My Husband Had a One-Year-Old Daughter While I Was Still Pregnant! Oops, Marriage Over Chapter 08

My Husband Had a One-Year-Old Daughter While I Was Still Pregnant! Oops, Marriage Over Chapter 08

Derek tried to throw money at the problem-buy Megan off with a lump sum and ship her back to her hometown to prove his loyalty to me.

Megan wasn’t having it.

She’d already figured out exactly how far Derek had fallen, and not only did she refuse to leave- she started throwing fits.

“You think you can toss me a few bucks and make me disappear? In your dreams!” Megan paced the living room with the baby on her hip, sobbing and shrieking by turns. “I gave you the best years of my life! I had your child! And now that you’ve got no money and no power, you want to kick me to the curb so you can go crawling back to your little princess? Over my dead body, Derek!”

But what really broke him was his own mother.

Instead of helping him push Megan out, she took Megan’s side.

“Why are you trying to get rid of her?” She jabbed her finger into Derek’s chest. “Zoe won’t even look at you anymore. You really think you can win her back? At least Megan gave this family an heir.

You can barely hold on to a job right now-you should count yourself lucky any woman is still willing to stick around!”

Every day, Derek endured the humiliation at the office, then dragged himself home to face not a warm meal but Megan’s demands for designer handbags and his mother’s relentless nagging and

favoritism.

His stomach problems came roaring back. Some nights the pain doubled him over on the couch.

Megan never once made him soup. She told him his groaning was annoying, picked up the baby, and went to sleep in the other room.

During those endless nights when the pain kept him staring at the ceiling, Derek started to remember.

He remembered the slow-cooked chicken soup I used to have simmering on the stove every single evening without fail, timed to the minute he walked through the door. He remembered coming home to a house that ran like clockwork-his shirts pressed, his ties laid out, not a single wrinkle. He remembered the way I could pick up the phone and make one call to untangle whatever mess he’d gotten himself into, calm and unhurried, like it was nothing.

He finally understood. The “perfect wife” who had made him feel suffocated, who he claimed had stripped him of his dignity-she was the only person in the world who had ever truly, selflessly had his back.

And Megan, the woman he’d chosen because she made him feel like a man? She was nothing but a leech.

He started showing up at my door like a man possessed.

Every evening after work, his car would be parked outside the gates of my father’s house.

He didn’t make a scene. He’d just lean against the car door, smoking cigarette after cigarette, his eyes fixed on the warm glow of my bedroom window.

Whenever my father’s car pulled out of the driveway, he’d lunge at it like a stray dog, slapping the window with both hands, eyes bloodshot, begging.

“Dad, please just let me see Zoe. I know I was wrong-

My father never even lowered the window. He simply told the driver, in a voice as flat as pavement:

“Drive.”

For two straight weeks-rain, wind, didn’t matter-Derek was out there, every single night.

Security chased him off multiple times. Even when they shoved him hard enough to knock him down, he clung to the iron gate and refused to leave.

One night, a heavy storm rolled in. The temperature plummeted.

I stood on the second-floor balcony, holding a cup of hot tea, looking down at the familiar black

sedan parked outside the gate.

Derek was soaked to the bone. No umbrella. He stood in the downpour like a statue, face tilted upward, staring at my floor.

My phone buzzed once.

A text from Derek. The first message he’d sent since I’d moved out.

[Zoe, I’m in so much pain. My stomach. My heart. All of it.]

[I finally know what it means to be nothing without you.]

[Just look at me. One look. Please.]