I picked my son up from kindergarten, and to my absolute shock, my ex-husband, Ethan, was standing right outside my door. It had been three years since our divorce. He crouched down and held out his arms. "Come here, son. Let Daddy hold you." My five-year-old instantly hid behind my legs. Then, as if remembering something important, he poked his head back out and yelled, "Go away!" Ethan suddenly broke down. Weeping hysterically, he asked me, "Mia, they told me we got a divorce. I don't believe it." Three years after our divorce, he had suffered an accident that wiped his memory. He forgot that we were divorced. And he forgot that he was the one who cheated. 01 "Buy a few extra groceries. Ethan is here." After reluctantly letting Ethan inside, I quickly texted my current husband, Liam. Liam replied almost instantly, thoughtfully asking, "Does he have any dietary restrictions?" I thought about it for a second and texted back, "He doesn't eat cilantro." Liam replied, "Got it." Only then did I turn my attention back to Ethan. He was still crying. His face was a messy mix of snot and tears as he sobbed. "Mia, how could we possibly be divorced?" "My only wish since I was eighteen was to marry you." "Is there a mistake? Did someone mess up the records?" ... He had curled himself into a tight ball on the sofa. As he sobbed, his shoulder blades trembled, making him look like someone enduring a profound, agonizing tragedy. Right now, his tears were falling in massive, heavy drops. But three years ago, from the day I discovered his affair to the day we finalized the divorce, he hadn't shed a single tear. I handed him a box of tissues from the coffee table and pulled out my phone to text his mother. "Auntie, Ethan is at my place." She replied just as quickly. "Mia, I am so, so sorry. The doctor said it's best not to contradict him right now or cause him any sudden stress. I'll come pick him up a little later tonight." Reading her message, I couldn't bring myself to say no. After my parents passed away in a car crash, it was the Vance family—Ethan's family—who took me in. They treated me like their own daughter. I never lacked for food or clothes. Even though Ethan cheated on me and we got divorced. Even though I now flat-out refused to call Ethan "brother" like I used to when we were kids. I still owed them for raising me. That was a debt I had to repay. I deleted the message I had just typed: "Can he go home by himself?" Instead, I replied, "Did the doctor prescribe any medication for his head injury? I can have Liam swing by and pick it up." Liam Vance. My husband. We got married last year. The chat went silent for a long time. The "typing..." indicator kept appearing and disappearing. Finally, she sent a voice memo. Her voice sounded incredibly raspy and aged. The fierce, decisive woman from my childhood memories suddenly sounded like she had aged ten years overnight. "I'm so sorry, Mia. Please tell Liam I apologize for the trouble." 02 "Mommy, I want to go to my room and do my homework." Leo, sitting right next to me, tugged on my sleeve. He was five years old, an age where sitting still is usually impossible. This was the very first time in his life he had ever volunteered to go to his room to do homework. When Ethan and I divorced, Leo was only two. But as he grew up, the absence of a father figure was obvious. Liam, however, never hid the truth from him. So, Leo knew perfectly well that the man currently crying on our sofa was his biological father. The man who had abandoned us. I patted his head. "Go ahead." Ethan watched him leave. Once the bedroom door clicked shut, he grabbed a tissue, haphazardly wiped his face, and turned to look at me. He offered a cautious, fragile smile, desperately trying to find something to talk about. "Our little guy is so big now. I swear, when I left for work yesterday, he didn't even know how to walk yet." "He used to just nestle in my arms and give me this huge, gummy smile whenever he saw me." I listened to him quietly. I grabbed a glass, meticulously dropped in some dried jasmine flowers, poured hot water over them, and pushed the cup toward him. "Drink some tea. It'll help your throat." Maybe it was because I was being too apathetic. Or maybe I was just acting too calm. He didn't touch the hot water. He just stared at me intently with those bloodshot eyes. After a long, suffocating silence, he spoke, his voice trembling. "Mia... you don't love me anymore." 03 At our age, talking about "love" felt a bit childish. But if we were really going to point fingers, I definitely wasn't the first one to stop loving. I poured myself a glass of water and finally gave him a serious answer to the question he had been obsessing over since he walked through the door. "Ethan, we are divorced." I looked down at the jasmine flowers floating in my cup, and added the final nail to the coffin. "Because you cheated on me." He completely froze. He just kept muttering the same phrase over and over: "How is that possible? How is that possible?" I used to wonder how it was possible, too. We grew up together. After our high school graduation, he confessed his feelings to me, his face blushing bright red. During college, we were on opposite sides of the country. He traveled to see me so often that his stack of train tickets was thicker than a dictionary. Even my incredibly picky college roommates had nothing but good things to say about him. After we graduated, he started his own tech company. We lived in a tiny, cramped apartment. When we were at our brokest, we could only afford to order one single bowl of wonton soup for dinner. He stubbornly claimed he wasn't hungry and tried to get up and leave the table. I split the soup into two bowls. When I pushed his bowl toward him, his tears fell straight into the broth. He looked at me and made a solemn vow: "Mia, I promise you. I swear I will give you a happy life." We got married. The following year, we had Leo. His company started taking off, becoming more and more successful. Everything seemed to be heading exactly toward that "happy life" Ethan had promised. Except for the part where he cheated. 