Chapter 1

Title: My Husband Took My Heart to Save His First Love. At Their Engagement Party, He Cried Over My Photo.

After my death, my husband personally performed the autopsy on my body.

He took my faintly beating heart and gave it to his childhood sweetheart, Sophia Reed.

The five-month-old baby I was carrying was removed and cremated without hesitation.

It was then I realized: I was nothing more than a temporary vessel for a heart he had always intended to give Sophia.

But three months later, on the day of their engagement, I saw him hiding in the dressing room, crying his eyes out over my picture.

The cold blade of the scalpel sliced through my pale skin.

I hovered above, watching everything unfold. As a ghost, I couldn’t feel pain anymore. Yet, when Steven Anderson opened my chest cavity, my soul trembled violently.

The tiny, blood-covered baby lay curled up, lifeless.

That was the child I had fought so hard to conceive after my miscarriage.

Steven had wanted a child so badly. I thought he might at least feel a flicker of grief.

But when he saw the baby, he turned his face away, uninterested. Instead, his trembling hands eagerly cut into my chest, extracting my warm, beating heart.

His excitement was palpable—his shoulders shook as he worked, so much so that he accidentally knocked over a glass container on the surgical table. The sharp crash echoed through the room, shattering the sterile silence.

A nurse assistant rushed in after hearing the sound. "Dr. Anderson, is everything okay?" she asked nervously.

I lowered my gaze to the operating table, staring at my own mangled, unrecognizable face.

It brought back the memory of the accident—glass shards from the shattered windshield piercing my eye socket, the deformed car crushing half of my skull.

I had worked so hard to carry this child, hoping it would bring Steven and me closer.

In the end, it cost the baby its life.

"Prepare the heart for transport," Steven instructed, his voice steady and emotionless. "Get it into the preservation container and take it to OR 3 immediately. Sophia Reed in Room 315 is ready for surgery."

He removed his bloodstained gloves, adjusting his gold-rimmed glasses with his usual detached composure.

"I’ll perform the surgery myself. Make sure every nurse and assistant is on standby—I won’t tolerate even the slightest mistake."

He was so… in love.

Sophia Reed, his childhood sweetheart with congenital heart disease, had been rushed to the hospital three days earlier when her heart began to fail.

And five days ago, I had been in a car accident.

The engine had been tampered with. I remembered the thick black smoke pouring from the hood, far too dark to be normal.

I knew it was Sophia who had orchestrated it.

She hated me more than anyone else in the world.

She needed my heart to survive. And she wanted Steven to be hers forever.

"What about your wife’s body?" the nurse asked hesitantly, glancing at the lifeless baby still cradled in my abdomen.

"There are no other family members to claim her remains," she added. "According to protocol, the body can’t stay in the morgue for more than a week."

Steven adjusted his glasses, his expression unreadable as always.

"Call Lila Harper," he said. "She was her closest friend from the orphanage."

I didn’t understand.

I didn’t know why.

My lifeless body lay exposed, chest cavity wide open, utterly vulnerable. Steven didn’t even think to hold me one last time.

I was always afraid of the cold. I was always afraid of pain.

Now, even as a disconnected soul, I felt a searing, tearing ache when I looked down at the gaping hole where my heart used to be.

The nurse sighed and shook her head, zipping up the body bag to preserve the last shred of dignity I had left. She pushed my body into the cold, dark drawer of the morgue.

The darkness I had always feared swallowed me whole.

Steven didn’t look back.

He was already rushing to save Sophia, the love of his life, with the heart he had stolen from me.

I wanted to ask him:

In our three years of marriage, was there ever a moment when you loved me?

If you knew Sophia had been behind the accident that killed me and our baby, would you feel even a flicker of anger? Would you shed even a single tear for me?

But his right hand—the one that once wore a wedding band—no longer bore any mark of commitment.

He had taken off his ring within an hour of my death.

He couldn’t wait to rid himself of the burden I had become.

I couldn’t find the words.

I realized then that even a soul could cry. Transparent tears fell from me, vanishing into the air before they could touch the bloodied operating table.

Steven Anderson never loved me.

I had known that all along.