Too Late, Mr. Sterling—I’m Marrying Your Rival Chapter 04

Forty-seven missed calls.

Twelve voicemails.

I’d only turned my old phone on to transfer my mother’s photos. It lit up like a war zone.

I should have deleted them all. Instead, my thumb pressed play on the last one.

His voice was unrecognizable. Wrecked. Sobbing.

“Ava. Dr. Patel told me everything. There was a baby. Our baby.” A choked sound. “I found the blood. I followed it from our bed to the front door. You crawled. You crawled, and I hung up on you.”

Silence. Ragged breathing.

“I found your journal. I read the last page. Please. Tell me where you are.”

My hand didn’t shake.

That surprised me most.

The journal. I’d forgotten it in the nightstand drawer. Six years of my heart, written in purple ink.

I knew exactly what he’d read on that last page, because I’d written it the night before I left:

Damien, I don’t want to be Mrs. Sterling anymore.

I want to go home. Back to Mom.

I deleted the voicemail. Then all forty-six others. Then I powered the phone off and threw it into the

Atlantic.

Harbor Point, Maine.

My mother’s hometown. Population 3,200. One stoplight. One lighthouse. One small hospital barely keeping its doors open.

Mom and I lived here until I was eight. Her little gray cottage still stood on the cliffs above Gull Cove, the windows facing the water.

It was raining when I arrived. The same cold, silver rain as the day she died.

“I’m home, Mom,” I whispered to the empty kitchen. “I’m staying this time. I promise.”

I applied at Harbor Point Regional the next morning.

The chief of medicine, a gruff old man named Dr. Whitaker, looked at my résumé, then at me. “Johns Hopkins trauma fellowship. Then nothing for three years.” He raised a brow. “What happened?”

“I made a bad investment,” I said. “I’m done with it.”

He hired me on the spot.

The town didn’t trust me at first. Big-city doctor. Rich man’s ex-wife-someone had recognized me from the tabloids.

Then, in my second week, a lobsterman’s son came in with a femoral artery torn open by a winch line. I had my hands inside his leg for four hours. He walked out on his own.

In my second month, I diagnosed the strange rash spreading through the elementary school-

contaminated well water no one had tested in a decade.

After that, people stopped whispering when I passed. They started bringing me blueberry pies.

I worked double shifts. I slept like the dead. And for the first time in years, I felt like a person.

Sometimes, on the break room TV, I’d see Damien’s face on the financial news.

Sterling Global CEO cancels Tokyo merger amid personal crisis.

I’d change the channel.

It didn’t hurt anymore. That was the strangest part. Where the love used to be, there was just quiet.

Then came the first winter storm.

At 11:40 p.m., the ER doors slammed open so hard the glass cracked.

“Doctor! We need a doctor NOW!”

Three men in torn suits dragged a gurney through the snow. One had blood running down his face.

The man on the gurney was barely recognizable. A metal shard jutted from his side. His chest was caved on the left. His skin had gone gray.

“Car went off the coast road into the ravine,” one of them gasped. “He pulled two of us out before it caught fire. Then it exploded,”

I grabbed gloves. “Who is he?”

“Rhys Calloway.”

My hands stopped.

Everybody in my old world knew that name.

Rhys Calloway. CEO of Calloway Industries.

The only man on earth Damien Sterling had ever called his enemy.