Too Late, Mr. Sterling—I’m Marrying Your Rival Chapter 02

I meant to make the broth. I really did.

But every step to the car felt like walking on broken glass. A deep, tearing cramp twisted low in my belly, like something inside me was still being ripped away.

By the time I got home, my hands were shaking too hard to unlock the door.

Cold sweat soaked my collar. The room tilted. The pills Dr. Patel gave me were in my purse, but I couldn’t make my fingers open the zipper.

Five minutes, I told myself, collapsing onto the bed. Just five minutes. Then the broth.

The pain dragged me under.

And in the dark, I dreamed of him the way he used to be.

We met at a charity gala six years ago. I was the young surgeon who’d saved his driver’s life after a crash. He walked up to me in a tuxedo, looked at me like I was the only light in the room, and said, “I’m going to marry you. Just so you know.”

His mother called me a nobody. His board called me a gold digger.

Damien stood in front of all of them and said, “She’s my wife. If you insult her, you insult me.”

Back then, he loved how soft I was. When I woke from nightmares, he held me until dawn. When I nicked my finger chopping onions, he called his private doctor in a panic. He begged me to quit the hospital—”I want you safe, I want you home”—and I did, because I loved him more than my own ambitions.

Then Sterling Global went public. The pressure came. The sharks came.

And so did Sienna Cross.

Ex-military. Ruthless. Brilliant. Damien hired her and started looking at me differently.

“Ava, you’re Mrs. Sterling now. You need to handle the press. Run the foundation. Stop calling me about every little thing.”

I tried. God, I tried.

But I froze in front of cameras. Reporters ripped me apart. Sienna “coached” me and smiled when I stumbled.

“Six months with Sienna,” Damien said, rubbing his temples, “and you still can’t give a two-minute statement?”

When I asked for his advice, he’d sigh: “Do I have to make every decision for you? Think for yourself.”

When I made mistakes, he’d look at me with that exhausted face.

“When are you going to become the wife I need?”

Then the dream shifted to a week ago.

The Sterling Foundation’s children’s hospital gala. Damien was supposed to give the speech. He didn’t show. So I did it, hands shaking, because a real Mrs. Sterling would.

A man rushed the stage. A laid-off Sterling employee, screaming, swinging a steel stanchion.

There were kids in the front row.

I didn’t think. I stepped in front of them.

The pole hit me in the stomach. I went off the edge of the stage and landed hard on the concrete.

For one stupid second, lying there, I thought: Maybe now he’ll be proud of me.

I didn’t know I was pregnant.

Not until Dr. Patel’s face went quiet three days later and she said the words: “I’m so sorry. There’s no heartbeat.”

I called Damien from the hospital bathroom, my back pressed to the tile.

“Damien, I need to tell you something—”

“Ava.” That sigh. “I’m in a board meeting. Can you handle anything on your own? Can you just, for once, be like Sienna? Strong. Independent. Deal with your own small problems.”

Click.

My small problem.

Our baby.

I laughed in that bathroom. Then I couldn’t stop crying.

That was the moment. The moment six years of loving him finally cracked straight down the middle.

I’m done being his wife.

After the surgery, I’m leaving.

A door slammed somewhere in the house—hard enough to rattle the frame.

Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs.

The bedroom door crashed open.

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