“You’re insane, Charlton! That is your own child’s remains! How can you do this? How can you deny him peace in death?!”
His gaze flickered. He spoke again, his tone calm and hard. “Teach, or watch his ashes dug up.”
Mariam’s smile was sweet but sharp as a blade. She pressed play.
The nightmare from five years ago unfolded on the screen.
My son’s breath faltered on the operating table. The monitor recorded every misstep, every manipulated moment of that disaster.
It was the rawest wound of my life.
“No!” I screamed, my voice breaking. I tore and thrashed, but the hands holding me were iron; they pinned me so I could not move.
The footage replayed again and again, each loop slicing into my chest like a knife.
In the background, the steady ring of shovels striking earth grew heavier with every blow.
Madness crawled at the edges of my mind. Tears blurred my vision until everything smeared.
“Stop! I’ll teach! I promise—I’ll teach!” The plea ripped from my throat, ragged with desperation.
Charlton raised his hand, and his men froze.
Mariam, smiling with almost pleasant cruelty, paused the tablet. The image froze on my child’s final pale face.
She leaned close, towering over me with mock tenderness. “Isn’t this better?” she whispered, sugar-smooth and merciless. “If you’d behaved like this sooner, none of this would have happened.”
My body shook so violently I could barely breathe. Tears fell, each one a cold drop on the hard earth.
They had taken everything from me five years ago.
Now, five years later, they dragged me back into the same burning pit of despair.
But in the hollow of my heart, something snapped alive.
I fixed Mariam with a gaze full of the long-buried hatred I had nursed for years.
My voice was hoarse but steady. “I have one condition.”
Charlton’s face hardened instantly. He frowned as if staring at a lunatic. “You still dare to make demands?”
Hatred rose in my eyes, years of suppression surfacing in a sharp, exacting edge. “Yes. My condition is that I divorce you right now. Sign the papers, and I will teach you how to perform that surgery.”
Silence crystallized around us. For a moment, the world felt suspended.
Mariam blinked, then a sickly euphoria lit her face. She nodded as if it were the sweetest bargain imaginable. “Fine. A deal like buy-one-get-one—I can’t say no to that.”
Charlton’s jaw worked, but he said nothing.