.

I could even hear the sound of him pouring whiskey on the other end.

"Sophia, don't expect me to be merciful to enemies."

"Since you chose to go against the Family, you have to bear the consequences."

"Go clarify. Don't ruin Olivia; she is the Family’s future cash cow."

In that moment, I finally understood.

The man I loved was dead.

Or rather, he never existed.