Chapter 1

Emil Brando thanked everyone on stage the night he accepted his award. Everyone except me, his agent, whose investment had paved the way for him to become the Academy's Best Actor.

I stared at the familiar backdrop before me and the list of nominees, overcome by a stunned sense of déjà vu. Had God pitied me so deeply that He had brought me back to this moment in time?

I watched Emil accept his Oscar, step off the stage, and return calmly to his seat beside me. He paused for a moment before turning to embrace the actress he was rumored to be dating.

The crowd erupted into screams of excitement. Fellow actors and guests watched with morbid fascination. His assistant, who knew about our relationship, shot me a wary glance, expecting me to lose control right then and there.

I laughed through my tears.

I had promised him that as soon as he won an Oscar, he would marry me. Back when he was a complete unknown, Emil had agreed without a second thought. He had taken my hand and told me that even if he never won the award, I was the only woman he would ever marry.

He had worried that my parents would disapprove of him for being an ordinary man, so he resolved to work harder and harder until he became successful enough to stand as my equal.

He had been determined to make me the happiest bride in the world. But when the day finally came and he won an Oscar, he fulfilled that promise with a heart full of resentment. He continued taking on role after role until his schedule became so packed that we never even had a honeymoon.

With every phone call, he grew more impatient and less willing to talk. Then came the interview where he admitted that our marriage had been nothing more than a transactional exchange for my investment in his career.

His popularity soared after winning the award. Emil's fans often imagined themselves as his wife, so they saw me, the woman who actually married him and who had been born into wealth, as their rival and nemesis.

They quickly organized a hate campaign against me online. Before long, they had even turned my name into a meme.

I already knew that celebrity fans could be dangerously obsessive, but I never expected to be doxxed, stalked, and eventually attacked with sulfuric acid outside my own home.

By the time I reached the hospital, my face had been damaged beyond repair. My life itself hung in the balance.

Emil came to the hospital while the doctors were fighting to save me. I assumed he had come because he cared, because he wanted to be there when I needed love and support during the darkest moment of my life.

I was wrong.

"I don't need you anymore, Bette," he said coldly, looking down at me from beside my hospital bed. "I have a brighter future ahead of me, but I can't walk that path with you holding me back."

He went on about how his fans had discovered our marriage after he became an Academy Award-winning actor.

"I've built my reputation around my life as an actor. I'm supposed to be the underdog, the grassroots performer who pulled himself up by his bootstraps until he reached the pinnacle of an acting career. I've sacrificed too much to maintain that image.

"Which is why you've become a problem. If people found out you were the one financing my career all this time, and that I only made it because I relied on your money like some sugar baby... then no one would see my Oscar as something I truly earned.

"At that rate, many of my fans would leave the fandom, and my haters would attack me even more relentlessly. Everything I've worked so hard to achieve would be destroyed!"