Prologue

Hope picked her phone up and saw the text from a coworker asking her to sign into work and help out for a power outage an hour away. She’d expected the call to come in since her boyfriend, Sean, who was a lineman for the utility company they both worked for, was just dispatched out.

When she moved here several months ago to be with Sean, he’d helped her get the job as a customer service rep. Because they didn’t work in the same building, let alone the same department, it wasn’t a conflict.

She grabbed her laptop and headset. Though she was done for the day, the OT would be nice. Sean paid for their apartment, but she tried to pay for the rest of the expenses so she didn’t feel too guilty. She didn’t care what her family said; she didn’t expect a man to take care of her. Not financially at least.

She started to swear when her computer decided to do an update when she opened it up and saw it’d be at least thirty minutes.

With her phone in her hand, she was ready to text her supervisor and explain when she caught sight of Sean’s computer on the kitchen counter. Maybe she could try his first.

She walked over and lifted the top and saw a screen for a password. Crap. She should have figured, even though she didn’t password protect hers. Knowing he was busy and wouldn’t get her text asking him what it was, she decided to try to guess it. He was a simple person. There was no way his password would be hard.

By the third try she’d gotten it with SexyMan1 and wanted to do a palm slap to her forehead. He was always walking around calling himself sexy or referring to himself as Sexy Man.

She might have done that move anyway when almost immediately messages started popping up in the lower right-hand corner of his screen. She wasn’t trying to be nosy, but it’s not like she could turn her head away from them once she’d seen the username LilyLove. What the hell?

After shaking her head, wondering if this was a dream—more like a nightmare—she realized it was a chat box for Tinder.

Work was forgotten, and since the message was up, she figured he was signed in and clicked his app and…jackpot. That piece of shit had been hooking up with women for years. And the entire time they’d been together!

Tears began rolling down her face and she wondered why he even asked her to move in with him if he was doing this. Why he said he loved her. Why he told her time and again he wanted a future with her.

Hope pulled her phone out and took snapshots of some of his chats to have as proof, not that she needed them to end things with him. Then went to the fridge and got a tub of ice cream and started to bawl her eyes out while she made a plan on how to get the hell out of here.