Where the Stars Went

What Stella Hart wanted was for Ashton Voss to forgive her about the fire. The two of them were caught in it seven years ago, and he came out of it believing she had heard him calling and gone to pull a stranger clear instead. He is the only heir to a jewelry house his family has held for a century, and for three years he made her pay for that night. A hundred sets of divorce papers came to her, and she gave up whatever she had to give up to have every one of them withdrawn. The hundred and first set arrived after a party. He kept his stepsister Jade beside him there and made Stella drink in front of everyone, knowing what alcohol does to her. Jade dropped her dead mother's locket on the floor and broke it. Ashton hit her hard enough to shatter the hearing aid she had worn since her father's fists cost her her hearing at nineteen. She signed, in a blood red dress, and went to Ethan Morrow. He runs a company in Silicon Valley and had been quietly paying for the cancer research Stella's mother left behind. The work Stella means to finish is the screening test her mother did not live to develop.