### Chapter 3
"You're still doing the newborn-care class tomorrow, right? Get some rest tonight. Tomorrow I'll make you the prettiest mommy there."
He kept coaxing until Maya finally laughed through her tears, and only then did he hang up.
When he turned back to me, his face had gone cold again.
"You just had a baby, so I won't hold tonight against you."
He tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Divorce? Where do you think you'd go if you left me? You think the Fox family would take you in?"
"Besides, you'd have died for me once. You think you can walk away from me?"
Back then, in the crash, I'd shoved him out of the car with everything I had and gotten myself pinned behind the twisted metal door. The scar was still on my shoulder. And now he was using it as leverage against me.
He went to keep Maya company without looking back.
The rain came down harder. I quickly pulled off my coat and draped it over the stroller.
Shivering, I dug out my phone to book a ride, and the next second an off-duty doctor pulled me into her car.
"I saw the whole thing. Why would you want a husband like that?"
She started the engine as she spoke. "When I had a hard labor, my husband stayed with me two days and two nights without closing his eyes. He cooked my recovery meals, got up in the middle of the night to take the baby on his own. He spoiled me and our child down to the bone."
I took the towel she handed me and wiped my wet hair, my nose stinging in secret.
Austin had gone three days and three nights without sleep for me once too.
When I was eighteen, I was kidnapped by an enemy of the Fox family. By the time they got me back, I was soaked in blood from head to toe.
The doctors said I might never wake up.
Austin, who had never believed in anything, knelt before the statue of the Virgin Mary and bowed his head, praying over and over.
In the dark, I could almost hear his prayer crossing every mountain and river, saying he would give up everything he had for me to open my eyes.
That year the rain poured down just like this. Maybe God was finally moved by how sincere he was, because after three days and three nights, I woke.
But Austin had knelt so long in the rain that his knees were nearly ruined.
I cried and cried because it hurt me to see it, and he just held me in his arms. "As long as you're all right, it's worth it, whatever happens to me."
There wasn't a single flaw in that young, honest love.
Why, in only seven or eight short years, was none of it what it used to be?
The doctor's sigh echoed through the car.
Bitterness rose from the bottom of my heart. I wanted an answer too.
Maybe everything changed the day Maya pulled out her medical records and announced, red-eyed, that she might never be able to have children.
He missed our most important wedding anniversary to take her to an art exhibit.
At my first prenatal checkup, in the middle of all that chaos, he left me there to go with her about a stye on her eye.
He turned the nursery I'd decorated myself into a piano room for her, saying that even if Maya could never be a mother, she at least deserved something to lean on.
When I got angry, he called me narrow-minded.
I thought that if I just kept enduring, one day he'd be moved. I thought he'd finally see how much I'd swallowed.
But every time I stepped back, what I got was him blocking me from getting into that ambulance with his own hands.
When I sent Austin the divorce agreement my friend had drawn up overnight, all he replied was:
"Knock it off once you've had your fun."
He was too sure of himself.
Back then it was me who'd cried and begged him to marry me, made a scene the whole city talked about, everyone telling him not to spoil me.
He figured this was the same. I'd act out for a couple of days, then come running back to him, meek and sorry.
But I didn't want to keep waiting for a turnaround that would never come.
After I nursed my daughter one more time, I curled up on the bed, worn out in body and mind, and fell asleep.
Half-dreaming, I thought I heard some movement over by the crib.
I assumed it was a maid coming to change the baby's diaper. My eyelids were too heavy to lift.
When I opened them again, the rain had stopped, and the sky was bright.
My phone buzzed on the pillow. Maya had posted on Instagram again.
In the photo, Austin and Maya were pressed close together, the two of them holding a little baby, lips puckered, kissing the baby's cheek at the same time.
The lights of the high-end postpartum care center were warm to the point of glaring, like a promotional shot of a family of three.
The caption.
"Being a mommy for a day~ Before anyone gets petty about it, let me say up front: the baby wasn't my idea, Austin practically forced her on me. "
My hand, about to lock the screen, went still.
The heart-shaped birthmark on the baby's forehead, the position, the shape, was exactly the same as my daughter's.