04 The first time I suspected something, Leo was a year and a half old. He spiked a sudden, terrifying fever in the middle of the night. I shook Ethan awake and told him to drive us to the hospital. He made a quick phone call. A car pulled up a few minutes later, but the person in the driver's seat was a young woman. As she got out to let Ethan drive, she casually remarked, "Mr. Vance, I didn't get to drive it fast enough tonight. You owe me dinner to make up for it." I stayed completely silent the entire ride, until Ethan finally offered an explanation. "She's the daughter of the CEO we're partnering with. She insisted on taking my beat-up car for a spin." He was being overly modest. That "beat-up car" cost more than our family's entire living expenses for the first half of our lives. I didn't press the issue. I only asked him one question: "When does the partnership contract end?" He rubbed his temples. "In half a month." I thought we had an unspoken understanding. Even if something was going on, once that half-month was up, it had to end. But at Leo's second birthday party, she showed up again. She laughed and pinched Leo's cheek, but her sharp, acrylic nails dug painfully into his soft skin. Leo burst into tears. When Ethan quickly picked him up to comfort him, Leo's flailing hand accidentally knocked Ethan's glasses off his face. Ethan instinctively lowered his head to catch them. The woman smoothly took a step forward, her long hair cascading over his shoulder. She went up on her tiptoes, her manicured finger gently brushing against his temple as she casually pushed his glasses back up his nose. When Ethan put his glasses back on, he saw me standing just a few feet away. Absolute panic washed over his face. I took Leo from his arms. That night, I confronted him directly: "You've slept together." He refused to admit it. He hovered around me, constantly trying to appease me. He swallowed his pride, said every sweet thing he could think of, and bought me round after round of expensive gifts. I still refused to speak to him. This dragged on for months. Then, one day... Leo was running a low-grade fever. I was holding him, trying to rock him to sleep. Ethan completely ignored the fact that our son was sick. He violently smashed a glass against the wall. A shard flew and sliced a long cut across my calf. He yelled at the top of his lungs: "Fine! Yes, we slept together! Are you happy now?!" I looked down at the thin line of blood welling up on my leg. I spoke very quietly. "Okay. Then let's get a divorce." 05 "How is that possible?" Ethan was still muttering to himself in disbelief. But sitting here now, looking at him, I thought: Why wouldn't it be possible? If he could hit his head and develop selective amnesia, anything is possible. "Her name is Chloe Sinclair. She's younger than me, and prettier than me." "The heiress to the Sinclair Group. Optimistic, outgoing, beautiful, and young." ... "I only want you, Mia." Ethan cut me off. He repeated himself, desperate: "Mia, I'm telling you, growing up, my only wish in life was to marry you." He didn't believe me. He was absolutely certain I was just making up a cruel lie to punish him. "Aren't we already married?" "Did I do something wrong? Just tell me, I'll fix it. I promise I'll change." "Please, don't throw me away." ... It made sense. If someone had told me five years ago that Ethan and I would get a divorce, I would have thought they were crazy too. We had been together for so long. We were practically family; our lives were entirely intertwined. When we finally split, it felt like my skin was being peeled off and my bones ripped out. I looked at his stubborn, desperate face and sighed. "Nothing stays the same forever." He kept acting like a petulant child. "I know I messed up. I'll change. But you can't just throw me away." Before his memory loss, he rarely acted this childish. If he broke a promise or made a mistake, his go-to solution was to buy me an incredibly expensive, beautifully wrapped gift. Even our mutual friends would see them and joke, "Wow, CEO Vance really spared no expense." But I hated them. I much preferred the simple, home-cooked meals he used to make for us on holidays when we were broke. Looking back now, the signs were always there. I had tried to reason with him, but he refused to accept reality. Suddenly, I just felt incredibly annoyed. Until the sound of the front door unlocking shattered the strange, suffocating atmosphere in the room. "Mia, I'm home." I stood up and practically jogged over to take the grocery bags from him. He handed me a cake box he was holding in his other hand. Aware that we had a guest in the living room, I leaned in close and whispered, "That bakery is so far away. You must be exhausted." He ruffled my hair, looked past me into the living room, and asked loudly, "Any dietary restrictions?" Hearing Liam's voice, Leo immediately opened his bedroom door and came running out, his little feet slapping against the floor. He threw himself directly into Liam's arms. "Daddy! You're home!" Ethan stared at Liam, his entire body trembling violently. He froze, completely rooted to the spot. Seeing his expression, I finally realized something. He hadn't known that I had remarried.
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