Who Are The Main Characters In 'From Scratch: A Memoir'?

My husband Bill and his beautiful assistant Doris are laughing and eating like they're on a first date. But the joke is on me... I'm here, Bill's wife, watching them from across the room, tending to my flat belly where a little life is now living. Of course, Bill doesn’t know about the baby yet. The news is still fresh in my mind, barely a few hours old. It is supposed to be a family dinner gathering, but I'm never the welcome one but an outsider. Watching Bill take the steak cut and handed over by Doris, his young age best friend who knows him the best, I guess I'm spoiling their fun by telling them now that I'm having a baby. Three years of marriage, and his frequent absences from the family left me feeling overwhelmed and alone. I've even forgotten the reason we got married. Maybe it was a mistake to begin with. Finally, I made a decision. Divorce. But a man came along and shifted things dramatically. And it didn't occur to me that this man was still deeply connected to bill's family. He was Bill's uncle.

Cast aside and humiliated, Elice McLean never imagined she would endure life. She was on the verge of giving up. Until that night led her to a crazy revelation. That she still had value. His name was Garrett Alexander Morales. A stranger who proved to Elice that she was still immensely valuable in his eyes. Through his gaze, through the way he spoke, and through his... touch.

After finishing work for the day, I checked my phone and realized I had been added to a group chat called "Catch the Thief." The members were my parents, my brother, Brian Wise, and my sister-in-law, Paulene Wise. I typed a question mark. Paulene replied instantly. [My jewelry is missing. I didn't add you here to accuse you or anything. I just wanted to ask what you think. Honestly, there's no use for other people in our family to take my jewelry, so I've been wondering... I'm not saying you definitely stole it. But if you did, you don't have to deny it. I'm willing to give you a chance to make things right.] My mother said nothing. She just kept tagging me over and over. I let out a small laugh and typed back. [Maybe Brian took it and gave it to his side piece. I'm not saying he definitely has someone else. Just that men his age sometimes start looking around. I'm only guessing here. And if he really did mess up, you could give him a chance to make things right, too.]

On her birthday night, inside her family’s five-star restaurant, she realizes her marriage is already over. While she waits alone, her husband chooses another woman.. again. Humiliated, heartbroken, she makes a reckless decision… unaware that a powerful billionaire has been watching her from the shadows. He knows her pain. He knows her family's secrets. And he wants to free her from the man who never loved her. But nothing ever unfolds that simply—especially not when fate has already decided to complicate it. Resentment turns into obsession, and truth bleeds into revenge. Soon, the cost of freedom begins to rise beyond divorce… beyond love… beyond mercy. And when buried histories ignite, what begins as rescue threatens to become destruction — where old flames are rekindled in fire, blood, and ruin.

Mom, Dad, and Jesse—my younger sister—went out to sea on a trip, but they were caught in a tsunami, and all three perished in the accident. I was left all alone—just as I was about to start university—burdened with nothing but a mountain of debt. In the end, everything I had saved for my university tuition, along with the house Mom and Dad had left me, was taken by debt collectors. I was then forced to work in a shady factory, laboring 16 hours a day, sleeping in a shabby ten-person dorm, and surviving on nothing but thin, flavorless broth. I finally cleared the last of the debt when I accidentally discovered that Jesse—who was supposed to be dead—had appeared on television and become a famous dancer. Mom and Dad even gave an interview about her success. It turned out they had taken out a massive loan and faked their deaths to flee to Pravia for Jesse's dance studies, leaving the entire debt for me to deal with just as I was supposed to start university. I went to confront them, demanding the truth, but they threw me out like trash. I was then hit and killed by a speeding truck at the side of the road. "How could Lorraine be such a nuisance, not even having the decency to die far away from our doorstep?" I have been given another chance, reborn on the day they faked their deaths.

This year, as the country's leading neurosurgeon, I was invited to perform a high-profile specialist surgery at a hospital in another state. Twenty years ago, I stood in this very operating room. My mother suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and the surgeon's hand slipped by less than a quarter of an inch. She died. Back then, it was my first love, Ethan Lancaster, who helped me through the grief. Only later did I learn the truth. The surgeon listed on the case was Ethan's father, the hospital's renowned Chief of Neurosurgery. But the one actually holding the scalpel was Ethan himself, still a surgical resident at the time. He and Vanessa Hart had planned it all along. They used my mother's operation as a practice case to advance his career. After the tragedy, Vanessa used her status as the hospital director's daughter to bury the entire incident. From that day forward, I gave up my guaranteed research placement and sat for medical school entrance exams again. I studied from undergraduate through postdoctoral training. I spent twenty full years turning myself into the kind of surgeon who would never make that mistake. All so that one day, no one else would have to suffer the same tragedy my mother did. Today, my assistant slid a patient's file across the desk. Brainstem tumor. Late stage. Extremely high risk. The face in the photo had aged considerably, but I recognized it at a glance. I handed the file back to my assistant and removed my surgical coat. “I can't perform this surgery.”