The unfamiliar apartment was my prison, and Aaron held the key.
He confiscated my phone and anything else I could have used to contact the outside world. Before leaving, he tossed a cold remark over his shoulder. "Sign the papers when you've thought it through. Don't make me resort to uglier methods."
The door slammed shut with a heavy thud, plunging the world into a sudden, oppressive silence. The only sound left was the frantic pounding of my own heart.
I stumbled around the room like a trapped insect, desperately searching for some clue, anything to make sense of this absurd nightmare.
Finally, in a drawer in the study, I found it: a locked diary.
The lock was simple; a hairpin easily pried it open.
The first page fell open, and familiar handwriting leaped out at me—my own.
The date was six years ago. Three months after our wedding.
**[Three-month anniversary. Aaron didn’t come home. I called. A woman answered. She said he was in the shower.]**
**[I asked who she was. She laughed. "Senior Ariana, have you forgotten? It’s me, Reese."]**
**[I drove like a madwoman to find him. The usual club. Reese in a bathrobe, sitting in his lap, feeding him fruit. Aaron just frowned. "What are you doing here?"]**
The handwriting in the diary changed from neat and graceful to a frantic, desperate scrawl. Every stroke was soaked in despair.
Page by page, I turned them. The six years I had forgotten unfurled before my eyes like a silent, bloody film.
It turned out that less than half a year into our marriage, Aaron had gotten together with Reese.
At first, he tried to hide it. Later, he grew bolder. More brazen.
And me? I went from shock to disbelief, from hysterics to frantic accusations. I smashed his car. I cut up his designer suits. I even went to the headquarters of Aaron’s Group and cursed Reese’s name in the street like a raving lunatic.
I became the laughingstock of the entire Capital City social scene.
Everyone said a country bumpkin was still a country bumpkin, even in a gilded cage. She'd never be a phoenix.
The final page of the diary recorded one last event.
**[My hand hurts. Aaron pushed me. I fell against the table corner. The doctor says my right wrist is fractured. He says I deserved it. Who told me to push Reese? She’s carrying the first grandson of the Aaron family. He said, "Ariana, you disgust me."]**
I looked at my own right wrist, perfectly fine now. It had once been fractured.
And I had no memory of it at all.
It was like watching a stranger play out this tragic, ridiculous one-woman show.
I closed the diary. All the strength drained from my body.
Now I finally understood why Aaron looked at me with such revulsion.
For the past six years, I had lived as a madwoman—someone I would have despised.
