My fiancée, Loretta Keith, who I had not seen for a year, hosted a welcoming banquet for me even though she was six months pregnant.
Everyone knew that she was my fiancée and everyone watched with a smile as her assistant, Rico Hathway, busied himself with serving tea and water for her.
Then he looked at me mockingly. But Loretta ignored my doubts and my dark face.
She let Rico hold her waist and walk among the crowd to toast and declare his sovereignty.
What they were wearing were obviously custom-made suits of the same color. For the people who did not know, they would think that that day was their wedding day.
It was not until the end of the banquet that Loretta seemed to remember me and wanted to give me an explanation, “Tyson, don't be so gloomy. Rico's mother is dying. Her last wish is to hold her grandson.
“You know, Rico just graduated not long ago and I'm the only one he can rely on.
“Don't think too much. This is from a test tube. Rico and I are innocent.”
I stared at Rico's restless hands on Loretta's waist and could not help but sneer, “Very innocent indeed.
“Mrs. Keith is so cheap that you can even ask any Tom, Dick, or Harry to give birth to a child for him.”
——
This was the first time I humiliated Loretta in public.
Although Loretta's face looked very unhappy, a rare trace of guilt flashed across her face.
Rico seemed to have just noticed something and loosened Loretta's waist in a pretentious manner.
“Mr. Chapman, please don't quarrel with Mrs. Keith. It's all my fault. I have little experience and don't have many friends around me, so I can only ask Mrs. Keith for help.
“There are too many people this night and Mrs. Keith is in her advanced period, so it is always inconvenient for her to move around.
“Don't worry, I will definitely not compete with you for Mrs. Keith in the future.”
Rico kept looking at Loretta with guilty eyes and Loretta's already small amount of guilt disappeared in an instant.
“Tyson, please don’t be so stubborn and conservative like that. We are a liberal people in liberal country. What's wrong with hugging each other's waist?
“You were supposed to be by my side at night, but what happened? What were you doing?”
I laughed out of anger and snapped, “Oh, you 're pregnant with someone else's child and I still have to protect you?”
Loretta's tone became impatient as she responded, “You don't understand what I'm saying? How many times do I have to explain it?”
“Explanation? My fiancée is pregnant with another man's child. Can this be solved with an explanation? Should I accept this explanation generously?
“Even if you get an abortion right now, you still can't get over this!”
After a whole night of being suppressed, my tone of voice could not get any better and the pitch rose unconsciously.
Loretta was stunned.
Rico knelt down in front of me and said, “Mr. Chapman, please don't ask Mrs. Keith to abort this child. I really have no other help, so I asked Mrs. Keith to help me.
“What's more...” he leaned toward me and whispered, so that only he and I could hear the rest of Rico's words. “...in order to get pregnant with my child as soon as possible, Mrs. Keith aborted her previous child.
Her previous child? I kept thinking back to the time when Loretta told me the good news of her pregnancy one day after I went abroad and the next day, she told me the bad news of her miscarriage.
I was in a foreign country at the time and I immediately bought a plane ticket to come back and be with her, but she cried and forced me to finish my work first.
She said, “I have lost my child and I cannot destroy the inheritance that my father has entrusted to me.”
We all understand how critical this project was to the Keith Family company. Failure would mean the end.
So, I turned my guilt towards Loretta into motivation for work and I completed the project that was originally scheduled to take one and a half years in just one year.
I grabbed Rico by the collar.
