“You won't see a single cent.”
“Make a scene and I'll destroy your career first.”
“Let's see how you pay for your mother's treatment when you're broke!”
For my mother's sake, I swallowed my pride.
I begged him to lend me five hundred thousand dollars.
I offered to sign an IOU, four percent interest, paid back within a year.
He just looked at me with contempt.
“Wasn't your mother the one who was too proud to take anything in the divorce?”
“Then stay proud. Don't come crawling back to me!”
Deborah chimed in from beside him, all false sympathy.
“Lucy, I don't mean to lecture you.”
“But you're a grown woman. You can't just run to Daddy for money every time something goes wrong.”
“Your father works so hard for his money.”
I was shaking with rage.
And my father, like he was tossing change at a beggar on the street, pulled two hundred dollars from his wallet and threw them at my feet.
“Two hundred. That'll cover a few boxes of painkillers for your mother.”
“Take it and get out.”
Security escorted me out. I stumbled back to the hospital in a daze.
That night, I saw Deborah's Instagram post.
In the photo she stood in a Chanel skirt suit in front of a brand-new white Porsche, easily worth a million.
The passenger seat was filled with Ecuadorian roses, a hundred dollars a stem.
And Albert had his arm raised high, deliberately flashing the half-million-dollar Rolex on his wrist.
Underneath was my father's comment：
【Anything you want. You're worth every penny.】
My hand froze on the screen, and my brain buzzed and went blank.
Because in twenty years, even though my mother had built that company alongside him from nothing, lived with him in a basement apartment, stayed by his side until stress gave her stomach hemorrhages, he had never once given her a decent gift.
The year the company posted its highest profit, the most he'd done was stop by a jewelry store on a whim and buy her an 18-karat gold necklace.
Even so, my mother was thrilled. She treasured it like it was priceless.
But for Deborah and Albert, he spent millions without blinking.
I scrolled through the rest of Deborah's Instagram with trembling fingers.
What I'd seen was only the tip of the iceberg.
An Hermès Birkin for Valentine's Day. A private yacht party for her birthday. A mansion worth tens of millions for the two of them……
He'd even hired a fireworks show for Albert's eighteenth birthday.
And now, all I asked was to borrow five hundred thousand to treat the woman who had been his wife.
He wouldn't part with it.
I stared at those photos until my vision blurred, tears falling faster than I could wipe them, and the hatred in my chest grew with every hour until dawn.
But what finally broke me was my father's product launch, after my mother died.
He held Deborah's hand, looked straight into the cameras, and smiled as he told the press：
“She is the woman I've loved and been most grateful for my entire life.”
And my mother?
The woman who had endured his worst years with him, lying alone in the cheapest cemetery on the outskirts of the city.
That was when I lost my mind completely.
I pulled out the knife I'd hidden beforehand and drove it into them both.
Watching them scream and thrash and beg, I felt no regret. Only relief.
But heaven gave me a second chance.
A chance to do it all over.
This time, I would strike first.
I came back to the present, looked at my mother, and told her everything that had happened in my past life, down to the last detail.
The affair. How long it had been going on. The illegitimate son. How my father watched her die and did nothing. How, in the end, she curled up on the hospital bed in so much pain she could barely breathe, but still refused the imported painkillers because they cost too much.
I thought hearing all of it would change her mind about leaving the marriage with nothing.
But she just sat there, eyes red, shaking her head over and over.
“He wouldn't……your father wouldn't be that cruel……”
“When he survived that car accident……it was your grandmother who saved him……our family saved his life, and he swore he would always take care of me……”
