Ninety-Nine Letters, A Thousand Lies

On our third anniversary, I found ninety-nine love letters my husband wrote.

None of them were for me.

They were for Kennedy, the woman who stole my award-winning design years ago, the woman he swore he was over.

His letters spoke of a soul-deep connection, a passion I'd only ever dreamed of.

Then, my best friend called from the airport. She saw him there, with Kennedy, locked in a Hollywood-style embrace.

He wasn't just cheating. This was a long-con.

He'd married me to silence me, using my DNA to help Kennedy fraudulently claim the inheritance of the powerful Olsen family-an inheritance that was rightfully mine.

He canceled my credit cards, renounced his citizenship, and secretly married her in France, all while I played the part of the loving wife.

When I tried to fight back, he had me drugged, imprisoned, and nearly drowned, all to protect his precious Kennedy.

He thought he had erased me, a mere footnote in their grand story.

But he made one fatal mistake.

He didn't know I was the real Olsen heiress.

And I was coming back to claim everything he stole.

Chapter 1

Aubrey Burris POV:

The ninety-nine love letters weren't tucked away in some forgotten drawer.

They were right there.

Stacked neatly on Cooper' s side of the nightstand.

Beside our wedding photo.

It was our third anniversary.

The air in our bedroom, usually a sanctuary, suddenly felt like a freezer door had been left open. Chilling me to the bone.

Each envelope was thick, old-fashioned, sealed with a wax stamp. A careful, almost reverent touch that made my stomach churn.

I picked up the top letter.

My fingers trembled. The elegant script, so familiar from Cooper' s early, more romantic notes to me, now felt alien. A language I suddenly couldn' t understand. The first line blurred.

"My dearest Kennedy…"

Kennedy.

The name hit me like a physical blow. It was a name that had haunted me for years. A ghost in the periphery of my life. Always just out of reach, yet always present.

The woman who stole my winning design. My chance at that international scholarship. Years ago.

The woman Cooper had supposedly long moved on from.

I fumbled with the letter. Tearing the wax seal open in my haste. The scent of old paper and something faintly floral wafted up. Something that wasn't my scent.

Cooper' s words, painstakingly crafted, poured out onto the page.

He wrote about her "unrivaled brilliance," her "vision that reshaped his world," and a "connection that defied explanation."

It was a stark contrast to the functional texts he sent me. The terse emails.

Pick up dry cleaning.

Dinner at 7. My breath hitched. He had written these words with a passion I' d only ever dreamed of. A devotion that felt like an open wound in my own heart.

He described details of their shared dreams. Their future plans. Plans that sounded eerily like the ones we' d discussed. The life we were building.