Love Faded, Sorrow Stayed

When I was eighteen, Ethan Shaw burst into my house and stabbed my father eighteen times.

As the police dragged him away, he smiled into the camera:

“Why should I regret it?

“There will never again be a beast who hides behind the name of family to hurt her.

“From now on, she is the freest girl in the world—Sophia Summers!”

When Ethan was released from prison, he saw me with no money in my pocket and my résumés constantly rejected. He stubbed out his cigarette, dove headfirst into the New York elite circle, and transformed himself into Mr. Shaw.

After our marriage, every password of his was set to my birthday.

But when I looked through his photo albums, I saw pictures of strange women. Over eighteen hundred of them. Not a single one of me.

It was as if he suddenly remembered. With a blank expression, he deleted all eighteen hundred photos, tossed his phone aside, and said:

“It’s all in the past. Just pretend you didn’t see it.”

I slid the divorce papers toward him. “I told you, sign it.”

He threw down the pen.

“I told you, between us there is no divorce. Only widowhood.”

…

Ethan didn’t sign.

Between us there was only widowhood, never divorce.

It was what he said when we got married.

He didn’t even glance at the divorce papers before storming out.

Not long after he left, a strange number popped up on my phone:

“You’re Sophia Summers, right?

“You must have seen it—he’s been collecting my photos since I was still in school.

“Ethan loves me, not you. If you don’t step aside, Ethan will make you regret it!”

The girl’s voice carried an innocence and boldness untouched by the world.

Or perhaps it was simply that Ethan had protected her too well.

Before I could respond, she sent over a dozen photos.

Her waist-to-hip ratio was perfect, a chain draped elegantly across her waist.

The large hand resting there sometimes forgot to remove the wedding band that belonged to me.

Until her belly began to swell, only then was the chain finally taken off.

“Sophia, Ethan has been married to you for three years and never let you bear his child. But he’s allowed me to carry his seed.

“Don’t you understand? Is clinging on still meaningful?

“I’m telling you, if you don’t step down, I’ll move into your home myself. Let’s see then—whose side will Ethan choose, yours or mine?”

When Ethan returned, he found the chat records alongside a roomful of crystal antiques I had smashed to pieces.

He only raised his brow faintly.

“You have nothing to explain?”

My ragged breaths mingled with the taste of his cigar smoke.

He chuckled lightly, exhaling a ring of smoke:

“She’s just a young girl, why bother with her?”

His airy tone made it sound as if the blood and storms of his rise in New York’s elite circle hadn’t fallen on us—but on that young girl and him.

“Yes, the little girl truly doesn’t understand.”

I tossed a medical record of a miscarriage onto the table.

He immediately sat upright.

I spoke lightly:

“So I simply taught her to be a real person.”

“Sophia!”

His hands clamped onto my shoulders with such force they nearly shattered.

My back pressed hard against the wall, lips curling as I watched his reddened eyes.

In this life, he had only ever shed tears twice.

Once, in our senior year of high school, when he saw my father drag me half-naked by my hair onto the street, threatening to drown me in the Mississippi River. Ethan stabbed my father eighteen times.

The second was now, when this girl miscarried.

He gripped my shoulders and accused me of being “cruel.”

“How rare,” I sneered, “to see Mr. Shaw in a panic.”

I smiled, without the slightest trace of remorse.

“You’re a woman too… how could you do this to her?”