"Why didn't you tell me!"

"If you'd said something sooner, I wouldn't have just grabbed the first person I could find and married her!"

Just grabbed the first person he could find?

My hands trembled as I opened the timer app I used for keeping track.

Today was the two-thousandth day since I'd met Harry James.

Today was the one thousand eight hundred and sixty-first day since we'd been together.

Meeting Harry had been an accident in my plain, ordinary life.

For him, I—a girl who'd spent her whole life following her parents' plans, step by careful step—worked up the courage for the first time to leave everything behind and come to Capital City with Harry to build a life from nothing.

Back then, everything we owned added up to just enough to rent a leaky basement.

He chose to start his own business. I took a steady job as a clerk.

My salary was six thousand a month. His, some months, was a negative number.

We stretched every dollar into two, and somehow, through all the stumbling, I propped him up until his business finally started to turn.

Later, his company was short on people.

I didn't understand any of that world.

So when he talked business, I was the one drinking at the table.

A woman who'd never touched a drop learned to drink until my stomach was bleeding, and never once let it show on my face.

And now, out of his own mouth, I was just someone he'd grabbed to marry.

The comment section had lost its collective mind over the two of them.

The handful of comments defending me, the wife, got reported and buried at the very bottom.

Before long, someone dug up Phoebe Fox's social media too.

Her latest post had gone up five minutes ago.

【Thank you all for helping me reach him. Getting to spend this last stretch of time with him before I go, I have no regrets left.】

The photo attached showed a man in an apron, his back to the camera, busy in the kitchen.

The man who not so long ago had carried a plate of braised ribs over and called me to dinner was now washing up and cooking soup for her.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I screenshotted it and sent it to Harry.

【Come home soon. We need to talk about the divorce.】

Harry didn't answer.

I sat there through the whole night, empty.

He didn't see my message until the next morning.

【Wait for me to get home. I'll explain everything properly.】

Harry came home carrying breakfast, a luxury shopping bag hanging from his arm too.

I was scrolling through my parents' feed, head down.

Since I'd followed Harry to Capital City, they and I had never spoken again.

Harry set a steamer basket of dumplings in front of me and leaned in close.

"Your favorite dumplings, that place you love. Eat them while they're hot?"

I'd told him just last week that this place had switched chefs and the food wasn't good anymore.

Then he held out the luxury bag.

"Didn't you say yesterday that you liked this brand? This one's new too. See if you like it?"

I'd seen it on Phoebe's social media.

A whole row of the latest luxury pieces. This one was her leftover, the one she'd passed over.

Only then had it made its way to me.

I closed the box, tossed it aside, and turned the laptop on the table toward Harry.

"This is the divorce agreement I drew up. Look it over and see if anything's off."

"If there's nothing, let's go down to the civil affairs office in a bit."

Snap——

The usual smile on Harry's face dimmed a shade, and he clapped the laptop shut.

"What is this supposed to mean?"

Over the course of one night, I'd made up my mind.

While Phoebe was still alive, more than half of Harry's heart was tied up in her—never mind what it would be like after.

I didn't want to live the rest of my life in someone else's shadow.

"I don't think there's any point in the two of us going on."

"I can't accept a husband who has an ex-girlfriend he loves this deeply."

Harry let out a long, heavy sigh, rubbing the space between his brows as if utterly at a loss.

"Libby, Phoebe doesn't have many days left. I only want her to leave this world without regrets."

Lies.

You've just finally found an excuse to be good to her out in the open.

"Can you not pick this of all times to get jealous and pull something so petty."

The emotions I'd been holding down began to break apart.

Tears slid to the corner of my mouth before I noticed, bitter, so bitter.

Every word of protest I might have thrown back was crushed under the weight of a human life.

I wanted to say I wasn't jealous.

It was because you still had Phoebe Fox in your heart.

It was because you didn't love me.

But in this situation, no matter how I explained it, I would come off as a madwoman who trampled on a dying person's life out of pure spite.

So I only said it again.

"I mean it. Divorce."

"Enough!"

Harry's face went dark, and he slammed the bun in his hand down on the table.

"Libby Curry, how can you be this cold-blooded!"

The greasy smell of the bun rose into my nose and made me want to gag.

"I already told you Phoebe doesn't have much time left! Can't you show a little mercy, let her go with some peace of mind?"

"I'll come back to you sooner or later anyway. For now, I'm begging you, just turn a blind eye, all right?"

They say the dead deserve the highest respect.

The world is always forgiving toward those about to die.

If I were the woman I'd been before yesterday, I could even have accepted Harry seeing Phoebe off on her final journey.

Because I'd been so sure Harry loved me.

But after yesterday, I finally learned what Harry looked like when he truly loved someone.

He would give up the things he hated for her.

Even when money was tight, he would give her the best.

So I couldn't accept it. And I didn't dare gamble on how high Phoebe might climb in Harry's heart down the line.

