Chapter 8
Wyatt was sentenced to five years in prison.
During those five years, I worked hard and rose all the way to deputy general manager. I earned enough to repay every dollar Wyatt had taken from my parents.
Under my care—and my parents’—Lily grew up healthy and happy. My boss even became her godfather.
Five years passed.
And then the day Wyatt was released finally came.
My parents were prepared for the worst. They worried he would come after me.
But I just smiled and told them he wouldn’t.
Because for the past five years, I had found ways to send Wyatt little updates.
About Molly.
About Kieran.
Molly became a social pariah. She couldn’t even support herself properly. Eventually, she sold Kieran for money.
After that, she became another man’s mistress.
When his wife discovered not only the affair but the fact that Molly had sold her own child, all it took was one report to get Molly arrested too.
As for Kieran, he was taken by a middle-aged couple and moved away somewhere far from the city. Rumor said they were violent people, the kind who beat even their pets.
No one knew exactly where he ended up.
At first, Wyatt managed prison reasonably well.
But after he learned his son had been sold and his mistress had gone on to become someone else’s affair partner, he began to crack.
Then to unravel.
Then to break.
He started shouting the truth—or what sounded like madness to everyone else.
My wife and I swapped bodies! She was inside me! She killed my mother! She stole my houses! She used my body to take everything from me!
The more he said it, the crazier he sounded.
He got beaten by other inmates, mocked, isolated, and over time, his mind deteriorated for real.
So when I went to meet him outside the prison after five years, I barely recognized him.
He was frighteningly thin.
His eyes were dull.
His steps were unsteady.
He muttered nonsense under his breath.
Only when he saw me did something sharp flash back into his gaze.
He lunged forward and screamed, “Give me back my son!”
But he never reached me.
An ambulance pulled up behind me.
Several men in white jumped out, restrained him in seconds, and loaded him inside.
With them was Wyatt’s cousin from the countryside—his last remaining relative.
The cousin looked at Wyatt thrashing and babbling about body swaps, then sighed heavily.
“I thought you were just saying he’d gone crazy to get revenge,” he told me. “I didn’t think he was really insane.”
Then he shook his head.
“I’ll decide it. We’ll send him to a psychiatric hospital.”
I smiled and glanced at Wyatt, who was still screaming inside the ambulance.
Private psychiatric hospitals like that were easy to enter and very hard to leave, especially if the family wanted you kept inside.
I nodded.
“Even though he treated me and Lily terribly, we were husband and wife once. I’ll cover the treatment costs. I’ll take care of the rest of his life.”
And that was exactly what I did.
The rest of Wyatt’s life would be spent locked away in a private psychiatric hospital, never free again.
He screamed through the window.
“I’m not crazy! That crazy woman swapped bodies with me and killed my mother!”
The more he shouted, the more convinced the doctors became.
Then, under their orders, the ambulance drove off in a cloud of dust toward the outskirts of the city.
That was the last time I ever looked at him.
He pounded on the window, tears streaming down his face, half pleading, half cursing.
But it had nothing to do with me anymore.
From that moment on, he disappeared from the ordinary world and into the darkness he had built for himself with greed, cruelty, and betrayal.
I turned around and kept walking forward without looking back.
Ahead of me, my boss was waiting in the car.
Lily was sitting beside him, waving at me through the window.
The sky was blue. White clouds drifted lazily overhead. Sunlight spilled everywhere.
And in the life waiting for me beyond that road, there were no more parasites.
Only hope.
END