For ten years, I lived a lie. I was Jocelyn Anderson, wife of hotel heir Ethan Lester, living a gilded life everyone envied, but truly, I was a ghost in a cage, bound by a desperate contract to save my foster sister, Sylvia. Every public humiliation, every tabloid photo of Ethan with another woman, I endured for her. Then, at one of Ethan' s lavish yacht parties, I found him, laughing, openly caressing the woman by his side. It wasn't a stranger this time; it was Sylvia. My sister, the very reason for my decade of sacrifice, looking up at him with adoration as he introduced her, loud enough for everyone to hear, as "my wife's best friend." The world around me blurred as their cruel laughter echoed. My husband and my sister, the two people I had given everything for, had publicly betrayed me in the most devastating way imaginable. I stood there, watching Sylvia flinch but not pull away, a mix of guilt and defiance in her eyes. The pain was so sharp, so absolute, it felt liberating. How could the one person I had literally given my life for, the one person who knew the truth of my unbearable existence, turn around and stab me in the back like this? How blind had I been to not see the rot underneath the surface of my entire world? But in that shattering moment, when everything I had built crumbled to dust, a cold, quiet resolve solidified. My mask of indifference fell away. I looked Ethan straight in the eye and said, for the first time in ten years, "Ethan, let's get a divorce."
For ten years, I lived a lie. I was Jocelyn Anderson, wife of hotel heir Ethan Lester, living a gilded life everyone envied, but truly, I was a ghost in a cage, bound by a desperate contract to save my foster sister, Sylvia. Every public humiliation, every tabloid photo of Ethan with another woman, I endured for her.
Then, at one of Ethan' s lavish yacht parties, I found him, laughing, openly caressing the woman by his side. It wasn't a stranger this time; it was Sylvia. My sister, the very reason for my decade of sacrifice, looking up at him with adoration as he introduced her, loud enough for everyone to hear, as "my wife's best friend."
The world around me blurred as their cruel laughter echoed. My husband and my sister, the two people I had given everything for, had publicly betrayed me in the most devastating way imaginable. I stood there, watching Sylvia flinch but not pull away, a mix of guilt and defiance in her eyes. The pain was so sharp, so absolute, it felt liberating.
How could the one person I had literally given my life for, the one person who knew the truth of my unbearable existence, turn around and stab me in the back like this? How blind had I been to not see the rot underneath the surface of my entire world?
But in that shattering moment, when everything I had built crumbled to dust, a cold, quiet resolve solidified. My mask of indifference fell away. I looked Ethan straight in the eye and said, for the first time in ten years, "Ethan, let's get a divorce."
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