By the time I reached the hospital in my hometown, my father’s surgery was already over.
He had made it through.
The moment I walked into the room, every relative turned to look at me.
Their eyes were exactly the same as the ones I had seen in San Antonio.
Disgust. Contempt. Judgment.
“Shari, how could you be this foolish?”
“You had a good job. Why would you become someone’s mistress?”
“No wonder you managed to come up with eighty thousand dollars so fast. So that’s what happened.”
I was numb by then.
I walked straight to my mother.
Her hair looked even whiter than before, and her eyes were swollen from crying.
“Mom,” I whispered.
Her voice trembled. “That money… was it from him?”
With my old salary, there was no way I could have come up with that much so quickly. Of course everyone had guessed.
I shook my head and tears started falling again.
“Mom, we broke up. I got this money by apologizing. I wasn’t the other woman. He lied to me.”
She pulled me into her arms and burst into tears.
“My poor girl.”
My parents had always opposed my relationship with Bert. They said long-distance love was unreliable. They said a man in another city who always had reasons to delay marriage could not be trusted.
But I had been obsessed with him.
I had promised them again and again that we would definitely get married.
The first year we were together, Bert had sent me most of his first stipend.
“Keep it,” I had said. “Your conditions are tough. You need it more.”
He had laughed. “You’re alone in Brookdale. Take care of yourself. Don’t be cheap with your own life.”
The second year, he told me he had made captain and gotten a raise. On the phone, we would plan our future for hours, talking about him transferring north one day or me discharging and finding work near his base.
For that future, I worked like crazy.
I was praised year after year as an outstanding civilian officer. Everyone around me called me a workaholic.
But I knew the truth.
I just wanted a stable home with him.
By the third year, my family had started pushing me to marry. I always said, wait a little longer. Once Bert gets settled.
By the fifth year, the pressure got even worse. My parents warned me there had to be something wrong if he still refused to marry.
I fought with them over it.
I trusted him completely.
And in the end, every warning they gave me came true.
A few days later, I saw Bert downstairs outside the hospital.
The second he saw me, he rushed over and wrapped me in his arms as if he had finally found something he thought he had lost forever.
“Shari,” he said hoarsely, “I finally found you.”
I pushed him away at once.
“We already broke up.”
“I know Sylvia forced you,” he said, grabbing my hand and pressing it against his chest. “I know everything now. Shari, she and I were only ever a family arrangement. The person I love has always been you. Come back with me.”
Then he said the thing that made me feel sick to my stomach.
“Other than the title of wife, I can give you anything.”
I stared at him.
For five years I had loved this man.
And I had never once truly seen him.
He wanted the influence of his family, the support of Sylvia’s family, the rank, the future, the security.
And he also wanted me waiting quietly in a corner, grateful for whatever scraps of devotion he still had left to give.
In his selfishness and cowardice, he had turned the woman he loved first into the one the whole world called a mistress.
“Bert,” I said, pulling my hand away, “do you really think I care about anything except being your wife?”
My fingertips were cold, but my voice was calm.
“The reason I stayed with you all those years wasn’t your money. It wasn’t your rank. It was the future you promised me. It was the home you said we’d build. Not this filthy, hidden kind of love.”
He looked stunned.
As if he had never imagined I could reject him this completely.
The old me would have waited months because of one soft promise from him. The old me would have cherished a cheap little gift for weeks.
But now, all his compensation looked like a joke.
“I’ve spoken to Sylvia about divorce,” he said, eyes red. “As long as you’re willing to wait, I’ll give you the place you deserve.”
I laughed.
Actually laughed.
“Do you think marriage is a toy? Something you pick up and throw away whenever you want?”
I looked straight at him.
“Have you forgotten the baby she’s carrying? Have you forgotten why you married her in the first place? The only reason you want a divorce now is because I left. Because now that I’m gone, there’s an empty space inside you and you want to drag me back to fill it.”
His face went pale.
I kept going.
“You lied to me for advancement. You married her for family interests. And now you want to abandon her and your child for what you suddenly call love. Bert, the only person you have ever really loved is yourself.”
Then I turned and walked back into the hospital.
He shouted my name behind me, his voice full of pain.
“I’m serious! I’d give up everything to be with you!”
I never turned around.
Everything he had was built on my heartbreak and my wasted years.
Why would I want it?