After My Miscarriage, I Divorced the CEO Who Faked His Silence

Three years into our marriage, my husband Chester Delgado suddenly lost the ability to speak.

He understood everything. He just refused to say a single word.

To take care of him, I walked away from a career at the top of the simultaneous interpreting industry and became his shadow.

I ran his meetings, drank on his behalf at business dinners, stepped in for every situation that needed a voice.

I believed my sacrifice would bring him back.

Then, three months pregnant, I slipped in the bathroom. Warm blood pooled beneath me in an instant.

Terrified out of my mind, I grabbed the hem of his trousers and forced out every word I had left in me.

"Chester, call a doctor. Save our baby."

He looked away. Stepped over me. Left.

The day I was discharged, I dragged my hollow body home

and heard a low, beautiful voice drifting from the study.

"This song is only for you."

Chester was wearing headphones, crooning a love song.

His eyes were half-lidded, his whole face soft in a way I'd never seen directed at me.

On the other side of the screen was his childhood sweetheart, the one he hadn't seen in years.

He was gazing at her, and the light in his eyes

was brighter than any star I had ever seen.

In that moment, I finally understood.

Chester didn't have mutism. He simply had nothing to say to me.

If that was the case, then this one-woman show was over.

——

I knew the song Chester was singing. I knew it well.

When we were first together, he used to hum it in front of me constantly.

The look he'd worn back then—it was the same one on his face right now.

My vision blurred.

For three years, I had wanted nothing more than to hear Chester speak again.

Even one word would have been enough.

He never gave me that.

Now the wish had come true, and a thousand days and nights of chasing doctors and begging for cures became a joke.

I swallowed the tears back down and returned to the bedroom.

Chester's phone sat on the nightstand.

He had given me his passcode a long time ago.

I had never once opened it. I trusted him. We were married.

Six years together—dating and married—and this was the first time I'd ever wanted to check.

He had one pinned contact on WeChat now.

Glenda Fox.

Back when we were dating, I had complained about how slow he was at replying and half-jokingly begged him to pin my chat.

He laughed it off, said he'd try to reply faster when he saw my messages.

He never pinned me.

When I brought it up again, he sighed and said he had too many work contacts for pinning to matter.

I let him talk me out of it. But the gray feeling stayed.

It wasn't until much, much later that I understood what that feeling was.

The quiet ache of not mattering enough.

Their chat history looked harmless.

Glenda shared a sunrise; Chester sent back a rainbow after the rain.

Nothing that would look wrong if anyone else read it—every message carefully inside the line marked "friends."

But that kind of idle, pointless back-and-forth had disappeared from my life with Chester a long time ago.

Our messages had been reduced to a handful of cold templates.

Working late? Have you eaten? Did the contract get signed?

I was about to close the chat when I accidentally tapped into his saved messages.

There was a pinned voice note from Glenda.

I pressed play. A bright, clear female voice filled the room.

"Chester, if you hadn't been so sharp-tongued back then, maybe we wouldn't have missed our chance."

The timestamp was three years ago.

The same day Chester lost his voice.

Something broke open in my chest, and cold air rushed straight through.

So his illness had been a lie. All of it.

Chester had punished himself with silence—a monument to the love he missed out on.