After I delivered our triplets, my husband entered my hospital room with his mistress beside him — proudly holding a Birkin bag. He threw the divorce papers onto my bed and said with a cruel smirk, “Look at you. No one would want you now.”

The morning they discharged me from the hospital, the sky was a bruised, heavy purple. A private medical transport, arranged not by my husband but by my father, drove me and my three little girls back to the neighborhood I had called home for four years.

I didn't expect a warm welcome. But I didn't expect the garbage bags, either.

When the transport pulled up to the gated driveway of our modern colonial home, I saw them. Black, heavy-duty trash bags piled haphazardly on the front lawn. My clothes. My shoes. The soft, knitted blankets my grandmother had made for the babies.

Standing on the porch was Serena, wearing one of my silk robes, holding a mug of coffee. She watched as I stepped out of the transport, moving slowly due to the pain of my C-section.

"You can't come in, Clara," Serena called out, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness. "Julian changed the locks yesterday. The deed is officially in my name now. He told you to go to a shelter, didn't he?"

The driver of the transport, a burly EMT named Marcus, stepped forward, his face red with anger. "Ma'am, she just had surgery. She has three newborns."

"Not my problem," Serena smirked, taking a sip of her coffee. "Julian left fifty dollars in that white envelope on the mailbox. Tell her to call a cab."

I stood on the sidewalk, the cold wind biting through my thin coat. I looked at the house I had decorated, the garden I had planted, the nursery I had painted with my own two hands while Julian was supposedly "working late."

"Marcus, it's fine," I said quietly.

"Ma'am?" he asked, bewildered.

"Leave the bags," I told him, not taking my eyes off Serena. "They are full of things from a past life. I don't need them anymore."

As I turned to get back into the transport, a sleek, jet-black Mercedes Maybach pulled silently up to the curb. The tinted window rolled down, revealing the sharp, unsmiling face of Arthur Vance—my father’s most trusted fixer and the head of our family’s legal team.

"Clara," Arthur said, his voice smooth and authoritative. "Your father is waiting. The nursery at the estate has been prepared."

Serena’s smirk faltered. She squinted at the Maybach, her mind struggling to process how a supposedly broke, helpless housewife had a quarter-of-a-million-dollar car waiting for her.