“No need to apologize,” Ethan said, stopping her.
A fresh wave of pain washed over me. I looked at the man before me and suddenly, he was a stranger.
I remembered a time when I’d gotten a small papercut, and he had fussed over me, carefully applying a bandage. Now, I had narr-
owly escaped death, and he didn’t care at all. He was telling me to let the person who tried to kill me walk free.
“Go home, Charlotte. Don’t make me say it again.”
His cold, dismissive tone was like a plunge into an icy abyss. My heart froze over.
“Give me an explanation.”
Ethan looked up, startled. Then, as if he understood something, he frowned. “Anna and Abby are on their own. The little girl is you-
ng and doesn’t understand. She sees me as a father figure. I happen to like kids, so I’ve been playing along. That’s why she misun-
derstood our relationship. I’ll explain it to her when she’s older.”
Net out a bitter laugh. “You like kids, Ethan, but you never wanted to have one with me, did you?”
We were supposed to be in our honeymoon phase, but Ethan was never home. I was shy, but one night I gathered all my courage,
my face flushed, and asked him to stay home from work, just for one night. He was surprised, but he agreed.
That night, just as passion was building, his phone rang. Without a moment’s hesitation, he pulled away and left.
Embarrassment, disappointment, shame… a storm of emotions swirled inside me. I sat alone on the bed and cried the entire night.
He obviously remembered it too. He stammered, “Anna had a high fever that night.”
I walked to the window, looking down at the city lights twinkling below, and laughed coldly. “So what you’re saying is, Anna has a
mother, she has grandparents, she has a family. But the one person she can’t live without is a ‘father‘ she has no blood relation to?
Is that it?”
“Enough!”
He strode over to me, grabbing my shoulders and forcing me to look at him. “When did you become so jealous?”
His pupils reflected my face, haggard and worn down by the endless turmoil he and Abby had created.
And suddenly, I felt so tired. It was all so meaningless.
I broke free from his grasp and walked away.
My hand was just about to touch the doorknob when his voice, hard as steel, came from behind me.
“Stop being a lawyer. Be a housewife. This is a notification, not a negotiation.”
“Besides, Charlotte, you’ve already lost the right to be a lawyer.”
“I’ve blocked every single one of your escape routes.”
