Chapter 1: The Breaking Point
The slap struck with such force that my diamond engagement ring sliced into the soft skin of my palm, leaving a stinging warmth that signaled the end of my patience. My name is Irene—or rather, that is the name I chose to live under for three years—and for those three long seconds, the entire marble foyer of the estate fell into a terrifying, suffocating silence until my mother in law simply smiled as if she had just finished a pleasant cup of tea.
“Get out of here right now!” my husband, Isaac, shouted at me, his face twisted into the kind of ugly, dark fury he usually reserved for people he deemed far beneath his social standing. “How dare you raise your voice at my mother in her own home?”
Her own home.
