Back when I was carrying Cherry, Claude and I picked out matching mother-daughter outfits too.
He was just as tender then.
Only now the leading lady wasn't me anymore.
My study had been turned into her bedroom at some point.
And my man, it seemed, had become hers.
If my daughter were still alive, would she have been torn from my side too?
A few tears slid down my cheeks, scalding every inch of skin they touched.
My phone rang. It was the hospital.
“Ms. Fox, the body has been prepared. We can only hold it for seven days at most.”
“We heard you still haven't come to handle the paperwork. If you don't want to come, we can contact the child's father instead.”
That absurd call from the hospital that day, and everyone remembering me as the wicked woman who let her child die to keep her money.
But I no longer had the strength to defend myself.
“There's no need.”
“The child's father isn't in her life anymore. I'll come right away.”
Cherry had never once left my side.
Her first time alone was lying by herself in a cold drawer, turning to ash by herself inside a burning box.
I don't know how many times I cried until I passed out.
My arms blistered in long strings where I'd beaten them against the cremation furnace.
The crash had been too brutal.
That tiny handful of ash, in the end, wasn't even as big as my palm.
I held the urn and sat alone at the roadside until deep into the night.
And finally I dialed the number I hadn't called in eight years.
“Mom, Dad, Ethan……I was wrong……”
My brother cut me off, urgent.
“You silly girl, you've finally swallowed your pride. Mom and Dad have worried about you all these years. All they ever wanted was for you to come around!”
On the other end, my father growled low with rage, and my mother wept softly.
“We already know what happened. I never thought much of that Sanchez boy from the start, all that ambition in his eyes. I never imagined he'd stop acting like a human being altogether! My poor little granddaughter!”
“Wait there. We're coming right now!”
My family's voices woke memories I'd sealed away.
I couldn't stop the tears from breaking loose again.
Eight years ago, Claude was just a poor student my family was sponsoring.
Then our relationship came out, and my father flew into a rage and pulled the funding.
It was me who threw caution to the wind, took the ten-million-dollar dowry my father had set aside for me, ran off with Claude, and bankrolled his start-up.
Back then we'd just settled into a shabby little studio in a strange city, and Claude knelt on the floor, gripping both my hands, and swore to me.
“Ruby, I'll work as hard as it takes. I'll bring you home in glory, and I'll make your father accept me!”
When I hemorrhaged during a difficult labor, he gave a full eight hundred milliliters of his own blood and dragged us both back from death's door.
He said: “Ruby, my life is yours. If you're gone, I can't go on living either.”
Every pot of gold, every achievement, he credited openly to me.
Until the company grew big, Maccabee Lewis was hired on, and everything began to change.
Somewhere along the way, the two of them grew closer and closer. He stopped caring about my red, swollen eyes, stopped caring when Cherry cried that she wanted her daddy.
He handed my work, piece by piece, over to Maccabee, as if she were the lady of the company, the woman who'd fought alongside him all this way.
Until the day Maccabee made one mistake that cost the company seven figures in an instant.
I was so furious I tried to fire her on the spot.
But Claude sent me packing back home instead.
And he trotted out the same line he always used to shield Maccabee: “Ruby, I married you so you could stay home and enjoy life as Mrs. Sanchez.”
Then he turned around and froze all my cards, so that everything required Maccabee's approval.
His way of getting back at me for making Maccabee lose face in public……
And our daughter, because of it, missed the best window to be saved, and died before my eyes with no treatment in time……
