He Traded My Trauma for Her Redemption - Chapter 1: Chapter 1

My husband was a well-known, aloof rising star in the industry.
Wealthy women threw themselves at him like he was the last man on earth. But through it all, he stayed loyal to me. He loved no one else.
But one night, I found him in the study, staring blankly at his phone. A familiar woman was streaming live.
She was the one he couldn’t have in his youth.
When word got around that someone wanted that woman dead, my husband lost his mind trying to protect her.
To keep her alive… he traded me. He handed me over to a man so terrifying, even his name made people tremble.
“I’m sorry, Cordelia,” my husband said. “Ivy can’t die.”
——
Lately, something had been off with Jayden.
He used to bring me flowers every week—without fail. But recently, he’d started forgetting.
He used to hate making me wait. Now, he often locked himself in the study long into the night.
Every time, he would follow it up with a tender look, a soft-spoken apology, and try to buy back my forgiveness with gifts even more expensive than the last.
But a woman’s intuition is rarely wrong.
One night, I woke up to find the other side of the bed cold and empty. A bad feeling crept over me.
I slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the door of my husband’s study.
That was how I saw her on the screen of his phone—waving flirtatiously at the livestream viewers.
The moment her dazzling, delicate face appeared, it felt like I’d fallen into a freezing lake.
I pushed the door open. For the first time, panic flickered across my husband’s usually composed face.
“Cordelia, you—”
“That’s Ivy, right?”
He paused for just a moment. Then his features hardened into calm.
“Right,” he admitted.
My eyes turned red as I stared at him. “Why does it have to be her?”
He exhaled and stepped forward, pulling me into his arms. “It’s not what you think. She’s out of options. I just want to help her.”
“She already paid the price for what she did back then,” he added. “And you—you’re doing just fine now, aren’t you?”
He asked, “Please… let go of the past. She’s doing everything she can just to stay alive.”
His voice was sincere but laced with compassion—for another woman.
I stepped back and studied the gentle man standing before me.
And suddenly, it hit me—our marriage had probably reached its end.
His voice dropped to a whisper. “I just want you two to make peace.”
‘Make peace?’ I repeated in my head.
But Ivy and I were never friends to begin with.
In fact, she hated me from the very first day of freshman year.
My three years in high school were hell for me.
My desk was defaced with vile scribbles. My textbooks vanished without a trace.
In the girls’ restroom, I was cornered and slapped.
Even on the way home, strange boys would surround me, their eyes full of malice.
It only changed when Jayden appeared in my life.
He wore sun-bleached white sneakers and stood in front of me like a shield.
Even then, I still remember the faint scent of soap clinging to him.
He took a blow meant for me, bled, and was hospitalized.
That was when I saw her—Ivy, crying at his bedside so hard she could barely breathe.
She kept apologizing to him through her tears, calling him a fool.
That’s when I found out—they had grown up together in the same orphanage. They were childhood friends.
The merciless Ivy I knew was afraid of no one… except Jayden Finnegan, the straight-A student.
I still remember the way he looked at me then scolded her. “You should be apologizing to her.”
I didn’t know how to react.
Like a good girl, Ivy apologized to me. She even offered a handshake and a smile.
But days later, I found my bike tires slashed.
The more Jayden cared about me, the harder she worked to maintain appearances.
And the things she did to traumatize me grew increasingly cruel.
She was an expert at quiet cruelty—the kind that didn’t bruise but leave wounds that settled deep under the skin.
Back then, I was just the illegitimate daughter abandoned by the Blumenthals; I had no one to rely on.