When His Mistress Demanded My Fourth Miscarriage, I Revolted

It was a Tuesday night when my twelve-year love story came to a dead stop. I came home late to our Upper East Side apartment. The place was quiet. I took off my heels in the hallway so I wouldn’t wake Julien. I pushed open our bedroom door. The room was dark, but the streetlights filtered through the blinds. Julien was asleep. But he wasn’t alone. There was a woman beside him. Elyse Chavez.

The night Lauren ended things with me, the comments swarming my vision went wild. [Mess with her now, regret it forever! Karma’s coming for the male lead!] [Our Lauren’s all tough shell with a soft center—she’s obviously crazy about you!] [Shh, classic plot. How’s the guy supposed to grow without a major screw-up? Just wait till he’s begging on his knees to win her back.] I watched the glass shards slice across the back of my hand, blood dripping onto the carpet. “Anthony, are you quite finished?” Lauren’s voice was cold. “Is all this really necessary over some… misunderstanding?” I looked at her, then at the smug man behind her—her junior, Ralph. A misunderstanding? I’d heard it myself: her laughing with a friend about how I was a free servant you could summon at will, treated worse than a dog. And only moments ago, to defend Ralph, she’d hurled this very glass at me. In that instant, my heart simply stopped. Softly, I said, “Lauren. We’re done.” … Lauren and I had been together for five years. Five years. One thousand, eight hundred and twenty-five days. I’d transformed from a rebellious rich kid into a nameless shadow by her side. For her, I cut ties with my family, turned down offers from prestigious universities abroad, squeezed into a Beijing rental smaller than forty square meters, and took over every part of her life. Groceries, cooking, laundry, cleaning—handling all her trivialities, even fending off her nagging editors. And she was Lauren: the rising literary star, the genius writer. “Anthony, where’s my coffee? Hand-ground, three parts sugar, seven parts milk, under eighty degrees—how many times do I have to tell you!” At six in the morning, Lauren’s irritated voice carried from the bedroom. I immediately set down the breakfast I was preparing and went to wait on Her Highness. [Mornings turn Lauren into a cute, grumpy kitten.] [The male lead is so devoted! This is love—giving up everything to cook for your soulmate.] Right on cue, the streaming comments scrolled past my vision, trying to sugarcoat this suffocating daily grind. Three years ago, these bizarre comments had suddenly appeared before my eyes. Only I could see them. They analyzed my relationship with Lauren endlessly, and their core message never changed: Lauren loved me deeply, and everything she did was an expression of that love. At first, I believed it. When she impatiently shoved away the hot water I offered, the comments would say, [Lauren’s just under a lot of writing pressure—she does care inside.] When she acted oblivious to everything I did, they claimed, [Real love is shown through actions, not words. She just isn’t good at expressing it.] Guided by their “interpretations,” I forgave her again and again, inventing excuses for her coldness each time. I thought I was the one person in the world who truly understood her. Until I became a spineless yes-man, orbiting her and nothing else. “Anthony, what’s wrong with this sweet and sour pork today?” At the table, Lauren took one bite and slammed her chopsticks down. “The meat’s too tough, the sauce is off—are you trying to sabotage my creative inspiration?” I rushed to apologize. “Sorry—maybe the heat was off today. Should I make you something else?” “Don’t bother. I’ve lost my appetite.” She shot me an icy look. “Have you been getting more careless lately? If you can’t even handle something as simple as cooking, what are you even good for?” [Aha, she’s jealous! Lauren must have seen him chatting with the girl at the convenience store yesterday. This is her way of marking her territory!] [A bestselling author staking her claim! We love to see it.] I looked at the comments, then at her utterly unapologetic face, and felt a cold wave tighten my chest. What was I good for? I could queue at five a.m. to buy the soy milk she loved from that old shop. I could drive three hundred kilometers overnight to a mountain in the next city because she “wanted to see snow,” nearly losing my fingers to frostbite. I could recite the best passages from her books, offer ideas when she was stuck—and yet my name was forever absent from her acknowledgments. I abandoned my major, my friends, my family, everything—just to be the man behind her success. And in the end, all I earned was: “What are you even good for?” Deep inside, something finally, quietly broke.

For six years, I worked myself to the bone to support my "struggling artist" boyfriend, Kasen. I paid the rent on our leaky Brooklyn apartment and believed in his dream, thinking our love was real. That all ended one rainy night when I delivered documents to an exclusive club and overheard him with his wealthy friends. Our life, he said, was just a "sociological experiment." He wasn't poor at all. He was a trust fund heir with a fiancée in the Hamptons, waiting to close a corporate merger. "Kaia is just a naive pet who voluntarily pays my rent," he laughed over a three-thousand-dollar glass of scotch. He told them girls like me were so desperate we'd come crawling back for a scrap of affection. My entire world shattered. I packed my bags and walked out that night with eighty-four dollars to my name, ready to start over. But escaping one monster only threw me to another. The next day, a predatory client tried to drug me during a business meeting. My boss, the terrifyingly powerful CEO Camden William, intervened. But after a night of drug-induced chaos, I woke up in his bed. He didn't offer an apology. He offered a contract. "Marry me for three years," he commanded, "and I'll give you five million dollars and make sure Kasen can never touch you again."

My fiancé went on a trip with his first love. He promised that after putting the past behind him, he would marry me. They strolled side by side, absorbed in each other's company. A month later, he returned and, upon seeing the pregnancy test results, he was ecstatic, asking, "Clementine, are you pregnant?" I simply looked at him and replied, "I was." --- "Matthias, where are you? I have some fantastic news…" The moment I learned I was pregnant, I couldn't wait to call Matthias, who was supposedly working late. But then, I heard his familiar deep voice coming from the room next door. "I'm busy right now, let's talk later." Following the sound, I peered through the window to see Thalia holding Matthias’ hand, her expression filled with curiosity. "Matthias, who was that just now?" Matthias paused briefly, stirring his coffee in a nonchalant way. "Just a client, finish your stew before it gets cold." Thalia wrinkled her nose. "I'm tired of stew every day.

My husband Hudson had kept me a medicated ghost for three years, convinced I was unstable. But a cheap pink hair clip, tangled with golden blonde hair in his car, ripped through the chemical haze. The bitter pill he forced me to take wouldn't numb the burning truth, only fuel my awakening. I was an architect once, but now I was just Cora, a docile wife trapped in his suffocating world. When he saw my shock, his concern was sickeningly sweet as he offered another Xanax. I pretended to swallow the poison, letting it dissolve under my tongue, a constant reminder of my awakening. Back at the mansion, his massive car deliberately blocked mine, a crude barricade confirming his control. Then, a message from an old intern confirmed my darkest fears: this was domestic abuse. He urged me to check Hudson’s closet, to record everything. I knew then I was living with a dangerous monster, and my denial shattered. The anger burned, fueled by the bitter taste of that undissolved pill. That night, Hudson walked in, wearing a hideous, sloppily tied red polka-dot tie. It was a clear, undeniable sign of another woman. My architect’s mind was awake, cold and calculating. "Game on, Hudson." I would make him taste this bitterness back a thousand times.

On our wedding anniversary, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I only had three months to live. I planned to tell my husband, Tobias Wright, but I accidentally heard a conversation between him and his mother, Joanna Wright, when I was outside the study. "Mom, she's finally going to die. I've been waiting for that day for five years." "Don't rush, Tobias. Once she's gone, her heart can be given to Jolie." So I realized that they had an evil plan when Tobias decided to marry me. They had just wanted my healthy heart. I laughed. Then I decided that I would give them a taste of their own medicine for their five years of 'anticipation.'