My Marriage: His Debt to Another Woman Chapter 26

My Marriage: His Debt to Another Woman Chapter 26

After I was hospitalized, it became increasingly clear that I didn’t have much time.

In my final days, the most decisive thing I ever did was take back everything I had ever given Chloe.

I used to call it responsibility.

Now I saw it for what it was: an excuse to avoid facing the truth.

She didn’t deserve any of it.

Not after what she did to Elara.

I called my lawyer and had my will redrafted.

My assets, my veterans’ benefits, my life insurance—every beneficiary was changed to one person: my ex-wife, Elara, and the unborn child she carried.

Lying in that hospital bed, I tried over and over to imagine what our child would look like.

A boy or a girl?

Would they have my eyes or Elara’s?

I couldn’t form a clear picture.

Maybe my child wouldn’t want to see me anyway.

That day, Mike came to visit.

He looked tired, his expression complicated. He told me he’d just seen Elara. She was at the hospital, about to give birth.

My heart seized.

My child was coming into the world.

“She asked me to give you a message.” Mike’s voice was soft. “She said she and the baby are doing well. She told you to rest easy.”

Rest easy.

I lay in the hospital bed as tears slid from the corners of my eyes and soaked into the pillow.

Elara had loved me so fiercely, and I had crushed that love into dust. Now I had lost her, and I had lost the right to see my own child being born.

Whose fault was that?

It was mine. All of it was mine.

That night, I had a dream.

I dreamed of a baby in a white sleeper, standing in a place flooded with light. The baby smiled at me and held out its arms.

I was delirious with joy, scrambling to pull the child into an embrace.

But the baby soon turned and walked away, toward a light that grew more and more distant.

Finally, the child vanished into the white.

After that, I never woke up again.

My consciousness seemed to float up, through walls and down corridors.

And then, from the maternity ward, I heard the loud, sharp cry of a newborn.

Was that my child?

If it was, I had only one hope: that for the rest of their life, they would love their mother with everything they had.