The Billionaire Who Wasn't Mine

The Billionaire Who Wasn't Mine

Nuan Qiu

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The phone felt cold against my ear, a stark contrast to the Texas heat. My fiancée Jennifer' s voice, usually sweet, was sharp and demanding. "Ethan, I need $100,000 for the influencer party in Miami. Wes says it' s our big break. It' s an advance on our wedding fund!" My heart stopped. This was it. The exact moment. In my last life, this call was the beginning of the end. I remembered giving in then, selling my classic Mustang, draining my 401k, even taking out a high-interest loan – all to cover the hole she blew in our company' s marketing budget that could have sent her to prison. I remembered the twenty years of a miserable marriage, her constant contempt, and the daughter I loved more than anything, who looked at me with her mother' s resentful eyes, ultimately revealing she wasn't mine at all. Then the final memory flashed: the rising water, the rescue boat, and her face, a mask of false grief, telling the rescuer, "He' s already gone, the water took him." My own daughter, her voice clear over the storm, whispered, "It' s for the best, Mom. If it wasn' t for him, we would' ve been a real family with Dad Wes years ago." They left me there. They left me to drown. But I'm not that man anymore. This time, as her voice shrieked through the phone, demanding I say something, I took a deep breath. And I said it. "No."

Introduction

The phone felt cold against my ear, a stark contrast to the Texas heat.

My fiancée Jennifer' s voice, usually sweet, was sharp and demanding.

"Ethan, I need $100,000 for the influencer party in Miami.

Wes says it' s our big break. It' s an advance on our wedding fund!"

My heart stopped. This was it. The exact moment. In my last life, this call was the beginning of the end.

I remembered giving in then, selling my classic Mustang, draining my 401k, even taking out a high-interest loan – all to cover the hole she blew in our company' s marketing budget that could have sent her to prison.

I remembered the twenty years of a miserable marriage, her constant contempt, and the daughter I loved more than anything, who looked at me with her mother' s resentful eyes, ultimately revealing she wasn't mine at all.

Then the final memory flashed: the rising water, the rescue boat, and her face, a mask of false grief, telling the rescuer, "He' s already gone, the water took him."

My own daughter, her voice clear over the storm, whispered, "It' s for the best, Mom. If it wasn' t for him, we would' ve been a real family with Dad Wes years ago."

They left me there. They left me to drown.

But I'm not that man anymore.

This time, as her voice shrieked through the phone, demanding I say something, I took a deep breath. And I said it. "No."

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The Heiress’s Fall, Her Rise to Love

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My coming-out party should have been the most glittering night of my life. As Chloe Davis, the Davis fortune' s true heiress, perched at the top of the grand staircase, I was the picture of cool, collected perfection in my silver silk gown. Then, everything shattered. The ballroom' s elegant music died, replaced by gasps as a grainy video flashed across the screens, showing me in a hotel room with a man who was not my fiancé. Humiliation burned through me, absolute and suffocating, as whispers turned to a roar of judgment. I fled, desperate for comfort, to my fiancé Liam Sterling' s penthouse, only to overhear him boast, "She deserved it," revealing the public disgrace was a calculated plan with my adopted sister, Sophia. The world spun, the betrayal a bitter choke in my throat. I escaped his apartment, returning home only to be slapped by my mother and banished to Europe by my parents, who watched with disgust. They had chosen Sophia over me. Days later, Liam appeared at my bedroom door, playing the concerned fiancé, claiming it was all a misunderstanding while Sophia texted me intimate photos of them. My last shred of hope withered when I called him, only to hear Sophia' s seductive voice in the background, telling him to "come back to bed." Then came the ultimate cruelty: Sophia' s staged fall down the stairs, followed by Liam's cold, calculating words to the guards, "Your eyes, Chloe, will be a perfect match." I woke to darkness, bandages covering my eyes. Liam spun a sick tale of my eye being donated to a blind child, while Sophia' s punishment for orchestrating everything was a single day of "grounding." The injustice was a physical weight, but the worst was yet to come. Accused of stealing Sophia' s necklace, I was dragged to an icy pond by Liam who, finding out I was pregnant, forced me into the freezing water to miscarry. I heard him confess afterwards, "Of course I did it on purpose. Now there's nothing standing in our way." The last bit of me broke, replaced by a cold, silent resolve. I called Julian Thorne.

From Coma to Clarity: A Wife's Reckoning

From Coma to Clarity: A Wife's Reckoning

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5.0

The screech of tires, then black. I woke up in a void, a sterile blue screen floating before me, informing me I was Ava Miller, critically comatose, and tasked with a "Life Reformation" mission. One hundred missions, healing me 1% at a time, fulfilled the regrets of strangers. Ninety-eight down, and I was almost free, almost back to my life, my career, my husband Liam. Then mission 99 dropped. The client: Liam Stone. His request? To erase the public proposal that started our love story in high school. My love story. My heart pounded, disbelieving. It had to be a cruel twist, a cosmic joke. But then his tired, weary voice filled the silence. "I'm just so, so tired of this marriage. Seeing you lying in that bed... it's a burden. The whole thing was a mistake. Ava was always a bit much, so intense, so dramatic. Chloe was just... easy." And the final blow: "She let herself go even before the accident. There were stretch marks on her stomach... she looks like a corpse." He was speaking about me, the unconscious woman he vowed to cherish. The vibrant, loving man I married found my very existence sickening. The betrayal was a physical ache, a venomous poison seeping into my core. All my efforts, all my pain, all the lives I had changed-just to get back to him, only for him to declare me an intolerable burden, a mistake he wished to undo. A cold, hard resolve crystallized within me. He had shattered my heart, but he wouldn't take my life with it. My path to waking up, my only hope, depended on fulfilling his cruel, humiliating wish. With trembling fingers, I typed my reply: "I'll do it."

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