I heard his voice through the crack in the door. “It’s me, baby. Oh, okay. I’m coming. Don’t cry.”
And he never came back to me.
I let him be. I was done.
I finally called my lawyer.
“It’s me. Lauren Valeria. I want to file for divorce.”
The lawyer’s voice on the other end of the line was steady but hesitant. “Mrs. Valeria, I just need to ask again, are you absolutely sure you want to proceed with filing for divorce? You do remember the prenup you signed with Mr. Valeria. It says you can’t legally divorce unless… well… unless one of you is dead.”
I pressed the phone harder to my ear, staring at the cold hospital floor. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I’ll be dead in a few days anyway. So just… finalize it.”
Before he could argue, I hung up. The silence that followed buzzed like static in my ears.
I started pulling the tape off the IV in my arm when my phone lit up on the side table. Another message. I didn’t even have to look to know what it was — it always came at the same time, like clockwork.
When I finally opened it, there it was: a video. Nadia’s giggle. Xander’s low laugh. The shaky image of them tangled together in his hotel suite. Again. The fiftieth video she’d sent me — always labeled Oops, sorry, wrong send. Always just enough to remind me who I really was in their eyes.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t break the phone. I didn’t even bother to watch it all the way through. I just tossed it into my bag, finished taping gauze over the IV mark, and zipped up my small suitcase.
I was done.
As I waited for the nurse to finish the discharge papers, my mind drifted to the first time everything really started to fall apart — long before Xander, long before the yacht.
I was fifteen when my mother shattered my world. She’d been cheating on my father with Nadia’s father for years — I’d always heard the late-night calls, the slammed doors, the crying. When the divorce papers came, I thought I’d stay with Dad. But Mom forced me to come with her. “A daughter belongs with her mother,” she said.
That was the first time I felt truly unwanted.
At first, living with Nadia didn’t feel so bad. She was sweet — bright, giggly, the daughter everyone adored. We shared secrets, clothes, and whispered about our dreams at night. But it didn’t take long for the cracks to show. When she didn’t get her way, she’d cry to our parents. And somehow, the blame always landed on me.