No Spring Comes from A Cold Man

I had spent years paying for Damian Grant’s infertility in every way a woman could.

Doctors, treatments, private clinics, and humiliation I swallowed in silence.

Then, against every odd, I finally got pregnant.

It was the child the Grant family had been waiting for. The miracle Madam Evelyn Grant had prayed for. The one thing Damian had been told he might never have.

On the night before our wedding, I saw a local post climbing the trending list.

[Another day of being the only girl who gets under my boss’s skin.]

In the video, a young woman smiled sweetly at the camera.

[My boss is terrifying to everyone else. Cold eyes, bad temper, the whole package. But today, during a meeting, I secretly stepped on his shoe under the table. He actually smiled at me. Then he texted me and told me to behave.]

The comments were full of people swooning.

[That has to be love. A man like that only softens for one woman.]

[Look closely. There must be some little detail on him that belongs only to you.]

I scrolled down and saw the influencer’s reply.

It was a photo of a dark silver tie clip pinned right over her chest.

[This is the gift he gave me. He said whenever I see it, I should think of him.]

I stared at that tie clip for a long time.

It was the engagement gift I had spent a month polishing by hand for Damian.

And inside it, there was still a tiny heart made from his fingerprint and mine.

In the mirror, the white wedding dress on me suddenly looked painfully bright.

The tie clip in that photo was the one I had given Damian Grant last month.

I still remembered the way he had taken it from my hand. He had barely glanced at it before tossing it into a drawer.

“Don’t waste your time on things like this again. You’re going to be my wife. Put that energy into learning how to run a household.”

His tone had been cold and flat, as if he were commenting on a bad quarterly report.

I had thought he simply didn’t like the gift.

But now, there it was, pinned neatly to another woman’s collar, turned into something she could parade around as proof that she was special.

Through the screen, it felt as if someone had slapped me across the face. My ears rang.

So the heart I had spent ten years trying to reach had already been handed to someone else.

A dry ache scraped at my throat. Somehow, I started laughing.

I took off the wedding dress and called Damian.

“Where are you?”

“At work.” His voice was as cold as ever, edged with impatience.

My fingers tightened around the phone until my knuckles turned white.

“There’s a reception tonight. Ethan will be there. You remember him, don’t you? When we were kids, my mother saved you and him from that fire...”

He cut me off.