Love on Borrowed Time

The day his first love got divorced, my husband drank himself senseless.

I stayed up past midnight taking care of him, only to discover that his phone’s photo album was filled with pictures of her.

The next morning, after he sobered up, he said to me, “Let’s redo our wedding.”

I knew this was his way of provoking his first love into coming back.

I smiled and agreed, but not before I slipped a divorce settlement agreement into the wedding contract he signed.

"Why is the wedding contract so thick?" Max Curtis asked with a frown. He flipped through the pages one by one, yet never put pen to paper.

As one of Riverport's most well-known business elites, he wasn't a man easily fooled.

On the second-to-last page was the divorce settlement agreement I had secretly slipped in.

I kept my head down. I didn't feel very nervous.

"There seems to be a lot of settlement terms. If you have time, you can read through them slowly," I said.

He wouldn't have time.

Today was the day his first love, Sandra Lynch, returned to the country.

Back then, when Sandra got engaged, he married me in a fit of anger.

Now, Sandra was divorced. He drank himself senseless, and once he sobered up, he asked me to redo our wedding.

It was nothing more than a way to provoke Sandra into coming back.

My marriage was just a prop in their game.

Sure enough, the impatience on Max's face was obvious.

"I need to head out to pick someone up. I don't have time to read all this."

A trace of tenderness flickered through his eyes.

The impatience was for me, while the tenderness was reserved for Sandra alone.

He hurriedly signed on the pages and left.

Three days ago, Max suddenly brought up the idea of redoing the wedding.

We had been married for five years. There was no grand ceremony nor a public announcement.

Only our parents and closest friends knew about it.

Even in media reports, Max was always introduced as a bachelor.

Any gossip columns talked only about his tragic, obsessive love story with Sandra.

As his wife in a secret marriage, I didn't even qualify to have my name mentioned.

Truthfully, I had always known that Max was obsessed with his first love.

In our five years of marriage, he showed me some tenderness, but never much.

I tried to make him grow used to my presence through love, but I never once saw him smile in this house.

Until that day.

The man, who never drank, got drunk out of his mind and couldn't stop smiling.

I quietly asked around and found out Sandra had gotten divorced. I took care of him until midnight, then used Sandra's birthday to unlock his phone.

I opened the photo album. It was almost full.

Every photo was of Sandra.

There wasn't a single one of me.

The cover photo of the digital album was our wedding picture, but my face had been photoshopped into Sandra's.

I recalled how Max refused to hold a wedding when we registered our marriage, yet insisted on taking wedding photos.

So that was why.

At that moment, I finally understood that this five-year marriage had reached its end.

All that remained was us going through the process.

There was a countdown of one month.

Coincidentally, the wedding Max promised to redo for me was also exactly one month away.

With 20 days left, Max started leaving early and coming home late more often than before.

The wedding he once promised seemed like it didn't even exist.

Occasionally, I saw posts from his friends. In the corner of their photos, he was always next to a woman.

I had already seen her face countless times in his phone's photo album.