Divorced and Done

After signing the divorce papers that waived every last cent of alimony, I tossed the ridiculously expensive wedding band straight into the trash can outside the law firm.

Then, I bought a oneway train ticket out of here. My phone, an ID, and a debit card with a depressing balance. That was my entire net worth after all these years.

The estate manager called.

He informed me I still had a few boxes of personal items left in the house. "Trash it," I said. "I don't need any of it." He hesitated, then added that Hayes was throwing a massive tantrum, demanding his mom. "He's getting a new mom soon.

The one he's been obsessing over." The son I carried and birthed was exactly like his father. They even worshipped the exact same woman.

I used to spend entire nights crying, completely drained because I couldn't get Gideon to love me.

But now, staring at the meager but entirely mine balance on my banking app, I figured he and his manipulative little first love, Fiona, could go ahead and torture each other.

I was finally free. Right before the train's doors hissed shut, I delivered my parting words into the receiver. "Tell Gideon to relax.

I won't bother him ever again." Chapter 1 I ended the call, powered down the phone, and snapped the SIM card in half. This city and I were officially done.

Sitting in the seat next to me was a little girl right around my son's age. She stared at me, wideeyed and hypervigilant. I used to love kids.

Now, I didn't care about a single thing in this world. She kept perfectly still.

It was her guardian who was the problem, practically yelling into a cell phone the entire ride, cursing out someone on the other end.

I shoved my earbuds in, closed my eyes, and tried to catch some sleep. Sometime later, a tiny hand tugged at my sleeve. I opened my eyes.

The little girl stared intensely at the empty seat next to her. She curled her hands into tight fists, not dropping a single tear. "She ran off with that rich guy and ditched me.

Can you call the cops for me?" The aisle seat was empty. I flagged down a conductor and transit security. A quick check confirmed it: the woman had slipped off at the last stop.

Security camera footage showed her constantly looking over her shoulder as she walked down the platform, terrified the kid would follow her. Simply put, she dumped her.

The cabin erupted in whispers.

Nosy passengers didn't even bother lowering their voices, openly gossiping right in front of the kid about how heartless the mother was and how pathetic the girl looked.

The little girl just sat there. Not a twitch, not a sob, not a sound. I caught that stubborn, lonewolf glare in her eyes.

I reached out and gripped her freezing hand tight. "Listen to me.

From today on, you never wait for trash that throws you away." I pulled out my ID, handed it to the transit cops, and wrote down my forwarding address and contact info.

So, when I finally stepped off that train, my inventory had slightly updated. A phone, an ID, a nearly empty bank account. And a kid. I settled into a quiet rural town.

There was a neglected backyard at the house I rented, so I cleared out the dead weeds and planted a vegetable garden. I gave the girl a new name. Wren.

We pushed through the fostertoadopt paperwork and made it official. My legal file was no longer just one miserable, lonely page. Wren was serious.

She rarely smiled, usually just watching me with this intense, deadpan expression. She understood way too much for a fouryearold.

When I caught a terrible flu, she dragged a step stool to the stove and managed to heat up soup for me. It made me think of my biological son. Hayes.

The privileged heir who got a private ski resort bought for him the second he mentioned wanting to see snow.

The kid who got an entire candy factory because he liked a specific chocolate bar. They were worlds apart. Wren asked me once why I kept her. She called herself a burden.

I brushed the hair out of her eyes. "Because I'm alone. So, how about you keep me company from now on?" She stared at me in dead silence for a long minute.

Then, she gave a hard nod. I'll stick with you forever. Chapter 2 Days bled into weeks, then years. Wren started kindergarten. Then she started elementary school.

She became class president. And then, Wren got into a fight. Getting that call from her teacher threw me off balance. off balance.

Wren was ridiculously disciplined and way too mature for her age. Forget throwing punches—she barely even spared a glance at the other kids.

According to her, they were "too basic." I rushed to the school. The teacher met me at the front entrance, looking out of her depth. "The boy Wren fought with is a new transfer.

He just started today." "Why did they fight?" I cut right to the chase.

