He Sacrificed Our Child, I Took Everything

As I quietly tended to my burn, a wave of sudden grievance welled up in me, and tears filled my eyes.

The man who once cared about my every little detail could now ignore me as if I didn't exist. His eyes and heart only had room for someone else.

That night, both rooms shared a single power grid, so all the heating was channeled into the next room.

I wrapped myself tightly, but leaving my burned arm exposed to the air made it so cold that I could barely breathe.

With no other choice, I opened my door to knock on Lionel and Chloe's, only to hear intimate voices coming from within the suite.

"It's just a few more days, so hang in there a little longer. I promise to make it up to you as much as I can after the baby's born. We can use every single move you like!"

"Help me out for some relief, babe. I swear I can't leave you for the rest of my life."

Intimate noises followed, while I stood frozen to the spot. Cold wind howled through the hallway, but I couldn't feel the slightest trace of the chill.

Until then, I had clung to a sliver of wishful thinking, hoping that maybe Lionel just wanted to make amends to his first love, that Nora's death was just an accident, and that the relationship I prided myself on wasn't shattered.

But reality felt like a brutal slap in my face. The signs had been there all along.

After snapping out of the shock, I pressed my hands tightly over my ears and ran back to my ward. Right now, all I wanted was to escape to a place where they didn't exist.

Once I pulled the blanket tightly over my head, endless grievance and misery flooded my heart. I could no longer force myself to maintain the calm facade and broke down, sobbing uncontrollably under the covers.

I didn't know how I eventually fell asleep, but when I woke up again, the courier delivering my divorce papers brought in a box of valuables.

"I found this box of expensive items in your closet. You'll need to check them yourself since they're covered under a special insurance policy."

I looked at the box before me and felt a strange urge to laugh. It was filled with evidence of how Lionel used to love me.

Back when we were separated during a lockdown and couldn't contact each other by phone, he had handwritten over a thousand letters to me just to set my heart at ease.

When I had a fallout with my family and moved to Jangleton for college, he saved up his first pot of gold to buy me a house, giving me my first home in the city. That was also when he found the courage to propose to me.

"This is a wedding ring, right? You should keep it safe. Small items like this are impossible to find once they're lost."

From the bottom of the box, the courier picked up a huge diamond ring and placed it in my hand.

I stared at the ring for a moment before hurling it into a nearby trash can, feeling the weight lift off my chest.

"Throw everything away. I don't want any of it anymore."

The courier looked at me in shock, paused for a second, then nodded. He kept looking back at me every few steps before dumping all the items into the trash can.

"What a waste, throwing all those treasures away," Chloe remarked and proudly walked up to me.

"So, did you enjoy listening in last night?"