Promises meant nothing against a well-laid scheme.

My first day in prison, I learned my father’s cancer had taken a turn. He was gone before I could even process the news.

All the strength drained from my body. I crumpled to the cold cell floor.

I don’t know how I survived.

Inside, every day was the same uniform grey. Enduring curses and bullying, grinding through back-breaking labor—each one its own kind of torture.

Once, I fought with a few other inmates. They beat me half to death. Waking in the infirmary, I was told my left kidney had been damaged beyond repair. They’d removed it.

My fingers traced the new, hollow space on my abdomen. I felt nothing. Not a single tear fell.

Only one thought remained: survive.

My mother was still out there. She was waiting.

I had to get out. I had to find the truth, clear my name, and see justice done for my father.

That single thought was all that carried me through those fourteen hundred and sixty long, dark days.

The day I was released, the sky blazed a brilliant blue. Sunlight glared, blinding.

I stood at the prison gates, broken, watching the traffic flow past. Nowhere to go.

Home was gone.

Just as I lingered there, lost, a black Bentley slid to a stop in front of me.

The window lowered, revealing a handsome face etched with severity.

“Ivy.” His voice was low, gentle.

I froze.

Russell. Shirley’s adopted brother. The untouchable CEO who’d built a commercial empire from nothing. He was also my father’s student—though he’d never cared for painting, only business.

In my memory, he was always quiet, stern, never smiling. We were never close.

Why was he here?

“Get in,” he said, pushing the passenger door open. “I’ll take you home.”

Home? What home did I have left?

I stared at him, wary and unmoving.

He seemed to read my thoughts and sighed. “Your mother… she’s in a convalescent home. I arranged it.”

*Mom.*

That one word unlocked everything, shattering all my tightly-wound defenses.

I scrambled into the car.

Russell was right. My mother was here, in Kingsport’s finest private sanatorium.

But seeing her felt like having my heart wrenched from my chest.

Gone was the elegant, beautiful woman I remembered. Now she wore an oversized hospital gown, her hair brittle and white, her eyes vacant. Clutching a pillow, she murmured endlessly, "Ivy, my Ivy… Daddy bought your favorite osmanthus cakes… come home…"

She didn’t recognize me.

My presence even frightened her. She screamed, hurled the pillow toward me, and retreated into a corner, trembling.

The doctor said she’d suffered a severe shock—a complete mental breakdown.

Outside her room, I knelt and wept as if my world had crumbled.

It was Russell who lifted me from the cold floor. He slipped off his suit jacket and draped it over my thin shoulders.

"Don’t be afraid," he said. "I’m here."

His embrace was warm, carrying a faint scent of cedar—just for a moment, it gave me an illusion of refuge. I clung to him, a drowning woman gripping her only lifeline.

Russell settled me into one of his apartments.

He was good to me. Unfailingly, meticulously good.

He cooked for me himself. He patiently accompanied me to visit my mother. He hired the best lawyers to file my appeal, even though every door kept slamming shut.

He never mentioned Aaron. He never brought up Shirley.

Shirley… now a rising star in Kingsport’s art scene.

She had taken my place: admitted to the National Academy of Fine Arts, holding her own solo exhibition, marrying Aaron in a blaze of glory to become the enviable Mrs. Aaron.

And me, Ivy?

I was just a forgotten ex-convict, rotting in the darkness.

Every time Shirley's artfully smiling face appeared in the news, hatred gnawed my heart raw, bleeding with every beat.

Time and again, it was Russell who pulled me back from the edge of collapse.

He would hold me close, murmuring softly, "Ivy, it's over. From now on, I'll protect you."

"Why are you so good to me?" I asked.

His deep eyes held an emotion I couldn't decipher.

"Because I've loved you for ten years."

I was too stunned to speak.

"From the first time I followed my father to your house and saw you painting at your easel," he said slowly. "It's just that back then, your eyes were only for Aaron."

Never had I imagined that this man—pursued by every woman in Kingsport—had kept me hidden in his heart all along.

Chaos seized my heart.

Six months after my release, on my twenty-eighth birthday, Russell proposed.

Kneeling on one knee, he held up a brilliant diamond ring, his gaze utterly sincere.

"Ivy, I know you can't fully trust anyone right now. But please, give me a chance. Let me spend the rest of my life healing you. Will you marry me?"

I looked at him—this man who had reached out when I was most broken and wretched.

I hesitated. Was someone as shattered as me worthy of him?

Seeing straight through my insecurity, he pulled me into his arms. "Ivy, you're not broken. You're a lost treasure, just waiting for someone to hold you again."

In that moment, I cried.

And I nodded.

I thought this was the beginning of my climb from the abyss, my chance for a new life.

I thought he was heaven-sent light, here to save me.

How utterly naive I was.