Theater: NovelMaster | Language: English | NEW
Synopsis
On Valentine's Day, my husband's kept woman delivered a bouquet to my door.
The flowers looked wilted, and tucked between the petals was a greeting card.
It was covered in childish scribbles and sticky, sugary fingerprints.
The woman gasped with exaggerated shock, plastering a fake, mocking apology across her face.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, sweetie. My little boy got carried away with his crayons."
"Then again, maybe you're the one who needs to grow up."
"You barren bitch. Julian and I have had a two-year-old son together, yet you're still clinging to him like a parasite."
Listening to her, I offered a faint smile and flicked the card right into her chest.
"Is that so? Because just yesterday, Julian was begging me to let him bring that bastard home so I could raise him."
When I opened the door, the sight of the woman caught me slightly off guard.
She wore a skintight, revealing dress that hugged every curve of her body.
Catching my eye, she flashed a smile that was anything but kind. "Ma'am, these flowers are from your husband. He told me to tell you: Happy Valentine's Day."
Her tone was bizarre, and her expression was even stranger.
A twisted mix of contempt and smug satisfaction.
I sized her up. I had never seen a courier dress like a high-end escort just to drop off flowers.
Besides, Julian and I had just had an explosive fight the night before.
Connecting the dots, I instantly figured out who this woman was.
I glanced down at the bouquet she held out. Roses. My least favorite flowers in the world.
The fiery red petals were already withering, their edges blackened like they had just been fished out of a dumpster.
A wave of cold amusement washed over me. Even if Julian was cheating, he would never order flowers this cheap for me.
The woman stared at me, her eyes screaming a deliberate provocation.
Not wanting to ruin her little performance, I took the bouquet.
That was when I noticed the card tucked deep between the thorns.
I pulled it out with two fingers. It was covered in toddler scribbles, stained with milk and sugar, with a faint, sticky handprint right in the center.
I looked back up at her. She clearly wasn't the type who could hide her emotions.
The triumphant smirk on her face was almost comical.
"I'm really so sorry, sweetie. Kids are just so mischievous. I have no idea when he slipped his little drawing in there."
I stayed silent, staring at her coldly. After a few seconds of holding my gaze, her smirk faltered, and she reached out to snatch the card back.
As her arm extended, a familiar wave of cheap, suffocating perfume hit my nose.
In that exact second, I was one hundred percent certain of her identity.
Seeing that I wasn't flinching, her face darkened. She awkwardly pulled her hand back, and the mockery in her voice turned sharp and vicious.
"Then again, maybe the real problem here is you, sweetie."
"You're nothing but a broken woman who can't pop out a baby. Julian and I already have a two-year-old son, and you're still stubbornly hogging him."
Listening to her vitriol, I let out a soft laugh. Twirling the card between my fingers, I snapped my wrist and hurled it straight into her face.
"Is that so? Because just yesterday, Julian was begging me to let him bring that bastard home so I could raise him."I had discovered Julian's infidelity two weeks ago.
That day, I had been caught in a downpour during my period, and debilitating cramps left me bedridden and shivering.
Julian stayed home all day, pretending to work remotely just to look after me. But by evening, as my fever spiked, his phone rang. Before I could even say a word, he told me there was a massive crisis at the office and rushed out.
I lay in bed alone, drifting in and out of a delirious sleep.
It wasn't until midnight that he finally came back.
Finding me burning up, he gathered me into his arms. And in that embrace, I caught a faint trace of cheap, synthetic perfume clinging to his shirt.
It wasn't the first time I had smelled it on him. When I asked him once before, he claimed an office intern had sprayed it recklessly and accidentally brushed against his coat.
But I remembered clearly: that intern had resigned the month prior after a critical data error nearly cost the company millions.
Dazed with fever, I didn't press him that night. But once my temperature dropped, I found a single strand of long, pitch-black hair on his blazer—completely unlike my own.
I called his executive assistant directly, only to learn there had been no emergency at the office that night whatsoever.
The cheap scent and that rogue hair shattered my peace of mind. Julian and I had been in love for nine years and married for five. To admit he was cheating felt like swallowing poison.
Yet the ugly truth slapped me hard across the face.
I hired a private investigator to tail him.
Less than a week later, the investigator sent me a video clip.
In the footage, Julian was in casual loungewear, cradling a chubby toddler in his arms. The shot was taken from a distance, with no audio, but his lips were unmistakably mouthing the words: "Say daddy."
Hearing my retort, the woman standing at my door turned instantly pale.
"Impossible! Julian would never say that! Leo is the ultimate proof of our love! Why would he ever hand Leo over to you?!"
Watching her unravel, I slowly pulled a dying rose from the bouquet.
