The Billionaire's Second Chance Romance

"Martha! Oh my gosh!" My mother-in-law screamed, looking at her daughter, who was throwing up blood. "Call 911!" She exclaimed. I rushed to the phone with shaky fingers and dialed the emergency number. However, Martha was already being carried to the car by her brother Jude, who was my husband. We all piled ourselves into the car and reached the hospital in less than fifteen minutes where the nurses quickly put her on a stretcher and took her to the emergency ward. In the hospital lobby where we stood, my mother-in-law gave me a resounding slap. "How dare you try to poison my daughter?" She screeched. "I swear, I did not try to. I have no idea why she was throwing up blood after drinking the tea." I shot Jude, my husband, a look of plea, but he ignored me and went to stand beside Martha's best friend, Josephine, with whom he was openly having an affair. "I saw you," Josephine said, her voice breaking. "Stop lying. You put some powder in her tea and when I saw you earlier in the kitchen you told me it was flavouring." I gasped as I stared at her, realizing she was behind it all. Earlier on, I had been making tea for breakfast, and she had given me a sachet with a white powdery substance and asked me to add it to her tea. Since she and Martha used similar cups, I'm sure she must have swapped it rn I would be a bad person. "Is this true?" Jude walked towards me with red eyes. I could see the fumes of anger emanating from his body. He placed a firm hand on my shoulder and bore his eyes into mine. "It's not true, I—" Jude's eyes dropped to his hands that rested on my shoulder. He removed it as though it was a hot flame and took out a sanitizer from his pocket, using it to cleanse his hands as if disgusted by me. Tears slid down my face as I watched him walk away. My mother-in-law began to throw every shade of insult at me, but I could not hear exactly what she was saying. Since my husband and I got married four years ago, he has never been intimate with me. Jude and I got involved in a drunken one-night stand, but even after that, we were still friendly with each other. I was going through the worst time of my life in the orphanage. I don't remember much from when I was younger, but I started living in the orphanage at the age of eight. I was sixteen when I met Jude and still at the orphanage. No one had ever wanted to adopt me. I was unloved by the world and severely depressed. A lot of people bullied me and took away my food so I starved most times. He didn't know this part of my life but was extremely nice and sweet to me. Later on, he found out I was an orphan and often brought me food. We would keep each other company till late at night when we had to say our goodbyes. After high school, I wasn't privileged to go to college like him. I had to leave the orphanage. I worked my butt off most of the time, but that did not change our relationship. We had s*x the second time one day he visited my tiny apartment, and then we were in an off-and-on romantic relationship. Everything went downhill when I found out I was pregnant. He asked me to abort the baby because his family would never accept it, but somehow, his father had found out and had said he had to marry me. I began living in their house since then. The marriage happened a month later, and the day after that, I lost my baby. His father did not allow me to leave; even after that, he said that we were married and that was final. Jude's father was very patriarchal. It was when I started living in their house that I discovered that he was in a romantic relationship with his sister's best friend. He did not care that we were married anymore, and he ignored me most of the time. He did not even sleep in the same room with me and avoided any form of physical contact. It was only when his father was around us that he was nice and caring. A few weeks later, his father died, and the whole household turned their backs on me. I was like a maid in their house and constantly mistreated by everyone. They said the most hurtful words to me and kept reminding me that I had trapped Jude into a marriage with me. Most nights, I cried myself to sleep and wished I had never met Jude and fallen in love. All his kindness and generosity had been fake, and it hurt me deeply. "You're such an ungrateful b***h!" My mother-in-law, Rebecca, was still yelling at me. "After taking you in and giving you the best of life and everything! We provided for you, and this is how you repay us?" "I swear I didn't try to poison her! I added the powder to her tea because I thought it was flavoring. Josephine asked—" "Oh my gosh!" Josephine gasped, putting her hands over her mouth. "She just admitted to it. She's such a liar. At first, she said she didn't have an idea of what we were talking about, and now she's saying a different thing." "I'm not guilty of this!" I cried out angrily. "I didn't try to poison her. Josephine was the one who asked me to put it in a drink for her, and then she swapped the cups." Josephine gasped, "Rebecca, she is accusing me only because I exposed her." Tears began to form in her eyes. "You know what?" She said, "It is all my fault. How I wish I had known it was poison, I would have stopped her.”