When I was eighteen, Faye Ellison burst into my house and stabbed my mother eighteen times.
The police dragged her away, but she turned to the camera and smiled.
“Why should I feel sorry? No one should ever get to control someone just because they call it family. From now on, Chester will finally be free.”
Years later, when she walked out of prison, she found me broke, my résumé tossed aside, a cigarette hanging from my mouth. She snatched it away, threw herself into the Upper Circle, and fought her way up until she was the hard-edged chairman of Ellison Group.
After we married, every one of her passwords was set to my birthday.
And yet, when I opened her photo album, all I found were strangers, over eighteen hundred pictures, not a single one of me.
It was only then that Faye seemed to remember.
Expressionless, she wiped every photo from her phone right in front of me, tossed it onto the table, and said, “It’s all behind us. Just act like you never saw any of it.”
I pushed the divorce papers toward her. “I told you. Sign it.”
Faye slammed the pen down. “I already told you. There’s no divorce between us. We’re stuck together till one of us is dead.”
——
Faye didn’t sign.
She said it herself. There would be no divorce between us. Only death could separate us, just like we promised on our wedding day.
She didn’t even look at the papers before slamming the door and walking out. Not long after, my phone lit up with a message from an unknown number.
“You’re Chester Hastings, right? You must’ve seen it by now. She was saving my photos back when I was still in school. Faye loves me, not you. If you don’t step aside, she’ll make you suffer.”
Untouched by the world, or perhaps shielded too well by Faye, the boy's voice held a naïve kind of bravado.
Before I could even reply, he sent over a dozen pictures.
Faye’s waist-to-hip curve was perfect, her collarbone chain draped just so across her waist. The large hand resting on her hip often forgot to wear the wedding ring she and I shared.
Not until her belly began to swell was that chain finally removed.
“Chester,” the boy taunted, “in three years of marriage, she never bore you a child, but she let me get her pregnant. Don’t you get it? What’s the point of clinging on? Listen, if you don’t back off, I’ll move right into your house. Let’s see then who Faye will stand beside, you or me?”
I thought back over the last year, the months she spent away from home. A bitter smile tugged at my lips.
When Faye returned and saw the chat logs, she saw the shards of shattered glass and jade littering the floor, and she only arched a brow slightly.
“You have nothing you want to explain?” I asked, my voice ragged, mixing with the acrid smoke of her cigarette.
She gave a soft laugh, exhaled a ring of smoke, and sighed. “He’s just a kid. Why bother stooping to his level?”
Faye's tone was airy, like all those years of bloodshed and power struggles in the capital’s ruthless circles hadn’t fallen on us but on her and that boy instead.
“Yes, a boy like him doesn’t understand.”
I tossed a pathology report onto the table—genital organ, surgically removed.
She straightened instantly.
My words fell softly, almost carelessly. “So I taught your lover how to be a man.”
“Chester!”
Her sharp, manicured nails bit into my shoulders, leaving marks. I leaned against the wall, my back against it, as I slowly curved my lips into a satisfied smile, taking in the sight of her eyes, now red with anger.
She had only wept twice in her life.
One time, in our third year of high school, when she saw my skin split open, my mom pulled me by the hair to the side of the road, ready to throw me into the Yellow River. She stabbed my mom eighteen times.
And now, with this boy’s manhood crushed, her fingers gripped my shoulders, demanding answers for my cruelty.
“How rare,” I murmured, “to see the great Faye Ellison panic.”
