She signed the divorce papers with steady hands. The next day his ex-girlfriend posted a smiling selfie with his back in the frame—and the world assumed what the photos implied. Ami Buck is an airline purser who married a famous pilot out of a messy responsibility. Forest Xu is the cool, golden-boy captain everyone trusts—and no one knew how little he ever loved her. When Ami collapses, a diagnosis and a desperate lie buy her three days of him. She uses illness as a bargain; he thinks distance is the cure. Public scandal erupts. Ami nearly dies. The city grieves. He discovers the diary she kept for years—pages of a one-sided love he never read. She flees abroad and rebuilds herself. He learns what he lost and stalks every rumor to find her. What follows are staged funerals, a life-saving earthquake, a hypnotic memory that rewrites their past, and a slow, dangerous pull back together. Both are changed—by guilt, by grief, by the stubborn ache that won’t go away. This is a story about two people who broke each other and then—messily, fiercely—learned to choose themselves and each other again.

19 Chapters