Signed Away: A Life Unbound

From the back cover

The printer hummed, spitting out the last page of the asset transfer agreement for a company I' d spent five years building with my husband, Liam. Five years of a marriage that was now just ash.

My phone buzzed. It was Dr. Alex Chen. "Chloe, are you sure about this? There are other ways." His voice was gentle, the same way it had been for years, trying to hold me together. "No, Alex," I replied, my voice hollow and distant, "There' s no other way. Not for me."

He was sick, he didn't know what he was doing. But I was sick too. Sick of waiting for a man who no longer existed, a man who, two months ago, drugged me with potent sleeping pills so he could go out with his ex-girlfriend, Sophia. Because of that, his mother, Liam' s kind mother, died alone. He admitted it without a hint of guilt.

My heart finally turned to stone. The love I had clung to, the hope I had nurtured in the dark, it all died with her. For five years, I had cared for him, run our tech company, the one we built together, while he slowly disappeared. His memory didn't just fade; it rewound. He was twenty-one again, and dating Sophia Reed.

Now, I was just a means to an end. The woman who paid the bills so he could shower Sophia with gifts, the woman who ran the company so he had a fortune to offer his college sweetheart. I had spent the last two months meticulously preparing for this. Every share, every asset, every dollar in the company was being transferred to him. I was leaving him with everything. And I was leaving him.

I gave him the papers. He barely glanced at them, his thumbs moving across his phone. "What is it? More boring company stuff?" he asked. "Can't you handle it?" I pointed to the signature lines. "It's an asset transfer. It's all yours now. Just sign, and it's done." In his current state, he didn't even notice the divorce papers tucked at the bottom of the stack. He just wanted to get back to Sophia.

"Hey, Soph," he answered, his voice dripping with affection. "Yeah, I' m on my way now. Just had to sign some stuff here for… her." He didn' t even use my name. "No, it' s great news. I basically own the whole company now. We can buy that beach house you wanted. Yeah, the one in Malibu." He walked out the door, still laughing about all the things they were going to do with the money I' d signed over to him, without letting me tell him his mother was dead.

The door clicked shut behind him.