He Paid Me to Leave, Then Returned / Chapter 1: The Price of Goodbye
He Paid Me to Leave, Then Returned

He Paid Me to Leave, Then Returned

Author: Bradley Lopez

Chapter 1: The Price of Goodbye

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When I broke up with Marcus Whitlow, he handed me $750,000—a parting gift, a settlement, call it what you will, but it felt more like hush money than anything else.

Even now, when I think about it, the memory burns—sharp, sudden, like getting slapped across the face. That check in my hand was cold, literally and figuratively, the kind of chill that seeps straight into your bones and makes you want to curse out loud, makes you wonder how you ever let it come to this. In that moment, I felt cheap and lost, like love had a price tag and I’d just been weighed and measured.

I clung to the front of his shirt, sobbing so hard I could barely catch my breath, gasping out, “I don’t want the money, I just—I just want you. Please, Marcus, I just want you.”

My hands shook, knuckles white against the fabric, and my voice was so raw it barely sounded like me. Tears blurred everything, his face swimming in and out of focus. God, I couldn’t even see him. The world shrank down to just the two of us, the restaurant’s soft music fading into a faraway buzz, leaving nothing but the wild, frantic pounding of my heart.

He heard me, paused a beat—then smirked and said, "Me? You think you could ever afford me?"

His words went deeper than any breakup line I’d ever heard. The air between us felt thick, suffocating, final—the kind of final you can’t talk your way out of. I could see the line drawn in the sand, and I knew—really knew—there was no going back over it.

I couldn’t go back. So later, I married someone else.

There wasn’t any big, dramatic closure, just the slow, awkward process of patching up a heart that didn’t want to stay broken forever. Eventually, the ache faded enough that I could let someone new in, and I found a kind of comfort in Ethan Hart’s gentle, steady love—something simple, something safe.

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