"If I had to guess, he bought these for you two days ago, didn't he? Celebrating the holiday early?"
A few days ago, I had combed through Julian's delivery apps. For the past three years, every single couple's holiday saw a bouquet or luxury gift delivered two to three days in advance to the exact same private residence.
That address was the secret home he shared with this woman.
The home where they supposedly raised their child together.
Deep, buried memories flared to life, and I realized the breadcrumbs had been there all along.
Two years ago, I smelled baby formula on his collar. He laughed it off, claiming he'd accidentally spilled milk on himself during lunch.
Back then, I teased him for being a clumsy child.
Now, knowing he had a whole second family outside, the timeline clicked into place with horrifying precision.
He hadn't spilled milk. He had been playing the doting father in another woman's nursery.
The tragic joke was, he truly believed the child was his."Yeah, that's right! Julian spends every single holiday with me first! He gave me these flowers two days ago!"
The woman seemed to regain her footing, sneering as she looked down at me. "I get every holiday two days before you do. Don't you feel like a pathetic failure?"
I looked at her without a word. It was just pathetic.
Arguing with trash like this was a complete waste of breath.
Clutching the bouquet, I stepped backward and slammed the door right in her face.
Julian and I had met in college.
Counting on my fingers, this year marked our exact tenth year together. Back in school, we were the only two students in our class on financial aid. He was a broke boy from a rural backwater, and I was raised by a sick, single mother.
We both took work-study jobs behind the counters of the campus dining hall, and that was where our eyes first met.
At first, we were just coworkers who barely spoke. Until one afternoon, a cruel frat boy pulled down my mask while I was serving food. He whistled loudly, shouting to the entire cafeteria that the department beauty queen was dishing out gravy, telling everyone to come look.
Not to be vain, but I was exceptionally pretty, voted the department crush during freshman year. Back then, I was intensely shy. Having my mask ripped off in front of a staring crowd turned my entire face bright red.
Worse, he didn't stop there. He leaned over the counter and dropped a filthy slur:
"Hey gorgeous, why are you selling food with a face like that? You could make ten times more selling your body."
The crude humiliation made my mind go completely blank. Several boys around him burst into raucous laughter.
The next second, Julian leaped clean over the dining hall counter, tackling the guy to the linoleum floor and beating him to a pulp.
After that day, Julian and I grew inseparable. Falling in love was as natural as breathing.
Yet looking down at the finalized divorce papers resting on my coffee table, my eyes stung with tears.
It would be a lie to say it didn't hurt. A decade of history is a hard pill to swallow. We had crawled through hell together to get here.
After graduation, we launched a startup from scratch. In our darkest days, we crammed ourselves into a moldy basement room for three hundred bucks a month, breathing in stale mildew, surviving on dollar-store instant ramen and fifty-cent discounted buns for weeks on end.
And against all odds, in that squalor, we built an empire.
I used to believe that the cliché of men turning rotten once they tasted wealth would never apply to Julian. But in two short weeks, my entire world had been dismantled.
Only now did I realize that Julian and I could survive rock bottom together, but we were never meant to share the view from the top.
At seven in the evening, Julian unlocked the front door right on the dot.
To be fair, over the years, he had performed the role of a devoted husband flawlessly.
I had set a seven-thirty curfew, and unless there was an unavoidable board meeting, he was always through the door by seven. Once our company stabilized, I stepped back from day-to-day operations to pursue my own passions at home. Julian fully supported it, rushing home every evening to cook gourmet dinners, constantly teasing that he was going to pamper me plump.
Throughout all these years, he had never once raised his voice at me, quietly taking on most of the heavy chores. Who could have ever guessed that this gentle, picture-perfect husband was playing house with another woman on the side?
"Babe?" Catching sight of me on the sofa, Julian called out with a cautious, timid tone. When I gave no response, he circled the couch carrying a bakery box. Setting the cake down, he dropped onto one knee in front of me and pulled out a velvet box containing a dazzling diamond necklace.
I recognized it instantly. When he accompanied me window-shopping last month, I had lingered on it for a few seconds.
The price tag was roughly one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
I looked down at Julian. As wealth accumulated, he had evolved into an impeccably groomed gentleman. His eyes were deep and refined, and the gaze he fixed on me was still brimming with tender affection.
A wave of dissonance washed over me. It felt almost impossible that the man begging at my knees was the same man raising another woman's son across town.
"Happy Valentine's Day, babe."
Seeing that I didn't snap or push him away, Julian let out a subtle sigh of relief. He stood up, reaching his hands out to clasp the diamond necklace around my neck.
Chapters (3)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Watch & Promotions
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