After the Divorce, My Ex Begged to Give Me a House

I’d been talking to Liam since last year about wanting to travel abroad.

I never imagined he’d already booked it behind my back.

He probably just forgot one thing—the last time we went to that travel agency, he’d given them my number.

If it weren’t for what happened yesterday, I would have been thrilled to find out early.

But now, all I feel is something stuck in my chest, neither up nor down.

Conflicted. Torn.

Tight and suffocating, like a thousand needles pricking me no matter which way I move.

I barely slept last night.

My mind was a complete mess, full of nothing but the fact that Liam had someone else outside.

By the time I dragged myself to the supermarket to buy fruit and vegetables, the exhaustion on my face was obvious.

A group of young girls happened to be standing near me, making the contrast even clearer.

They were chatting and giggling away in public.

“I’m definitely not getting married. And even if I do, I’m not staying home as some housewife. Give it a few years and you just start looking old.”

“So you’re not getting married, just dating guys, huh?”

“Yeah, like Chloe Bennett, Liam’s mistress. Your boyfriend treats you so well, he’s even taking you to Denver. No wonder you insisted we swing by so early just to get him a cute breakfast.”

The girl they were talking about smiled. “It’s not like that. This place just has a great selection of fresh fruit.”

At the mention of that familiar word, “Denver,” I instinctively turned around.

And it felt like a lightning strike.

The girl called Chloe was wearing a pair of diamond studs exactly like mine.

She even looked a lot like me.

Except she looked like me in my early twenties—young, fresh, glowing.

I looked down at myself.

I’d rushed out in a hurry, hadn’t even brushed my hair, and I was still in my pajamas.

So that trip the agency booked wasn’t for me.

Maybe it was a woman’s intuition, but she lifted her head and noticed me too.

Our eyes met.

One of her friends tugged her wrist and whispered in her ear, not as quietly as she thought.

“Chloe, that woman in front looks a lot like you. Just… older.”

Chloe glanced over at me and slowly smiled.

She pouted lightly. “How am I anything like her? I don’t have eye bags that deep. You saying that on purpose?”

Her friend hurried to backtrack. “You’re right, you’re right. You’re way prettier than her.”

Seriously? How old am I in your eyes that you’re calling me “auntie”?

The malice was blatant.

I laughed coldly to myself.

Liam had found a girl who was fifty percent my copy.

I didn’t know whether to say his taste hadn’t changed, or that he’d gone and found a stand-in for me before I was even “dead.”

Too bad for him: knockoff is still knockoff.

I spoke up, my voice not too loud and not too soft:

“Natural and man-made are never the same. Some noses obviously cost a lot of money. By the time you reach my age, you’ll probably need a repair job.”

Chloe’s expression shifted.

I finished paying and walked out of the supermarket with deliberate calm.

When I got home, Liam was already up.

He was adjusting his tie as he said, “By the way, I might need to go on a business trip around the middle of the month. About a week.”

My hand, midway through preparing breakfast, paused.

The dates lined up perfectly with what the travel agency had told me.

But to my face, he called it a business trip.

I looked at him quietly.

Inside, it felt like a piece of me was missing, hollowed out.

A chill seeped through me, strong enough to make a person shiver.

He didn’t notice at all. He just glanced at his phone, and his brows relaxed a little.

“I’m in a rush today. I’ll skip breakfast.”

I watched him closely.

Then I lowered my eyes to the half-prepared dishes on the counter.

Suddenly, I felt ridiculous.

So what if I’d just scored a little verbal victory over the side chick?

Everything Liam did made one thing clear: I just didn’t matter that much to him anymore.

That knot in my chest from the travel agency’s call this morning—that tiny flicker of doubt—was nothing but my own wishful thinking.

The trip abroad I’d cared about since last year, he’d booked it already.

He was just going with someone else.