Chapter 1: The Severance “If you want the children, take them. They’re only holding me back from starting over.” The words didn’t echo. They simply dropped onto the center of the polished walnut desk, heavy and absolute, poisoning the air between us. Adrian Castillo, the man I had tethered my soul to for an agonizing decade, delivered this sentence a mere five minutes after the ink dried on our divorce decree. He spoke with the detached, sterile pragmatism of a man discarding a scuffed dining chair, rather than discussing the living, breathing lives of Noah and Lily—our flesh and blood.
I sat motionless across from Attorney Bennett, whose immaculate downtown office smelled faintly of lemon polish and expensive, cowardly silence. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city churned in a hazy…