It hurt, but I had to cut my losses in time.

Harry didn't give me another chance to speak.

His phone rang.

On the screen, the word "Phoebe" flashed over and over.

He threw out one line, "Think it over carefully," slammed the door, and hurried out.

I opened Twitter. Phoebe's account had just posted an update.

【Another flare-up, it hurts so much. At least this time I have you here with me.】

Fans swarmed under Phoebe's account in an instant.

【Oh my god, my heart aches for you. You have to get better soon.】

【You two really have it so hard. I hope you can be happy in the time you have left.】

【Do you have any last wishes? Have your husband make them come true! Like wearing a wedding dress or something...】

Phoebe replied to that one.

【If I could, I really would love to wear a wedding dress for him once.】

That comment shot straight to the top.

I knew Harry had seen it too.

Because that same afternoon, more than a dozen wedding-dress photos went up on Phoebe's account.

Married three years, and our own wedding had never even taken shape.

At first, I'd pushed him about it, desperate.

I wanted to invite my parents, to let them see that their daughter hadn't misjudged the man all those years ago.

But Harry always said work was too busy, that there was no time to plan it.

He said he needed to earn more money before he could face my parents, before they would accept him.

I waited and waited.

It took until today to learn that throwing a wedding wasn't so hard for Harry after all.

The next day, they'd even booked the reception.

Phoebe posted the hotel address and a welcome photo on Twitter.

【Your brother-in-law booked out the entire hotel. He says he welcomes you all to our wedding. Any of my babies who have time, please come cheer us on!】

I looked at their photos.

I kept scrolling through my phone's album, and finally I reached the record of the day Harry proposed to me.

The backdrop was somebody else's wedding.

I'd caught the bouquet at a friend's wedding, and Harry had gone with the moment and proposed to me right there.

We didn't even have a ring back then. We used pull-tabs off soda cans instead.

The photographer hired for my friend's wedding was good at his job, so we ended up with two respectable pictures.

But next to a real bridal shoot, they looked crude, like two kids playing house.

I kept firing messages at Harry.

【You're married, and you can still throw a wedding with someone else. You've really got some nerve.】

【If you want to have one, divorce me first.】

【Harry, what exactly do I even count as to you……】

He didn't answer a single one.

After the fight that day, he threw all caution to the wind and paraded his romance with Phoebe Fox all over social media, hiding nothing.

Every topic on every platform was about the two of them, and the gossip accounts kept lining up, one after another, to feast on the traffic.

On the day of Harry and Phoebe's reception, one video that took a different angle cut straight through the noise.

【Does nobody feel bad for the first wife of this "brother-in-law"?】

A lot of people caught on, late.

Oh. So it turned out there was a first wife in this story.

My name, along with Harry and Phoebe's wedding, climbed the trending list one after another.

Overnight, opinion flipped, and Phoebe was met with a flood of abuse.

They called her scheming. They called her a homewrecker who knew exactly what she was doing.

And I knew none of it.

I hadn't slept for days, and while I was resting at home with my eyes closed, Harry came storming in, enraged, and hauled me up.

He slammed me hard onto the floor and gripped my face, squeezing like he meant to crush the bones.

"Libby, was it you who leaked all of it?"

"How can you be this vicious? Do you know Phoebe collapsed on the spot when she saw the news, she was so upset?"

"She's in the hospital fighting for her life right now. Happy now?"

From his scattered words, I more or less pieced together what had happened.

I just couldn't believe it.

Couldn't believe the trust between us was this thin.

Phoebe had only been with him for two years.

We'd been together five, married three.

And in the end, she was his idealized love.

I was the one who'd swallowed every hardship at his side, and I was the one who was vicious to the core.

It was too absurd.

The heart that had gone numb these past few days started to beat again.

Faster and faster, more and more painful, like it wanted to burst out of my chest.

"Enough, Harry!"

I heard myself scream, hysterical.

"I told you and told you I wanted a divorce, and you're the one who wouldn't agree!"

"We've been married three years. I came all this way to help you build a business, slept in a basement with you, lived on scraps with you."

"And in the end you were thinking about your ex the whole time, and the second she cries you go scrambling right back to her!"

"So tell me, what exactly am I, to be treated by you like this?"

I had never blown up at Harry like this before.

His reason came flooding back, and he looked lost.

"Libby, I……"

"Don't say anything. Divorce! Whatever the two of you do from now on has nothing to do with me!"

The area under my nose was wet. I kept wiping at it with my hand, and no matter what I couldn't get it clean.

Then Harry looked at me, terror all over his face.

"Libby, what's wrong with you?"

A streak of vivid red slid into my vision.

Only then did I realize my hand was smeared with blood.

Something was dripping from the tip of my nose, drop after drop onto the floor, carrying a thick, rusty smell.

The room spun.

I saw Harry lunge forward to catch me.

The next second, I blacked out completely.