Chapter 2
902 Words
I quickly found a suitable apartment. That same afternoon, I signed the lease and paid both the deposit and the entire year's rent upfront.
By the time I finished cleaning, it was already 9 p.m.
I went back to the villa to discuss the divorce with Owen in person. When he still hadn't come home by midnight, I sat in the living room and waited.
At 1 a.m., Owen finally walked through the door.
The moment he saw me, his face tightened with impatience. He took off his suit jacket, tossed it over the back of a chair, and said coldly, "Enough. Stop making a scene."
He rolled up his shirt sleeves and headed toward his bedroom without even glancing at the divorce settlement agreement on the coffee table.
My throat tightened, but I stopped him.
"Owen, that is the divorce agreement. Please sign it."
He stopped and looked back at me, irritation written across his face.
"I didn't know Natalie was pregnant before we married. By the time the child was born, you and I were already husband and wife. I couldn't turn my back on my own child. And I had the vasectomy for your sake. Do you have any idea how dangerous pregnancy can be? Gestational hypertension and gestational diabetes can be fatal. Pregnancy can change a woman's body permanently, and some women struggle with anemia or postpartum depression for years. I honestly don't understand what you're so upset about."
He made it sound as though he had sacrificed himself for me.
He went on, "If you want a child so badly, we can adopt. I'll handle the paperwork. I have all the connections we need. Or is the real problem that an adopted child might not inherit a share of the Brooks family fortune? Are you afraid of losing the status that comes with being Mrs. Brooks?"
I almost laughed.
So that was what he thought. He believed I cared about the Brooks family's money and the status that came with being his wife.
My family had more money than I could ever spend. If wealth and status were all I wanted, I could have married into a family far more powerful than his.
He would probably never understand that I had loved him long before we married. I fell for him when we were young and kept that love to myself for 15 years.
When he injured his knee playing basketball in high school, I secretly left pain-relief cream outside his door.
When his startup ran short of money in college, I hid it from my parents and sent him all the money I'd saved from birthday gifts and scholarships.
When constant drinking at business dinners left him with chronic stomach problems, I got up early every morning for 3 years to make him homemade chicken soup. I poured it into a thermos and took it to his office, only to hear the same dismissive response again and again: "I'm busy. Just leave it there."
When our families encouraged us to marry, I knew he still loved someone else. Even so, I agreed because I hoped that living together would eventually make him love me too.
I didn't want a child for money or status. I wanted a family of our own because I loved Owen and believed we would spend the rest of our lives together.
That hope was gone now.
I took a deep breath and held myself together despite the pain in my chest.
"No, Owen. I really do want a divorce."
I stood and repeated myself, calm and firm.
"I expect the agreement to be signed by tomorrow morning."
For once, I treated him with the same cold indifference he had shown me for years. I walked past him, went into the guest room, and locked the door.
Owen shouted after me, "Fine, Claire. You want a divorce? I'll sign it right now. Even if you come crawling back on your knees, I won't take you back."
A moment later, he slammed the door to the next room.
I had expected him to be angry, but the sound still made my chest ache.
Perhaps Owen had forgotten how many times I had swallowed my pride and begged for scraps of his time during our 4 years of marriage.
On our first wedding anniversary, I made a reservation for a candlelit dinner. He promised he would be there, then forgot all about it. At the last minute, he messaged me to say he had to meet with clients. He offered no explanation and hung up when I called.
When we signed our marriage papers, he promised to take me to Velmora for our honeymoon as soon as work slowed down.
For the next 4 years, I asked him every year when he would have time to travel with me. Every year, he said he was too busy.
The honeymoon never happened.
After we began trying to conceive, I took supplements every day, yet we were rarely intimate. Whenever I moved closer to him, he found an excuse to turn me away. I had even convinced myself that he simply had little interest in s*x.
For years, I couldn't understand why an invisible wall always seemed to stand between us.
Finding the vasectomy record and the child support agreement finally gave me the answer.
Owen wasn't cold by nature. He simply didn't care about me.
- Writer
