I was happy.
I felt like I'd finally done something good for everyone.
Until the day Rhys and Dahlia took Oliver for his pediatric checkup and came home.
The red dress Dahlia was wearing was Rhys's anniversary gift to me.
I hesitated, then asked if she'd grabbed it by mistake.
She shrank behind Rhys with Oliver in her arms, her voice trembling on the edge of tears. "I'm sorry. I just thought I should look presentable when we went out. I didn't want to embarrass Rhys."
She cowered like I was about to slap her across the face.
Something hot and nameless flared inside me. I stepped forward and grabbed the fabric. "Take it off."
"Enough!" Rhys cut in, his voice low and sharp. "It's just a dress. Let her have it."
"It was your anniversary gift to me!"
Impatience flickered through his eyes. His gaze dropped to my chest and lingered there for a few seconds. "So what? The way you look now, it's not like you'll ever wear it again."
He said it like it was nothing. Then he put his arm around Dahlia and walked past me.
As she passed, Dahlia lifted her eyebrows at me. A quick, deliberate taunt.
I stood there like a nail had been driven through my feet into the floor. I couldn't move.
My heart clenched so tight it hurt, like something inside me was tearing loose, breaking free of whatever had been holding it in place.
Dahlia and Rhys started acting more and more like husband and wife.
They took Oliver to early-learning classes, to his vaccinations, spent entire days at the mall together.
When they came home, Dahlia peeled off her coat without a shred of self-consciousness, revealing my cashmere sweater underneath, my pearl necklace around her throat, my lace bra against her skin.
At night, when Oliver cried, Dahlia locked the nursery door and shut me out.
Her thin, reedy voice squeezed through the crack. "I've got this. You can't really do anything anyway. Go back to bed."
I pounded on the door.
"Don't wake Rhys up," she said.
"You lie around the house all day, so you wouldn't understand. Men work hard. They need their rest."
"Try being a little more considerate, okay?"
I knew what Dahlia was doing. She was eating my life piece by piece, and one day there would be nothing left for her to take.
But I was powerless to stop it.
Every time I told Rhys I wanted Dahlia gone, his face darkened. "You invited her in and now you want to throw her out? What's wrong with you?"
"Isn't this arrangement working?"
"With Dahlia here, Oliver doesn't cling to you, and you've got all the time in the world to sit around mourning your chest."
"Stop stirring up trouble when there's none."
The contempt in his voice made one thing perfectly clear. Things had gone off the rails.
But I still lied to myself. I told myself Rhys defended Dahlia because she was a good nanny. That it wasn't Rhys who couldn't live without her. It was Oliver.
Until the day I came home from the hospital.
Dahlia was sitting on my bed, nursing Oliver.
Rhys was pressed against her side, one hand cupping her breast, guiding it toward Oliver's mouth.
Pale, soft flesh squeezed rhythmically between his fingers. His eyes were glazed, almost reverent.
My scalp went numb.
Every ounce of humiliation I'd swallowed over the past weeks erupted at once. I lunged forward and slapped Rhys across the face as hard as I could.
I was shaking so badly I could barely stand. "You're doing this in front of your son. Does that not disgust you?"
Rhys looked at me. Cold. Dismissive. He spat two words like he was flicking away something dirty.
"Filthy mind."
"Massage helps the milk flow better."
"You read the breastfeeding guide, didn't you?"
"What, did they cut out your brain along with your breast?"
His tone was flat. Casual. And it froze every drop of blood in my body.
The same man who had knelt beside my hospital bed months ago and whispered that he was sorry was now using the most painful thing that had ever happened to me as a weapon against me.
The string inside me, stretched to its absolute limit, finally snapped.
I screamed until my throat was raw and tore the apartment apart. Smashed everything I could get my hands on.
I told Rhys that if he didn't send Dahlia away, I would jump off the balcony.
The look on my face scared him. He was afraid of a scandal, afraid of a death on his hands, so he sent Dahlia away.
But she was back within a week.
Oliver had gotten used to breast milk and refused the taste of formula. He screamed until his voice cracked, his tiny face flushed crimson, and no amount of coaxing could make him take the bottle.
Rhys hurled it against the floor. "What kind of heartless mother are you?"
"Because of your sick, twisted jealousy, you'd let your own child starve?"
"I'm telling you right now, if you don't agree to let Dahlia come back, I'll take Oliver and go find her myself!"
So Dahlia came back.
She walked through the door like a rooster strutting after a victory.
I told myself to endure it. Just endure it until Oliver was weaned, and then Dahlia could be sent away for good.
But every night, a rhythmic jingling drifted from the study.
I knew what that sound was.
I could picture it perfectly: the little bell bouncing up and down, two naked bodies tangled together.
That sound burrowed into my brain. It was driving me insane.
More than once, I stood outside the study door with a hammer in my hand. But I never swung it. I never smashed that door open.
Tearing off the mask meant divorce, and I couldn't afford a divorce.
Rhys was a lawyer. Given my condition, I would lose everything.
I could walk away from the wealth I'd spent ten years building. But the child I'd nearly died to bring into this world? How could I just hand him over?
How could I have known then...
That later, I would willingly abandon everything just to run, all because of one sentence from that little boy.
