When Porcelain Wakes

The day we signed the divorce papers, we were both eerily calm. Across from me, Austin sat with weary, unreadable eyes. "Barbara," he asked quietly, "are you really sure about this? You don’t want Walter or Audrey?" I nodded, sliding the signed document toward him. "Just what’s in the agreement. The car. Westwood Villa." "And the two percent of Austin's Family shares you promised me. The children—I don't want them, either." My coldness seemed to sting him. His brow furrowed. "They're your children, too." A faint, humorless smile touched my lips. "Austin, we’ve been married nine years. I’m tired. I don't want anything of yours anymore. Except the money." He fell silent for a long moment before finally signing his name at the bottom of the page. ... Back at Westwood Villa, the first thing I did was take down the enormous wedding portrait in the living room. There I was at eighteen, dressed in pristine white, my smile one of pure, unguarded joy. My eyes were fixed on the handsome man in the black suit beside me as though he’d hung the moon. Back then, I was the university’s youngest, most dazzling prodigy. I truly believed I was marrying for love—marrying the prince from a fairy tale. Now, it was nothing but a joke. Carrying the heavy frame out into the courtyard, I mustered every ounce of strength I had and hurled it to the ground. *Crash!* Glass exploded into a thousand pieces. The face I’d once treasured was sliced instantly into fragments. At the noise, Andrea came running from the kitchen. She gasped at the wreckage. "Madam, what are you—" "Andrea," I turned to face her. In all those nine years with the Austin family, she alone had ever shown me real warmth. "I'm divorced," I said softly. Her eyes welled up at once. Stepping forward to steady me, she spoke with emotion thickening her voice. "Madam… it’s for the best. Truly, it’s for the best." Yes. It was for the best. I was finally free. But the price of that freedom was written across my body in countless hideous scars. It was my dead child, and my mother—lying beneath a cold headstone, never able to wait for the surgery she needed. With Andrea’s help, I packed everything Austin had left behind, then called a moving company to dump it all at the gates of the Austin Family Estate. When it was done, I walked into the bathroom and undressed. The woman in the mirror was gaunt, her skin marred by scars of varying depths. The most prominent one snaked across my wrist like an ugly centipede—a constant, grotesque reminder of my own past foolishness and despair. That was after I gave birth to Audrey, when I’d sunk into a severe postpartum depression. Austin was away at the time, vacationing abroad with his new flame. I called him, sobbing, telling him I felt terrible, that I was dying. His voice on the other end was impatient. "Barbara, what’s wrong with you now? Every woman goes through this. Stop making a scene." Then he hung up. That night, I took a kitchen knife to my wrist. As the blood began to flow, I felt a strange sense of relief. It was Andrea who found me. She screamed, cried, called an ambulance, and dragged me back from death’s door. Austin flew back the next day—not out of concern for me, but because Deborah, my high-and-mighty mother-in-law, had called to berate him. I’d shamed the family name, she said. He stood by my hospital bed, staring at the bandage on my wrist. There was no pity in his eyes. Only disgust. "Barbara, haven’t you caused enough trouble? Must you make everything so ugly? Do you realize you nearly cost the company a major deal?" In that moment, staring at his handsome, icy face, the last shred of love in my heart bled out—just like the blood from my wrist. From then on, I never loved him again. I stayed only for my children. For my sick mother, waiting far away in our hometown. I thought if I just endured, if I waited it out, the clouds would eventually part. I was wrong. In the Austin Family, endurance and retreat only invited more severe bullying—more crushing humiliation.