THE MISTAKE

PROLOGUE

RYN

You know how people say that there's always that one love that you just can't seem to walk away from? That person you're meant to share your life with?

Well, I believed that Cooper Mitchell was my person. I wanted him to be.

We met young, really young. Our parents were friends and all our friends were friends.

Everyone believed that our relationship was inevitable. A fairytale brought to life.

We went through all of it together. School, pubity, fights and friends. I had such a crush on him that I couldn't tell the wood for the trees.

Looking back now, I realise that what he really wanted was for me to treat him the way his mother does. Always at his beck and call. Always revolving around him.

And I did, in the beginning, revolve around him. I put him on a pedestal and made him my whole teenage world.

We shared our first real kiss under the bus shelter after our final GCSE exam. I thought that it was so romantic and, from that day on, Coop and I became a 'them', an 'us' and a 'we'. Back then, we were the real-life fairytale. The couple that everyone 'shipped'.

I won't lie. We had our fair share of ups and downs, obviously, but we always seemed to find our way back together. I fell so hard for him.

University was a turning point. All sorts of rumours started getting back to me, and many late nights were spent apart and in tears. His away games got messier to explain. All the partying and the arguing intensified. We hit a few really rough patches. Had a couple of short term break ups.

My mother's death in my final year, weirdly, brought us back together and closer than ever. Cooper adored my mum. He was so strong while I fell apart.

My dad opted out, and my brother was so broken. Coop swore that he'd seen the error of his partying ways and was a changed man. He promised that he never wanted to lose me. That he would never break my heart again, and I believed him because I felt so indebted to him.

We had only just moved into our house when an intern from his first post grad job appeared on our doorstep in an absolute state. She was dumpster drunk and accused Cooper of getting her pregnant and then forcing her to have an abortion. He was furious. He absolutely denied any wrongdoing and went so far as to offer to take a lie detector test.

I didn't know what to believe or whom. I was a mess. The sting of his possible betrayal left me numb. It fed my insecurity and made me question everything. My brother, Royce, was furious and roughed him up pretty badly.

A few days later, the same woman found me at the yoga centre and apologised profusely. She confessed that she was never pregnant and that they never slept together. She had a crush on Cooper. She was out with friends. She got really drunk, and they convinced her to confess her feelings. She said that she had freaked out when I opened the door.

Seeing me made her want to hurt Cooper because for all the times that they'd chatted, he'd never mentioned having a girlfriend. So she blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

Royce absolutely believed that she was lying. He was sure that she had somehow been blackmailed into apologising. Cooper swore up and down that he was innocent. I was caught in the middle and utterly exhausted by the whole situation.

He took his time and weaved his way back into my heart, one romantic gesture after another. He was so charming when he needed to be. His charm led to a ring and a promise, another one.

The little life we made together was really good in the beginning. Cooper quickly worked (finessed) his way up the ladder at the office, and I was so proud. Too proud to see the business meetings and work trips for what they really were. Stupidly, I forgave him everything because I was in love with him, or at least I'd convinced myself that I was.

But really, I wasn't. I loved him, sure, but I wasn't in love with him. I was in love with the fairytale, the dream, the desire. The idea of him and of what we could be. The notion that I could be his priority before all others, that's what I was in love with...the delusion. I was a fool who didn't have the backbone to face her reality, so Cooper became the mistake I kept allowing myself to make.

Then I met Peter Forrester.