Chapter 1

The day I was discharged after surgery, my wife said she’d come pick me up. But by the time I got home after changing buses one after another outside the hospital, I still hadn’t seen a trace of her.

I opened the messaging app and found the Instagram post she had put up an hour earlier.

A photo of a thumb wrapped tightly in bandages, tied off with a pretty bow.

Caption: Someone actually said my bandaging looked ugly. So mad.

I called her, but all I heard was her ex’s faintly mocking voice. “Mia, is your husband checking up on you again?”

Whenever I needed my wife, he either had some scrape or injury that needed caring for, or he was lonely and depressed and needed someone to keep him company.

And every time, my wife chose him without hesitation.

As if I were the outsider.

I collapsed weakly onto the sofa, replaying everything that had happened over the years, and then I steeled myself and contacted a lawyer.

I was tired. I wanted a divorce.

...

The lawyer sent me a draft divorce agreement on my phone. I got up and walked to the table, and the empty house felt even colder.

Dozens of pages of text looked like they were mocking my three years, like it had all been a joke.

Suddenly, my wife started a video call with me.

“Sorry, babe,” Mia said on the screen, dressed up delicately and beautifully, wearing a fitted spaghetti-strap mini dress, her expression cool. “Something came up all of a sudden, so I can’t pick you up from the hospital. Are you home yet?”

Her tone was as normal as ever, as if the person who had just complained about me on the phone to her ex wasn’t her.

I said, “Mm,” and then I didn’t know what else to say. I’d heard the same excuses too many times.

I was already numb.

Mia noticed my silence and explained,

“Ryan hurt his finger while renovating today. I was worried, so I...”

“So you abandoned your husband of three years on the operating table and ran off to worry about some outsider!” I snapped coldly at Mia.

There was a clear pause on the other end of the video call. When Mia recovered, her voice rose.

“Don’t say that! Ryan isn’t some outsider. He’s my friend! Besides, didn’t your surgery go fine?”

“Ethan, can you stop making a scene?”

I suddenly felt like laughing when I heard that.

A friend. More important than her husband.

“Who exactly is making a scene? A friend? Huh. A friend you drink boba with and eat from the same bowl with? A friend who can call you out in the middle of the night and get you to leave? A friend you go running to when he’s drunk? Mia, I’m not an idiot!”

“Ryan gets a little hurt and you worry yourself sick. I was vomiting my guts out in the hospital from a stomach bleed, and you didn’t even ask!”

“It’s always like this, Mia. What am I to you, really?”

I shot up in anger, and the movement tugged at my wound so badly it made me dizzy. I had to brace myself against the sofa just to keep from passing out.

My lips had gone so pale they were frightening.

But Mia on the other end didn’t notice at all. Her voice turned sharp, impatient.

“I told you, we’re just friends.”

“If you want to think that, there’s nothing I can do.”

My fury all seemed to smash softly into a wall of cotton.

“I’m not coming home tonight.”

Mia gave me that as a perfunctory notice. She was holding up a mirror while fixing her makeup, and the phone screen shook, catching a flash of a man wearing only a bath towel.

I couldn’t help clenching my fists and said sarcastically, “Spending the night with your good friend? Sharing a bed?”

“What are you even saying? Do you have to make us sound so dirty? Ethan, if your mind is filthy, then everything you see is filthy!” She was clearly panicking, her hands freezing mid-makeup as she kept yelling at me.

I sneered. “Is that so? Then you two really do have the purest exes relationship!”

Ryan suddenly pushed into the video call, his upper body pressed tightly against Mia’s.

“Bro, don’t be mad. It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t accidentally hit my finger, Mia wouldn’t have worried so much and come find me. You two wouldn’t be fighting either.”

“But I don’t really have any other friends, besides Mia... Mia’s a really great girl. Every time something happens to me, she comes to help me...”

When he said that, his eyes were looking at me provocatively, like he was showing off something.

“Heh.” I let out a cold laugh. “Yeah, after being broken up this long, you still only know how to ask your married ex-girlfriend for help when something happens. Wow.”

Mia’s expression changed at once. She reached out and pulled him behind her.

“Ethan, you’re not allowed to yell at him!”

As she shifted, I could see more clearly what Mia was wearing underneath. It was obviously lingerie. And her thigh had already been pressed right up against Ryan’s. He was still rubbing against her.

It was so intimate it made me sick.

The woman I had loved for seven years suddenly felt completely unfamiliar.

From a first crush in our youth to the wounds all over me after marriage.

I had walked this road in too much pain.

I had risked everything just to get one result. In the end, I got nothing.

“If you have nothing else, I’m hanging up.” Mia’s voice turned a little breathy. She hurriedly finished speaking to me and lifted her hand to hang up.

I cut her off. “Mia, do you even deserve the dad who died for you?”

Back then, Mia and Ryan had been wildly in love, all sweetness and passion.

But in the end, Ryan had only gone after Mia’s family money.

He took away most of the Mia family’s money, the company’s cash flow broke, and Mia’s father went gray overnight.

They had no choice but to keep selling off property to patch the holes, and her father had to bow and scrape while borrowing money and begging favors from former business partners. There was even a company boss in his forties or fifties who had taken a liking to Mia, and her father had forcefully blocked him.

Mia’s father worked himself nonstop day and night and eventually died from a sudden illness. Mia hated Ryan to the bone.

“Do you still remember how I gave up everything to come here with you?”

I was the one who stayed with Mia through that darkest time, little by little, helping her get through it.

She drank herself senseless all night, and I brought her out, cared for her carefully, and encouraged her to pull herself together.

I gave up the promising future and further-study opportunities back home... and followed Mia without hesitation to her hometown, two thousand miles away.

I worked four jobs a day. I stayed by her side, fighting day and night, and helped rescue her company.

Four years later, we got married, and Mia smiled and said the luckiest thing in her life was meeting me.

Her company kept getting bigger.

Then, out of nowhere, Ryan showed up again.