News about my children reached me now and then through relatives.
Jason’s company finally collapsed.
His wife started talking seriously about divorce.
Megan made a major mistake at work and was fired. After that, she refused jobs she felt were beneath her and spent most of her time unemployed at home.
Both of them ended up living off David’s professor’s salary.
They couldn’t afford a full-time caregiver.
So the responsibility of taking care of him bounced back and forth between them, and they fought constantly over it.
Once, the argument got so violent right in front of David that he fell from the bed and hit his head.
After that, he was never the same.
His speech became slurred.
His memory started deteriorating.
The brilliant professor who once believed himself above everyone else slowly became a frail old man with a child’s temper.
Relatives later told me that as his mind worsened, he forgot almost everyone.
But not me.
Apparently, he would look around and ask, over and over, “Where’s Evelyn? Call my Evelyn.”
I heard it and only felt irony.
In my last life, I had stayed with him for fifteen years.
In this one, without me, he made it less than five.
Eventually, Jason and Megan lost patience and sent him to a nursing home.
The same one they had dumped me in during my last life.
That place had been exposed multiple times for staff abusing elderly residents.
Everyone in the city knew it.
I had once believed my children were only cruel to me.
I had been wrong.
They were cruel to anyone who stopped being useful.
Then came the news that Claire had been arrested overseas for cross-border fraud and extradited back to the U.S.
She was sentenced to thirteen years.
Jason and Megan called me right away to tell me, as though I should celebrate.
I only let out a soft, bored sound and changed the subject.
By then I understood something deeply.
Even without Claire, there would have been another woman.
If not Claire, then someone else.
The real source of everything that happened was never a mistress.
It was the selfishness, vanity, and coldness in David and my children.
That was the rot.
Years passed.
I grew older, but I also grew lighter.
I had friends.
A life.
A home I actually wanted to wake up in.
Then one day I got a call from the funeral home.
David was dead.
In my last life, under my care, he had lived fifteen more years.
In this life, he hadn’t even made it to five.
The person on the phone sounded awkward.
His children did not want to purchase a burial plot.
They were asking what should be done with the remains.
I was silent for a second.
Then I said evenly, “If they don’t want to keep them, then do whatever your policy allows.”
And I hung up.
My luck at cards had been excellent that day.
I had no intention of letting bad energy ruin it.
Some people would probably call me heartless.
Maybe they would whisper that after everything, I should have at least shown some mercy.
But mercy had cost me too much in my last life.
And I had finally learned that refusing to be dragged back into someone else’s darkness was not cruelty.
It was wisdom.