I took a calm sip of the porridge that had gone cold.

“You did the right thing.”

Next week, we were leaving for the overseas branch. The department had put together a farewell dinner to see us off.

“Everyone, remember to bring your other half!”

I looked at the ugly scar on my wrist, then at Head Nurse Meredith Lawson's beaming face. The refusal sitting on my tongue never made it past my lips.

I called Denys：“There's a dinner tonight. Spouses are supposed to come……are you free?”

Wherever he was, the music was deafening, loud enough to make my eardrums ache.

“Hello? Hang on……”

The background noise dropped a little, as if he'd stepped into a hallway.

“Go ahead. What is it?” A thread of irritation ran through Denys's voice, the tone of someone interrupted.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Cornelia's favorite band is on tour. I managed to get floor seats. She was supposed to go with a friend, but the friend bailed on her.”

“The venue's in a rough area. A young girl alone isn't safe.”

I gripped my phone. My left hand tightened around it.

Denys waited a beat, then sighed：

“Nellie, Cornelia's barely in her early twenties. A girl that age is most vulnerable when she's stranded somewhere alone. She's still inside waiting for me, so please don't start with me right now.”

He didn't wait for me to say another word. The line went dead.

At seven o'clock, I was standing outside the hotel entrance.

After Denys hung up, I'd still left him a voicemail explaining tonight's dinner.

The autumn rain came without warning, slanting across the steps.

I hadn't brought an umbrella. All I could do was press myself behind a pillar and watch the traffic stream past.

In that moment, a thought crept in: if Denys walked out of that concert halfway through and drove here,

even if he only sat with me for ten minutes, I would tear up the transfer agreement.

An hour passed. My sleeves were soaked through.

The damaged nerve beneath the scar began to throb, a low, persistent ache.

I turned and went inside, stopping in the restroom first to deal with my drenched pant legs.

When I pushed open the door to the private dining room, every seat was already taken.

Denys was sitting directly across from the entrance.

Beside him, radiant and smiling, sat Cornelia.

They were dressed in matching tones, looking for all the world like a perfect couple.

“Nellie! Come sit over here!” Cornelia waved me over, her smile wide and guileless.

Every table was paired off, two by two. Only I, the supposed guest of honor, stood there like an intruder who didn't belong.

Meredith faltered, glancing between me and Denys, then quickly ushered me toward the empty chair beside him.

“Denys, what kind of husband are you? How could you let Nellie walk in here all by herself?”

Cornelia looped her arm through Denys's on cue, tilting her face up with a coy little laugh：“Oh, you've got it wrong. Denys is here tonight as my ‘close friend.’”

Denys lowered his head, took a sip of tea, and offered a flat：“Mm.”

The air in the room solidified for one long second.

Meredith scrambled to smooth things over：“Well, that works too. You're all family anyway, so what does it matter who sits where?”

Denys lifted his gaze and met mine. Whatever he saw there, my face gave him nothing. For once, he lowered his voice and offered an explanation：

“Cornelia's pretty, and that makes her a target in her department. Lately there've been a few male patients who won't leave her alone. She's scared, so I'm running interference.”

“Everyone here knows you're married. Nobody would be tactless enough to bother Mrs. Henson.”

“She's never even been in a relationship. She's innocent. I have to look out for her.”

Once again, he chose, without hesitation, the person who “needed protecting more.”

The first time had been at the multi-car pileup on the highway. He'd been too busy calming a terrified Cornelia to see my messages, the ones I'd sent after a steel rebar went through my hand.

The second time, he turned me into the biggest joke in the entire hospital. It happened at the farewell dinner.

The final segment of the evening was reserved for goodbye speeches from the staff about to transfer overseas.

When I stepped onto the stage and took the microphone, the murmuring below nearly drowned out the speakers.

Every pair of eyes landed like needles on my right hand, the one that still couldn't close into a full fist, then drifted to the two people sitting shoulder to shoulder in the audience: Denys and Cornelia.

That mix of pity and secondhand embarrassment in their gazes hurt worse than the steel rebar that had gone through my palm six months ago.

I drew a long breath, letting my gaze skim past Denys's face, that expression of perfect “clear conscience” he always wore.

“Thank you all for looking out for me.”

I paused, and in the silence of the private dining room, my voice carried with painful clarity.

“I hope that over the next two years, while I'm gone, every one of you gets what you wish for. Take care of yourselves.”

Two years ago, on that rainy night, my career ended.

Cornelia, who was supposed to be off duty that day, had called me in tears, saying she'd seen the mangled bodies at a highway pileup and her legs had given out from fear. She begged me to go in her place.

It was a catastrophic chain-reaction collision.

The rain came down like the sky was caving in. I had just pulled the last survivor from the twisted wreckage when the compressed chassis buckled open.

A snapped piece of rebar shot through my right palm like a striking snake.

In that moment I didn't even feel pain. All I heard was the sound of bone splintering.

I was pinned in a gap between the debris, rain washing the blood off me in sheets, surrounded by a silence like death.

Only my left hand could still move. I managed to open his pinned chat, shaking so hard I could barely type, and sent message after message, voice and text, one on top of another.

“Denys, help me……I'm losing so much blood……”

“Denys, I'm so scared.”

The screen flashed the same ice-cold auto-reply, over and over: 【Received】.

I curled up in the mud, bit through the tip of my tongue, and held on by the thinnest thread of a delusion.

I told myself he was on his way. I told myself he was just too busy to type a real answer.

By the time the rescue team dug me out, dozens of hours later, I was barely alive.

The paramedics called my emergency contact on the spot.

The first call was hung up.

When they called again, it was Cornelia's voice on the other end, irritated and sharp：“Stop calling! Denys just took me to a movie and he's sleeping!”

The line went dead a second time. Then I was blocked.

With no one to sign the consent forms, my surgeon went ahead anyway, eyes red-rimmed, operating at his own risk just to keep me alive.

I spent two weeks in the ICU. Denys never came. Not once.

Because during those two weeks, he was busy taking poor, shaken Cornelia to the beach to help her recover.

My right hand was pieced back together, but the nerve damage was too severe. After more than six months of rehab, I was still left with a tremor that would never go away.

As a nurse, I could no longer perform a precise IV insertion or administer emergency care. My future had been nailed shut by that rebar on that rainy night.

The day I was discharged and came home, I lost it.

I smashed every mirror in the apartment, tore our wedding portrait to shreds, and screamed until my voice broke.

I clawed Denys until blood ran down his arms. I slapped him across the face three times.

I pointed at the centipede-like scar across my right hand and demanded to know why he had set his messages to auto-reply.

“Denys, I could have died that night! How could you just blow me off like that?!”

He stood in the middle of the wreckage, perfectly composed, like someone watching a scene that had nothing to do with him.

“Because I didn't feel like coming back.”

He pried my hand off him, voice flat.

“Nellie, you talk too much. How many patients you stuck with needles today, whether the cafeteria food was any good tomorrow. I never cared.”

That was the moment something inside me rotted through completely.

My desperate cries for help while I hovered between life and death were, in his eyes, just another one of those “trivial annoyances” he couldn't be bothered with.

For two years I'd tried to mend things, tried to forgive, given him chance after chance.

Now all I had left was a hollow, bitter laugh at myself.

My only regret was that the night that rebar went through my hand, I didn't let Denys Henson die in my heart right then and there.