Three years. Three years of trying to conceive with my husband, only to be met with disappointment time and time again.

Then one day, in front of my best friend—who also happened to be a doctor—I casually took my daily folic acid supplement. She grabbed the bottle from my hands, her brows furrowing as she examined it.

A moment later, she crushed one of the pills into powder and studied it closely.

"This isn’t folic acid," she said, her voice dangerously low. "It’s birth control."

My stomach dropped. "That’s impossible."

But I trusted her. I sent the pills to a laboratory for testing. The results came back, confirming my worst fear. For three years, I had been unknowingly taking birth control pills.

Ferry Zach, my husband, had been the one giving them to me. He had always been so gentle, so considerate—handing me a pill before every time we were intimate, assuring me it was good for my health and would help with conception. He had been lying to me all along.

I was preparing to confront him when my phone vibrated with a message from our college friend group. It was from Chindy May.

The picture attached to her message made my blood run cold—a pregnancy test, with two bold red-purple lines.

Her message followed.

[Hubby, let's make a bet, okay?]

[Do you think I'll give birth to a little Zach or a little May?]

[I bet on a little Zach.]

Two minutes later, she sent another message, feigning embarrassment.

[Oops, sorry everyone, I sent that to the wrong chat. I can’t delete it now, so let’s just pretend we didn’t see it, okay?]

A cold, bitter smile curled my lips. Any lingering sense of morality or restraint I had left shattered in that moment.

I replied calmly, my fingers steady despite the storm raging inside me:

[Give me a month. I’ll come with you.]

——

The group chat fell silent.

Then, one by one, the messages started pouring in.

[Congratulations!]

[When did you two get married? Why didn’t you tell us? We need to celebrate!]

Someone initiated a payment transfer, a tradition in our group—a small token of congratulations. Others quickly followed, sending their well wishes and money.

Chindy hesitated for a moment before replying with two shy emoji faces.

[Thank you all for your blessings. Please, let’s not make a big deal out of it. Just pretend you didn’t see anything.]

How could they pretend? This group was full of Ferry’s college friends—the same people he had introduced me to after we got married, saying, "These are my friends. You should get to know them."

Back then, when they had asked him who I was, he had simply said a friend.

[Introduce her then! Maybe one of us single guys will get lucky,] someone had joked.

Ferry had fallen silent. So had I. I had never truly belonged in that group. I had been an outsider, observing from the shadows. Back then, even Chindy had dismissed them.

[You guys act like you’ve never seen a woman before. Go find one yourselves.]

The Zach Family and my own—the Gardner Family—were both prominent and wealthy. Our parents had wanted a grand wedding, an extravagant celebration of our union. But Ferry had brushed it off. "I’m in the prime of my career right now. I don’t even have time for a small wedding, let alone a grand one. Let’s postpone it."

That postponement had stretched into five years. Eventually, I had stopped hoping for a wedding at all. It didn’t matter anymore.

Even now, his friends still didn’t know he was married. And they certainly didn’t know that he was married to me. Meanwhile, they all knew about Chindy—the woman who had once been his golden girl in college, his supposed ‘best friend.’

My phone buzzed with more messages, the screen lighting up in my clenched hand.

I stared at it, my vision blurred with unshed tears. My heart ached, but I couldn’t bring myself to cry. I had no idea how to process the pain, how to unleash the rage simmering inside me.

For a fleeting moment, I hoped—hoped that Ferry would step in, deny everything, call it a misunderstanding. But he didn’t. His friends laughed and cheered, tagging him relentlessly. Still, he remained silent.

Then, finally, Chindy sent one last message.

[Thanks again, everyone. Consider this a small meeting gift for the baby.]

[Once the baby is born, we’ll all get together to celebrate.]

"The baby will be born, and then we’ll invite the brothers to come out and celebrate," she said.

Their decision was made. They were keeping the child.

A suffocating weight pressed down on my chest. I opened the window to let in fresh air, but it didn’t help. Standing on the balcony, inhaling deeply, the cold wind did little to ease the storm inside me.

After a while, I calmed myself enough to take a screenshot of the group chat before silently exiting. But I remained sitting in the corner of the balcony, lost in my thoughts, until Ferry came home unexpectedly early. He pulled me up from the floor and shut the window.

"It’s the middle of winter. Sitting here with the window open—you’ll get sick," he scolded.

I stared at him, searching his face. He was fussing over me, adjusting my clothes, but something about him felt different. He wasn’t the same as before. Was it guilt? Did he finally feel remorse after what he had done? Repulsed, I sidestepped him, avoiding his touch.

"Don’t touch me."

He froze for a moment before finally meeting my eyes. There was something unreadable in his gaze, and then he said lightly, "It’s because of what happened in the group chat, isn’t it?"

"Karen, didn’t we agree before we got married? We were only doing this to fulfill our parents’ wishes."

"They’re satisfied now. I’m content. So what more do you want?"

Our marriage had never been about love—it was an arrangement, a necessity. The Gardner and Zach families had been close for generations, but while I had studied abroad since middle school, Ferry had remained in Europe. We had barely spoken growing up, our relationship nothing like that of our fathers. But when I returned home, our parents had pushed us together.