The teacher gave me a highly uncomfortable look. "Well…" "What?" "Hayes claimed Wren was trying to steal his mother." I stopped dead in my tracks. "Wren had a photo of the two of you tucked inside her pencil case," the teacher explained. "Hayes saw it, and he… he called Wren a thief.

Said she was stealing his mom." I didn't say another word. I just kept my eyes straight ahead and followed the teacher down the hall.

As she pushed open the door to the principal's office, she glanced over her shoulder. "Oh, by the way, Hayes's father is already inside." I paused in the doorway.

My eyes immediately locked onto Wren, who was sitting in the corner quietly doing her homework. She didn't look hurt. I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding.

Out of the corner of my eye, the little boy throwing a massive tantrum suddenly lit up. He bolted toward me on his short legs. "Mommy!" I crouched down and caught Hayes.

But instead of pulling him into a hug, I planted my hands firmly on his small shoulders and pushed him back. "You've got the wrong person, kid." I flashed a polite, deadeyed smile and lifted my gaze to meet the man standing across the room. "Hi there.

I'm Wren's mother." I never planned on seeing Gideon again. The world is massive. If you want someone dead to you, they stay dead.

Hayes started wailing, screaming between heavy, dramatic gasps that I was abandoning him. In the corner, Wren’s knuckles turned bonewhite as she gripped her pencil.

She was seconds away from snapping. Gideon just stared at me. Dead silent. I knew exactly what he was doing.

He was waiting for my facade to crack. "Wren." I walked over and zipped up her backpack. "Can you head home first?" She gave a sharp nod, slung her bag over her shoulder, and marched out of the room without a single backward glance.

The second she was gone, Hayes wiped his face, scrambled over, and locked his arms around my calves like a vice. "Mommy, stop being mad, okay?

I know I was bad!" I leaned down and gave his head a dismissive, patronizing pat.

Then I stood back up and locked eyes with Gideon. "Can we talk in private?" My history with Gideon was painfully cliché.

Back in the day, my grandmother saved his grandmother during a botched kidnapping attempt.

Because of that ancient life debt, his oldmoney family made a habit of sending us obnoxious holiday care packages every single year.

When I got accepted into a university in the city, Grandma was getting too frail to travel.

Terrified that I'd get eaten alive by the fastpaced city life, she finally cashed in the favor. She contacted his family and asked them to keep an eye on me.

Chapter 3 That year, dragging my cheap, overstuffed luggage out of the train station, I spotted Gideon instantly.

He was leaning against a ridiculous luxury car, carelessly swiping on his phone. He was blindingly out of my league.

You could throw every romantic adjective in the dictionary at him and it still wouldn't be enough. Falling for him was a fatal, unavoidable error.

I knew we operated in entirely different stratospheres. I didn't expect a damn thing.

I was just a girl walking under a brilliant moon, grateful for the fleeting light it cast on me. We ended up at the same university.

Occasionally, doing his duty for the elders, he'd drop off care packages. We barely graduated from nodding acquaintances.

Then, I learned all about Gideon and Fiona’s toxic, highstakes romance.

The golden couple's dynamic was exhausting: intense passion, explosive fights, dramatic breakups, and inevitable, fiery reconciliations.

I was just the extra in the background, occasionally feeling a hollow ache in my chest. By my junior year, I landed an internship across the city. The daily commute was killing me.

During a random runin with Gideon, he asked how I was doing, and I gave him the unfiltered truth. A few days later, his grandmother called.

She insisted they had an empty apartment right next to my office and demanded I move in. You don't say no to oldmoney grandmothers.

Moving in, I immediately realized the place reeked of Gideon.

Knowing I harbored a pathetic crush, I crammed all my belongings into the tiny guest room, desperately trying to erase my footprint.

Then came the night I dragged myself home from working late and found Gideon passed out drunk on the sofa. I wanted to stay far away, but my stupid, lingering affection won out.

I grabbed a throw blanket and leaned over to cover him. His eyes snapped open. He stared right at me. I braced myself for an interrogation about why I was in his apartment.

