His Mistress's Puppy Over Our Dying Son

### Chapter 3

As I was putting everything back, I caught a line of writing on the folder for the flower shop renovation.

"Just fly. I'll carry every storm for you."

I stared at that sentence for a long, long time.

So it turned out he could throw himself behind someone's dream too.

Six years married. By day I washed his clothes and cooked his meals, by night I rocked our child to sleep, spinning like a top that never got to stop.

And online, my old colleagues were winning case after case. I watched them glowing in those photos, and all I felt was envy and a quiet ache.

The wind carried my tears off into the night sky.

In the end I laughed out loud.

I took out my phone and dialed the number I knew by heart.

"Fergus Gray, that overseas market in Chicago you mentioned. I'm in."

Fergus went quiet for a beat, then said, delighted,

"Seraphina, with you on board we'll be unstoppable! But it means relocating abroad. Have you really thought this through? Your husband, your child—"

"I've thought it through." My answer didn't waver.

"Then we leave in three days, on schedule."

Three days from now, I would walk away from him for good.

The next morning I went out first thing to buy a suitcase.

A child tripped and fell by the roadside, and her mother scooped her up against her chest, soothing her.

Watching the little one sob into her mother's shoulder, something in my chest twisted without warning.

I thought of Bradley. He'd clung to me more than anyone while he was alive. Every day the moment I got home he'd trail after me like a little shadow, wherever I went, he went. On the road to the afterlife, with no mother beside him, how frightened and heartbroken my baby must be.

He was so small. Would his little ghost lose its way home, not knowing how to find his mother?

I turned my head away, unable to look any longer, and the tears broke loose like a flood.

The moment I got home I started packing fast.

Anything Stuart had bought me, I wanted none of it.

But the protective jade pendant my mother had blessed for Bradley before she died, that I was taking with me.

Bradley had a congenital heart defect. Back then my mother heard of a master said to be miraculous, and she'd walked miles of road, dropping to her knees with every step, kowtowing until her forehead ran with blood.

When she pressed the jade pendant into my hands and I cried at the sight of her, she only smiled, warm.

"As long as Bradley is safe and healthy, as long as your family lives happy and whole, anything I do is worth it."

Just as she'd instructed, I tucked the pendant under Bradley's pillow.

But now the pendant was gone.

A chill ran through me. I was about to go ask the housekeeper when laughter drifted up from downstairs.

I walked to the open hallway overlooking the room below and saw Ellie Cooley sitting on the sofa with a brown teddy in her arms, Stuart beside her.

Ellie smiled and looped her arm through his.

"The second I said CoCo had a hard birth, you went and got her a jade pendant for protection. Stuart, you're so good to CoCo, you sweet godfather."

My gaze dropped, and all at once I saw it, the jade pendant around the teddy's neck, the very one my mother had blessed for Bradley.

Stuart ruffled Ellie's hair. He was severely germophobic, yet he lifted his own cup and held it for her to drink.

"You're the one. Running the flower shop and looking after the dog both, you've worn yourself out, you little fool."

That handsome face wore a doting smile I'd never once seen, and the sight of it scorched my eyes like fire.

There was a time I'd done housework all day, run a high fever, and absently picked up his cup to drink from it.

He hadn't said anything then. But later, that cup turned up in the trash.

So his germophobia depended on the person, after all.

He stood and headed for the kitchen. "Hungry? I'll go cook. Your favorite, beef stew."

For six years I'd tended to his every meal, down to the smallest detail, certain he didn't even know where the kitchen was.

So it turned out he would cook for someone else, too.

I came down the stairs step by step. Ellie looked up and curled her red lips at me, all charm.

"Oh, so you're home, Seraphina. And here I thought you'd actually gone to the county clerk's office to file for divorce."

"Just what I said. A lazy good-for-nothing who'd happily wrap around her own husband like a strangling vine, how could someone like that ever get divorced?"

"Honestly, next to you, I'm just built for a career. Too busy to even find myself a boyfriend."