I used to believe my life was a fairytale.

Logan and I were raised practically in the same crib. Our mothers were best friends, and our families had been neighbors long before we were born. They used to laugh that while I was still in the womb, they had already plotted out my wedding. They even chose our names from the same book of poetry — two characters that meant “promise.”

And so, my life was filled with Logan.

He was two months older, and never let me forget it. “I’m your big brother,” he’d declare with a serious face, puffing out his chest. At five years old, that meant holding my hand all the way to kindergarten while I sobbed from fear of leaving home. At ten, that meant showing up with candy when I failed a test, sitting cross-legged beside me until my tears turned into laughter.

He was the boy who ran to the corner store in middle school to buy me sanitary pads when I stained my skirt for the first time. He had come back flushed, shoving a heat pack and brown sugar water into my hands along with the package, his ears blazing red. “The clerk said it hurts,” he muttered, eyes darting everywhere but me. “Does it hurt? Should I carry you to the hospital?”

I laughed at him through my mortification. “No, Logan. I’ll be fine.”

He carried me home anyway, my face buried against his back, his jacket tied around my waist to hide the stain. The afternoon sun bathed us both in gold, and I remember thinking — this is what safety feels like.

By the time we reached high school, I’d stopped calling him “big brother.” No matter how he coaxed or teased, I stuck stubbornly to “Logan.” Perhaps it was my way of reminding us both that we weren’t just children anymore. That day when he blushed at the sound of his old title, his hands tightening on my shoulders, I realized something had shifted between us.

Our youth had bloomed into something more.

On my eighteenth birthday, in front of our entire class, Logan confessed with roses trembling in his hands. “Harper,” he stammered, “I—I like you. Will you be my girlfriend?”

I cried, nodded, and threw myself into his arms while our classmates cheered. That was the first kiss we shared. At that moment, I thought my love for him could never burn brighter.

We spent senior year hand in hand, grinding for our exams. I studied mathematics, he finance, and when we both got into the same university, our parents glowed with pride.

We were the perfect story: childhood sweethearts who grew into lovers, families intertwined by business and blood, a bond tested but never broken. Our parents even gifted us a villa as our marital home after we graduated.

When Logan slipped a ring on my finger at twenty-two, the whole city sighed with envy.

And so, I became Mrs. Reed.

Marriage should have been our golden years. Logan was charming, successful, with his family’s company already sliding into his grasp. I was happy to be his wife, focusing on my studies, traveling with him, building a home together.

But the cracks began small.

It was in our second year that I received the first anonymous message. A photo of a necklace I hadn’t chosen, around the neck of a woman I didn’t know. He gave this to me. Isn’t it pretty? the caption read.

I stared at it for hours before deleting it. Logan was affectionate, devoted. Surely it was just envy, a trick from someone who wished they had what I did.

But then came another message. Then another. Flirtatious texts, screenshots, gifts flaunted online. I confronted Logan once, showing him a post of a girl leaning close to him during a work dinner.

He only smiled and kissed my forehead. “Harper, you’re jealous. It’s just the angle of the photo. I’ll be more careful next time.”

He coaxed me with cake, with flowers, with his old warmth that wrapped around me like a blanket. And I — foolish, blind — let myself believe him.

Until the third year.

That was when his young secretary escalated. She didn’t just hint. She didn’t just flirt.

She sent me a photo of her and Logan in bed.

Not even pretending to be ashamed, she captioned it: He’s mine now.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t throw the phone.

I forwarded it to my lawyer.

For months, I had been preparing. Packing little by little, instructing Mrs. Carter and Mr. Bennett — the caretakers who had raised me — to slowly move my belongings out of the villa. Logan never noticed. He was too busy enjoying his double life.

By the time the photos arrived, all that was left in our closets were clothes he had bought me. I left those behind. I didn’t want anything from him.

I instructed a cleaning company to clear the house as soon as I stepped out, erasing every trace of me. A buyer was already lined up; the villa would change hands within days.

When Logan called from his supposed “business trip,” I smiled at the irony. He whispered into the phone, “Harper, I miss you so much. I wish I could come home right now.”

I replied gently, “There’s a surprise waiting for you when you get back.”

He laughed, delighted, oblivious to the knife about to fall.

The secretary kept sending me messages, her arrogance shining through every word. She thought she was winning. That she had climbed into his bed and into his life.

But what she didn’t know was that every message she sent me was evidence. Evidence my lawyer was filing one by one.

Evidence that would strip Logan of everything.

The prenuptial agreement had been his idea. Back when we were young, he had held my hand in front of our families and promised, “If I ever wrong Harper, I’ll leave with nothing. Every share, every asset — she’ll take it all. That’s how certain I am I’ll never betray her.”

I had cried back then, touched beyond words. He thought I had forgotten about the notarized document, locked away in my safe. He thought my love blinded me.

But I remembered. And I had protected that contract like a treasure.

When I signed the divorce papers, my lawyer attached the prenup. The court needed only days to rule. Logan, distracted in bed with Tiffany, never saw the notifications. She deleted them all, thinking she was helping herself.

When Logan finally came home, he found strangers living in our villa. He pounded on the locked gate, shouting for me, only to be told the property had been sold. His flowers wilted in his hands as he realized — I was gone.

By the time he knelt at my feet days later, begging with tears in his eyes, it was too late. The evidence was already filed. The projects he had “transferred” to me in guilt were now Collins Corporation property. The shares he had promised in the prenup were mine by law.

The golden boy of the Reed family was ruined, and he had done it all with his own hand.

The shareholder meeting at Reed Corporation was my stage. Logan’s father stared at me like I was a stranger as I laid out project after project, profit after profit, all tied to the Collins Corporation.

“You’ll support whoever makes you money,” I told the shareholders coolly. “And I will make you money. So—does anyone oppose me as the new chairman?”

Silence. Then nods. Then applause.

Logan sat slumped in the corner, pale as chalk, muttering, “She loved me… she loved me…”

But the girl who once loved him had died long ago, on a university lawn where he stroked another girl’s head and thought I would never notice.

Now, there was only Chairman Collins.

Mrs. Reed wept. Mr. Reed looked ten years older. Logan tried to protest, but even his father silenced him with a slap.

By the end of the week, the court ruled in my favor, and Logan left the company with nothing. Soon after, in a fit of rage, he pushed Tiffany down the stairs when he discovered her deception. The scandal sealed his fate.

And me? I signed a government contract that same day. The cameras flashed. The room applauded.

No one called me Mrs. Reed anymore.

I was Chairman Collins.

I sometimes ask myself when I stopped loving Logan.

Was it the university days, when I caught him laughing with a girl he swore he didn’t know? Was it our second year of marriage, when messages started piling in my inbox like small cracks in a glass window?

Or was it the night I looked in the mirror, saw a tear-streaked ghost of myself, and realized Logan wasn’t worth breaking for?

I’ll never know.

But I do know this: I never forgot Riley, the friend who pulled me back from that mirror. The one who reminded me, “Harper Collins doesn’t beg for love. She was born to build.” Together, we became not just survivors, but victors.

At banquets, no one whispers about my husband anymore. They whisper about me. About the woman who took betrayal and turned it into empire.

And when I walk into my office, sunlight spilling across the Collins Corporation seal, I finally understand the truth:

I was never meant to be Mrs. Reed.

I was meant to be Harper Collins.

And I will never lose myself again.

The End