I Was Just His Substitute Wife

"Why didn't you tell me!"

"If you'd said something sooner, I wouldn't have just grabbed the first person I could find and married her!"

Just grabbed the first person he could find?

My hands trembled as I opened the timer app I used for keeping track.

Today was the two-thousandth day since I'd met Harry James.

Today was the one thousand eight hundred and sixty-first day since we'd been together.

Meeting Harry had been an accident in my plain, ordinary life.

For him, I—a girl who'd spent her whole life following her parents' plans, step by careful step—worked up the courage for the first time to leave everything behind and come to Capital City with Harry to build a life from nothing.

Back then, everything we owned added up to just enough to rent a leaky basement.

He chose to start his own business. I took a steady job as a clerk.

My salary was six thousand a month. His, some months, was a negative number.

We stretched every dollar into two, and somehow, through all the stumbling, I propped him up until his business finally started to turn.

Later, his company was short on people.

I didn't understand any of that world.

So when he talked business, I was the one drinking at the table.

A woman who'd never touched a drop learned to drink until my stomach was bleeding, and never once let it show on my face.

And now, out of his own mouth, I was just someone he'd grabbed to marry.

The comment section had lost its collective mind over the two of them.

The handful of comments defending me, the wife, got reported and buried at the very bottom.

Before long, someone dug up Phoebe Fox's social media too.

Her latest post had gone up five minutes ago.

【Thank you all for helping me reach him. Getting to spend this last stretch of time with him before I go, I have no regrets left.】

The photo attached showed a man in an apron, his back to the camera, busy in the kitchen.

The man who not so long ago had carried a plate of braised ribs over and called me to dinner was now washing up and cooking soup for her.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I screenshotted it and sent it to Harry.

【Come home soon. We need to talk about the divorce.】

Harry didn't answer.

I sat there through the whole night, empty.

He didn't see my message until the next morning.

【Wait for me to get home. I'll explain everything properly.】

Harry came home carrying breakfast, a luxury shopping bag hanging from his arm too.

I was scrolling through my parents' feed, head down.

Since I'd followed Harry to Capital City, they and I had never spoken again.

Harry set a steamer basket of dumplings in front of me and leaned in close.

"Your favorite dumplings, that place you love. Eat them while they're hot?"

I'd told him just last week that this place had switched chefs and the food wasn't good anymore.

Then he held out the luxury bag.

"Didn't you say yesterday that you liked this brand? This one's new too. See if you like it?"

I'd seen it on Phoebe's social media.

A whole row of the latest luxury pieces. This one was her leftover, the one she'd passed over.

Only then had it made its way to me.

I closed the box, tossed it aside, and turned the laptop on the table toward Harry.

"This is the divorce agreement I drew up. Look it over and see if anything's off."

"If there's nothing, let's go down to the civil affairs office in a bit."

Snap——

The usual smile on Harry's face dimmed a shade, and he clapped the laptop shut.

"What is this supposed to mean?"

Over the course of one night, I'd made up my mind.

While Phoebe was still alive, more than half of Harry's heart was tied up in her—never mind what it would be like after.

I didn't want to live the rest of my life in someone else's shadow.

"I don't think there's any point in the two of us going on."

"I can't accept a husband who has an ex-girlfriend he loves this deeply."

Harry let out a long, heavy sigh, rubbing the space between his brows as if utterly at a loss.

"Libby, Phoebe doesn't have many days left. I only want her to leave this world without regrets."