Life had never been easy. My father passed away when I was still young, and soon after, my mother became seriously ill. By the time I started my first year of high school, I had no choice but to leave school and start working to help keep us afloat.
For years, survival was my only goal. I worked wherever I could—cleaning houses, helping in small cafés, babysitting. Eventually, fate led me to a position as a live-in housekeeper for one of the wealthiest families in Los Angeles—the Harrison family, who owned a massive mansion in the elegant neighborhood of Beverly Hills.
Their son, Ethan Harrison, was the only heir to the family fortune.
Ethan was everything people expected a wealthy heir to be—tall, handsome, impeccably polite. Yet there was something distant about him, as if an invisible wall surrounded him at all times. In the three years I worked in that house, I always kept my head down. I did my job quietly and never allowed myself to imagine I could ever belong to their world.
One afternoon, however, everything changed.
Mrs. Harrison called me into the living room. Her posture was straight, her expression serious. On the glass table in front of her lay a marriage certificate.