Too Late to Love Him Back

Olivia didn't love me. Maybe I'd known that from the day she agreed to marry me.

Back then, she'd married me because her father needed a huge sum for heart bypass surgery. My startup had just made it big, so I gave her the money, and she married me. It looked like exactly what it was: a transaction with no feeling behind it.

But I always believed that if I gave her everything, if I loved her sincerely enough, even a stone would soften in my hands.

After the wedding I gave in to her on everything. I even signed the company over to her so no one could call her a stay-at-home wife.

And now, at last, I saw it clearly.

A stone is a stone. No matter how I tried to soften her, her heart stayed cold as iron.

When she saw the despair in my eyes, Olivia panicked.

She had never seen me look like this, with no love left in my gaze.

She used to say that every time I looked at her, my eyes were full of stars.

But this time the stars were gone, and only a gray haze remained.

"Kerry…" She reached for my hand, flustered, and I pulled away.

"Don't say anything else. I don't want to hear it. Besides—"

I couldn't hold back any longer and knocked over the gift box she'd set on the table.

"Can you stop lying to me? Stop putting on this fake performance in front of me."

"Playing the devoted wife with me while you mess around with another man."

"Ms. Winfield, would you please stop treating me like a fool?"

When she saw the condom fall out of the gift box, Olivia looked like the soul had gone out of her. She froze where she stood, stunned, for a long moment.

"Kerry… let me explain."

"Evan Harding just likes weird things. He's always causing trouble, trying to scare people. Those condoms are all—"

By the time she got that far, she was so frantic she was almost in tears.

The Evan she kept mentioning was the man she'd always called her best friend, and the same man she'd been tangled up with the night before.

Olivia was starting to babble.

"With Evan, honestly, it's just a boss caring about an employee. Weren't you the one who told me to look after my staff more?"

"If you're angry, I'll call him right now and tell him not to come to work tomorrow. I'll never see him again, all right?"

I watched her coldly, waiting to see if she could really go through with it.

Right in front of me, Olivia dialed Evan's number. It rang for a long time, but the call wouldn't connect.

She tried a few more times. Still nothing.

The tension in her face was plain to see.

"Evan never ignores my calls. Something must have happened to him."

Olivia fumbled to open Evan's social media feed, and the second she saw his latest post, her face went white.

"Evan's been in a car accident! Kerry, we'll finish this conversation later."

And just like that, she left, not caring about anything else.

When she'd opened Evan's feed a moment ago, I'd caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye.

The so-called car accident was just a scrape on the car. He wasn't hurt at all.

What stuck in my throat most was the car he'd been driving. That blue Maserati was the birthday present I'd given Olivia.

She'd once said only two people would ever ride in that car: her, and me.

But in the blink of an eye, she'd forgotten the vow she made.

I sent Olivia a voice message.

"I'll have the divorce papers delivered to you."

I waited quietly for a while. She didn't reply.

Right now every bit of her was fixed on Evan. Maybe none of the rest of it mattered to her anymore.

Lying in the hospital bed, I suddenly felt the tears streaming down my face. A video was playing on my phone.

Olivia had dragged Evan to a hospital for a full-body exam, and my friend who worked there happened to see it and filmed it.

"Kerry, your wife really looks out for her staff, huh. That little snake didn't even want the checkup, and Olivia forced him to get the most expensive full workup they had. Turned out there wasn't a single thing wrong with him."

"But I've got to say, that little snake looks a bit like you. Especially that mole between his eyebrows. I almost thought you'd turned young again."

Hearing my friend's teasing, I felt nothing at all inside. I almost wanted to laugh.

How much do you have to care about someone to do something this ridiculous?

Back when the car accident nearly left both my legs paralyzed, the most Olivia did was ask where it hurt and whether it was serious.

This kind of caring, this kind of frantic worry, had never once been aimed at me.

Whether a person loves you or not, every move they make shows it.

Since she no longer loved me, why keep struggling to hold this marriage together?

Maybe in her heart she had never loved me at all.

I had the lawyer prepare a full financial settlement. Every dollar Olivia had spent on Evan that couldn't be justified would have to come back.

Once all that was done, and with my condition improved enough that the doctor said I could start getting up on my own, I checked myself out of the hospital.