Instead, he pinned me to the couch. It was a disastrous, monumental mistake. Honestly, the chaotic blur of that night is mostly gone.

The brain has this brilliant defense mechanism where it scrubs away trauma when the pain gets too suffocating. In my entire life, I’ve only slept with one man, exactly one time.

And the whole time, he was whispering her name. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure Gideon has only said my actual name once. That very first day at the train station.

He gave me a slow, assessing look. "Stella?" "That's me." If only we had stayed strangers. The school was dead quiet after the bell.

Gideon and I stood at the end of the hallway, a stretch of manicured lawn sprawling behind us. "You wanted to talk in private," he said, his tone flat. "So talk." If he wanted to play it straight, fine. "What exactly have you been feeding Hayes for the last four years?" "Excuse me?" "We've been divorced for four years.

For four years, I kept my end of the bargain. I stayed a ghost, and I wired child support into your account every single month.

Kids have the memory span of a goldfish." "And let's be real—Hayes couldn't stand me when I lived there." I stepped closer, my voice dropping. "Unless someone was constantly drilling it into his head, there is zero chance he'd remember me, let alone suddenly decide he loves me." Gideon refused to look at me, staring out the window. "I didn't feed him anything.

It was my grandmother.

She wouldn't let him forget." "Then why transfer him here?" "He wouldn't shut up about finding you," Gideon paused, a muscle ticking in his jaw. "I couldn't stop him." Chapter 4 Right, Hayes was the golden boy of the family.

He got whatever he wanted. Even Gideon had zero boundaries when it came to him. I dropped my gaze, staring blankly at the floor tiles.

After a long beat, I let out a dry laugh. "Whatever. Once his little fantasy shatters, he'll naturally want to run back to his mansion." I was never the lovable type anyway.

Once Hayes spent enough time with me, reality would hit him. He would figure out that his memories had completely romanticized me.

To him, I was still just the annoying, unlikable biological mother who dragged down his elite status. After moving to this rural town, I opened a tiny diner to pay the bills.

Since I was a onewoman show, I strictly capped the daily reservations. Surprisingly, word of mouth spread, and outofstate tourists turned it into a viral hotspot.

The eighteenyearold Stella wanted to be a ruthless tech CEO pulling in millions.

The twentyeightyearold Stella just wanted to guard her thousandsquarefoot diner and ride out the rest of her life in peace.

Ever since he transferred, Hayes abused his father's oldmoney privileges.

Every day after the bell rang, he had that obnoxiously flashy, bulletproof black SUV aggressively hijack the curb right outside my diner, using his inherited arrogance to force his way back into my life.

He was a smart kid. He only pulled that massive tantrum stunt on our first day reuniting.

Gideon rarely showed his face; ninety percent of the time, it was just the chauffeur trailing Hayes. I couldn't comprehend his family's logic.

If the heir was so precious, why dump him in the middle of nowhere with hired help? I didn't chase him off. He was the last living person on earth who shared my DNA.

I used to stay awake for three days straight, eyes bloodshot, wiping his forehead when his fever spiked.

I once sliced my hands to ribbons trying to build him a custom toy he pointed at in a catalog. Humans are inherently selfish, I get it.

I didn't expect a medal for doing those things.

But after pouring my literal blood and sweat into him, getting nothing but disgust and eye rolls in return… yeah, it felt like swallowing a mouthful of ash.

When he was a toddler, he was my shadow. He needed me in the room to fall asleep and demanded I carry him everywhere.

His dependence on me was the only thing that got me through the sneers and humiliations in that estate.

But the second he learned to walk, the second he discovered the word "no," he started pushing me away.

I was the bad cop who snatched the candy away, the disciplinarian who grounded him when he acted like a spoiled brat. Kids don't understand right from wrong.

To him, I was just the warden running his prison, so naturally, he locked me out. Then came the breaking point. Gideon took him out for the weekend.

When they walked back through the front doors, Hayes marched up to me, chin raised high. "I don't want you as my mom anymore.

I want Aunt Fiona to be my mom." "You don't deserve to be my mom! Get out! This is my house