My Husband’s Regret After I Cheated

I'll admit it. I used to be pathetic where he was concerned.

All it had taken was the handkerchief he'd once handed me when I was hurt, and I'd carved the name Lucas Sterling into my head.

Unlike the rest of them, he hadn't mocked me. He'd always been mild with me, polite, and when he happened to cross paths with me he'd ask after how I was doing.

He was the only one who'd remember, on Seraphina's birthday, to have something set aside for me too.

In a house of cold eyes and casual cruelty, those small gestures of his had felt like real kindness. I'd been grateful for them.

So when the Sterling family went bankrupt, I pulled out everything I'd saved.

I sat up with his sick grandfather when Lucas was burned out and stretched thin. I joined that ragtag company of his when they couldn't even afford a decent office, went to the work dinners he couldn't stomach, and drank myself into a bleeding ulcer so he wouldn't have to.

Edmund Sterling's one dying wish was that the two of us would end up together. Lucas honored it.

It was also the day Seraphina left the country.

On our wedding day Lucas got blind drunk. He didn't even finish his vows before he walked out of the ceremony.

That was the day I learned that there was only ever one woman in his heart, and it wasn't me.

He said I'd cashed in his gratitude to trap him. He said I'd been the reason Seraphina's condition had flared up again, that I was the reason she and the man she loved would never be together.

So Lucas made sure I didn't get to be happy either.

Every divorce filing I submitted, he killed. Every job opportunity that came my way somehow fell apart. No freedom. No social life.

He wanted me to sit inside this hollow marriage he'd been cornered into for the rest of my life. He wanted me stuck there. Forever.