My Paralysis Was His Online Romance Story

“Why?”

Tony blinked. “Don’t you usually sleep badly? Either you can’t fall asleep, or you have nightmares?”

He wasn’t wrong.

Five years ago, after the car crushed both my legs, I kept dreaming of them, bloody, ground into pulp.

I’d jerk awake in a cold sweat and never manage to sleep again after that.

But even so.

I didn’t want to live inside a lie.

Tony insisted, though, so I pretended to swallow the pill.

The moment he looked away, I spat it into the trash.

Just like last night.

Then he was chatting with Hannah again.

This time he asked what gift she wanted. She wanted a handbag.

Something around three thousand.

Tony agreed without a second thought.

In all the years we’d been together, he had never once bought me a gift that expensive.

Then again, I’d never asked for one.

I also heard Hannah offer to help him pick out my wedding anniversary gift.

It made Tony laugh out loud.

The next day.

Tony went out to meet a friend, and when he came back he was carrying two gift boxes.

He held out the one in his left hand.

I opened it and found a pair of rhinestone high heels.

They looked like something off a street cart.

Every seam left rough and unfinished.

So this was the gift Hannah had helped him prepare for me.

For a cripple like me, it was the cruelest kind of humiliation.

No wonder he’d looked so pleased with himself.

“Medicine keeps advancing these days. I’m sure you’ll stand again one day.”

“Consider it my very best wish for you.”

Tony smiled at me as he said it.

Dressing up humiliation as something noble, something upright.

I didn’t answer. I looked instead at the gift box in his right hand.

That would be the three-thousand-dollar bag he’d bought for Hannah.

“A cousin of mine is coming to visit in a couple of days. That one’s for her.”

Having explained himself, he hurried the box off to the study.

Afraid I might take it from him.

I said nothing. I lowered my head and messaged my lawyer, asking him to draw up a divorce agreement.

Then I crossed to the canvas on my crutches.

One gift deserves another.

Let this painting be my gift for the day the two of them finally met in person.

But as I worked.

A wave of nausea hit me, exactly like morning sickness, so I went to the study and told him, “I’m not feeling well. Could you take me to the hospital?”

“Right now?”

He had his headphones on. The smile at the corner of his mouth stiffened a little. “I’m kind of busy. Why don’t you just take some medicine first?”

We looked at each other for a few seconds.

“You go ahead and stay busy, then.”

I shut the study door, wheeled myself out alone, and had a few tests run.

“Congratulations. You’re pregnant.”

The doctor handed me the report. “In your condition, with the injuries you had before, getting pregnant isn’t easy at all.”

I froze.

A few days ago Tony had come home drunk and pulled me into his arms.

I hadn’t expected it to take.

I just didn’t know whether, that night, he’d been thinking of Hannah instead of me.

The truth was, we’d always wanted a child.

But right then I couldn’t bring myself to feel happy.

When I left the hospital and the taxi pulled up at the entrance to our complex, the rain came down in sheets.

It struck me like flung gravel.

By the time I got my wheelchair back inside, I was soaked through, and then I heard his voice ring out from the study.

“Hannah, you’re amazing! We won this round, all thanks to you!”

The tears came.

I tugged my mouth into a bitter smile.

So he knew I wasn’t home. Otherwise why would he shout like that?

Too busy gaming with Hannah to wonder where I might have gone.

He didn’t come out until nearly dinnertime.

“Honey.”

“Are you feeling any better?”

He hadn’t even noticed I’d changed my clothes.

It looked like concern.

It was really just going through the motions.

But it didn’t matter anymore.

One day left.

Then he’d meet his online girlfriend in person and escape this misery.

And I would disappear.