3: 3

3

The fight drained out of me.

What did it matter. If I couldn't even keep a baby, what was one set of baby clothes.

Derek let go of me and strode toward the door.

"Vivi just got back to the country. She's still finding her feet. I'll walk her out."

I didn't answer him. There was no point answering him anymore.

Someone who'd just come home and didn't know the area had gone to the trouble of buying a dog and delivering it to our door.

Derek, love really did make him blind. He couldn't see through a trick this small.

Or he simply didn't want to.

I stopped chewing on it. I took out my phone and quickly set up some apartment viewings.

My body hadn't fully recovered, but I couldn't stand sharing a room with him another day.

A whole day of looking, and I finally settled on a place.

That night I got home and lay across the bed, worn out.

But underneath it there was a thread of relief.

I was finally leaving. Since I'd learned the truth, every minute in this room had felt like suffocating.

In the middle of the night, Derek's phone called me.

I picked up, and the voice on the line was Vivienne's.

"Charity, Derek's had too much to drink. Could you come get him?"

I was about to say I couldn't when Derek's voice came through from her end.

"Don't you know? It was because you got married so suddenly, because you broke my heart, that I rushed into marrying Charity."

"But you're the one I love."

His words were slurred, his tongue tripping over itself, and still the confession came out clear as day.

I heard a scuffle on the other end, like someone being shoved off.

Then Vivienne's voice.

"Get up, you're crushing me."

The sound after that turned crisp and close.

"Charity, don't take it to heart. He's rambling. Whatever we were is long in the past."

So back then, when he suddenly said yes to me, it was because Vivienne had gotten married.

And I'd been foolish enough to think I was the one who'd waited out the storm and won him.

This was the first time Derek had ever gotten drunk like this.

It turned out it wasn't that he couldn't lose control. It was just that the person who could make him lose control was never me.

I lifted a hand and wiped away tears I hadn't noticed falling.

"I'm not well. I can't come get him. Figure it out yourself."

I hung up, dragged out my suitcase, and started folding my clothes.

After dawn, Derek sent a message.

【I'm sorry, Charity. Old classmates' reunion, I got carried away and had too much.】

【I'm heading to work now. I'll come home tonight and cook for you.】

The class reunion happened once a year, and only this year had he drunk himself into that state.

Because of Vivienne.

A heart I thought had already been broken through kept clenching, wild and raw.

I washed up, then stood at the door with my suitcase in hand.

I looked around the room that had once been so full of love.

Now every corner of it was a shadow of the lie.

I slid the ring off my finger and set it on the shoe cabinet.

I shut the door and walked out without looking back.

4: 4

4

When Derek got home, the apartment was quiet.

He didn't see me in the living room, so he called out twice.

"Charity? Charity?"

Changing his shoes, he braced a hand on the shoe cabinet, and it felt like he'd pressed down on something.

He looked closer. It was my wedding ring.

He stared at it, disbelieving, then pulled out his phone and called me.

The screen lit up with the word 'Husband.'

I was silent for a moment, but I still picked up.

Derek let out a breath.

"Charity, where did you go? Why did you take off your ring?"

I looked down at my finger. There was still a mark at the base of it, worn in from years of wearing the ring.

It would fade in time. Along with my love for Derek, it would fade.

"I know everything now."

Derek still hadn't caught on.

"Know what?"

"You and Vivienne."

The line went quiet for a long moment. I was about to hang up when he finally spoke.

"Vivienne and I did date, yes, but that's all in the past."

"Now, you're the one who's my wife."

"You say I'm your wife."

"Then how do you explain the babies I kept losing?"

He was still making excuses.

"Our bodies just aren't strong, that's why the pregnancies didn't hold. Haven't we been treating it all this time?"

"Don't rush it. This kind of thing doesn't happen overnight."

"If you really love kids that much, we could always adopt."

In the end I couldn't hold it in, and I broke down crying into the phone.

"Derek, you bastard!"

"Is it really a health problem, or did you just never want children? You know exactly which it is!"

He drew several deep breaths. That was his habit when he was keeping his feelings down.

"Fine, I didn't want children. I just wanted a few more years with only the two of us."

"I just wasn't ready to be a father. Is that so wrong?"

I lost it and smashed the water glass by my hand, screaming into the phone until it tore out of me.

"Is it that you don't want to be a father, or that you don't want to hurt your precious Vivienne?"

"You could have used protection."

"But for your own pleasure, and to keep feeding me those false hopes,"

"you didn't care what it did to my body. You let me miscarry, over and over."

"Four years. How many shots I took, how much medicine I swallowed. You don't know?"

"You watched me suffer with your own eyes, and still you let me hope, then crushed it."

"Derek, you don't even deserve to be called human!"

He clearly hadn't expected me to know it all so clearly. When he spoke again, there was a stammer in it.

"I... I did it because I saw you, saw how badly you wanted a child."

"You tried so hard for one. I... I couldn't bring myself to say it."

I laughed, and the laugh grew louder and louder.

"You couldn't say it, so you watched me lie on that operating table, again and again."

"Every time you did the D&C with your own hands, didn't your conscience ever hurt?"

"Derek, let's get divorced."