I knelt in front of his friends. Every single one of them looked down at me with cold eyes. Not one would lend me a cent.
Only Maurice Fox—the quietest one in the group—
had wavered as I was being shoved out the door, then finally opened his mouth.
"Stop trying to borrow money. Look after yourself."
"Even if you can't raise the funds, Mick… he'll be fine."
At the time, I thought he meant inside the prison.
That those people would never just stand by and let Mick die in there.
Only now did I understand what he'd really been telling me.
By now, Tilda had already spotted me. She'd steered Mick into saying all of that on purpose, for my ears.
I could only listen, swallowing the humiliation, my face showing nothing.
What expression was I supposed to wear?
In two years, I had swallowed more suffering than most people see in a lifetime.
The day Mick's company was declared bankrupt and the police took him away, the house was seized along with everything else.
I was forced into a damp, freezing basement.
To pay off tens of millions in debt, I bussed tables, took overnight shifts sleeping in houses no one else would set foot in.
Two years of grinding myself down wrecked my body, and when I was diagnosed with cancer, when the doctor urged me again and again to have surgery immediately,
all I could do was shake my head with a bitter smile. "Doctor, I'm done treating it."
If I hadn't stumbled onto what I just saw,
I would have already mixed pesticide into a bottle of cola and drunk it.
But no. I wasn't going to let this cheap life end for nothing.
I tossed the bottle of pesticide into the trash.
Mick opened the car door with careful attentiveness, letting Tilda climb into the passenger seat with the baby in her arms.
I almost couldn't stop myself. I wanted to walk straight up to him, rip apart every lie about his bankruptcy and his prison sentence, and slap him hard across the face.
I wanted to demand why he'd lied to me for two years. Was it really just because I'd suspected Tilda was carrying his child and pushed for her to have an abortion?
I had gathered solid evidence proving the baby was his.
He was the one who cheated first, yet he'd looked down at me from on high and said I deserved to be punished.
But in the end, I did nothing.
I turned around, expressionless, and walked back to my basement rental.
Dark and damp, and I had lived in it for three years.
The bathroom was right by the front door, its walls crusted with mold that had built up layer by layer, a smell of rot seeping out at all hours.
When I first moved in, I threw up every single day.
For the first twenty-five years of my life, I had been pampered. The sheltered eldest daughter of the Gilbert family, never exposed to a single day of hardship.
An internationally recognized painter, award after award until I'd lost count.
And at the height of all that, Mick Weiss—the kind of heir every socialite in the city wanted—had proposed.
After the wedding, he spoiled me rotten.
Just like that, without seeming to lift a finger, I'd become the kind of woman every girl envied.
The media called me a woman who had it all.
Then the old nanny retired, and Mick hired a replacement: a timid, soft-spoken young woman. That was when everything began to change.
From the day Tilda Pruitt walked through our door, my things kept being moved.
I told Mick about it, dead serious. He brushed it off.
"Come on—Tilly's a nanny, not a thief. She was raised well. She's not going to touch your things. It's all in your head."
So I told myself I was overthinking it.
Until I came home early from a trip and found Tilda sprawled across my bed in my nightgown, rolling around in it like she owned the place.
Clothes and bedding everywhere. Tilda froze, the color draining from her face. "Mrs. Weiss, I just thought the fabric of your nightgown felt so nice, I wanted to try it on. I'm sorry…"