They had pleaded, cried, and insisted, "You two getting married is the best choice."

"We’ve paved the way for you. Why insist on going down the wrong path?"

"That boyfriend of yours? Forget him. We won’t allow it—not unless your father and I are dead."

They had stripped us of our bank cards and phones, placed bodyguards at the doors, and done everything in their power to force us together. I had no choice but to break up with the man I loved. And in the end, I married Ferry.

Before we received our marriage license, he had looked at me with cold detachment. "We’re in this together. As long as they’re satisfied, nothing else matters."

I knew he loved Chindy. But I never imagined he would be so brazen about it. Or that he would go so far as to secretly feed me birth control pills for three years. Our marriage may have started as a sham, but five years is a long time. To say I wasn’t hurt would be a lie. To say I wasn’t disgusted—an even bigger one.

I turned to him and asked, "So you want to keep the baby?"

Even as I asked, I already knew the answer.

If Chindy hadn’t gotten Ferry’s approval, she wouldn’t have so openly accepted the red envelopes from the group. She wouldn’t have made a spectacle of herself unless she was certain she had his support.

Ferry clenched his jaw. "Karen, I want a child."

The words made me snap. My hand flew before I could stop it, striking him across the face. The absurdity of it all hit me at once. I started laughing—hysterically, painfully—tears streaming down my face as I did. Without another word, I walked into the bedroom. The test reports from the lab still lay on the table, alongside the hospital’s diagnostic reports.

Fury surged through me as I grabbed them and hurled them at him.

"Ferry, take a look for yourself."

"The ‘folic acid’ you gave me—it’s birth control, isn’t it?"

He stilled. His hands trembled as he picked up the reports, scanning them with wide, disbelieving eyes.

His voice shook. "Karen..."

I cut him off, my voice cold and unyielding. "You fed me birth control pills for three years. And now—now you have the audacity to say you want a baby?"

"If you wanted to have a child with Chindy, you could have just told me. I would’ve hidden it from Mom and Dad for you."

"Instead, you disguised birth control pills as folic acid and tricked me into taking them."

"I can accept many things, but I can't accept you hurting me."

Looking back on these five years of marriage with Ferry, some moments felt surreal. For the most part, we treated each other with distant respect, but there were times when our relationship seemed... real.

There were nights when he would come home drunk, his body heavy against mine, murmuring, "Honey…"

"Do you think we’re happy? I do."

Then he would hold me tighter. I would get up to make him sobering soup, but he would pull me back. "Nothing sobers me up better than having you by my side."

"Just stay with me a little longer."

At first, I wondered if he was thinking of someone else. But over time, I convinced myself otherwise. I welcomed those moments, allowing myself to bask in the scent of alcohol on him, the warmth of his presence. He would give me small gestures of romance now and then. On holidays, he would sweet-talk both our parents.

Sometimes, he would stand in my parents' house, his arm wrapped around my waist, saying, "Don’t worry, Mom and Dad. Karen is wonderful. Marrying her was one of the best decisions I ever made."

Even if I always suspected it was an act, those words made me believe, even for a fleeting moment, that maybe—just maybe—fate was tying us together for life. Even if we weren’t lovers, we were family. But he had been so ruthless. So heartless, watching me take birth control pills for three years without a word.

If my bestfriend hadn’t discovered the truth, I would have kept taking them, never knowing.

His hand trembled as he held the report, his gaze clouded. His voice was barely more than a whisper, "I was afraid you’d be sad."

"I won’t give them to you anymore."

Two short sentences. No apology. No remorse.

Just an escape from the consequences of his own betrayal. I let out a cold laugh. Was he afraid of upsetting me? Or was he just afraid that if he had told me the truth, he wouldn’t get what he wanted?

Ferry’s selfishness and hypocrisy made me sick.

"You say it so easily, but do you have any idea how much pain I went through? How many nights I lost sleep, thinking something was wrong with me?"

I slowly took the hospital report from his hands and pointed at the results.

"The doctor said I took too many birth control pills. My hormones are completely messed up. It might make me infertile."

"You only ever wanted a child with the woman you love. Did you ever think that I should have had the right to be a mother, too?"

"Now that you’re satisfied, you don’t have to feed me pills anymore. But because of you, I might never be able to have a child."

My voice broke. The tears I had been holding back spilled over, my body shaking with emotion.

"But it doesn’t matter anymore. We have no future, Ferry. I hate you."

After confirming the pills' ingredients, I had gone straight to the hospital for a full check-up, hoping for reassurance. But reality wasn’t kind. I couldn’t escape the damage those pills had done to my body. When the doctor told me that getting pregnant would be difficult, I felt something inside me break.

That was the moment I truly began to hate Ferry. And now, my hatred for him had reached its peak. I would never forgive him. Without another word, I turned and walked into my bedroom, locking the door behind me. As I did, my computer screen lit up.

A new email. It was William Larson.

He had been waiting for me abroad for so long. Even after we had officially separated, he never stopped reaching out. Every week, without fail, he sent me an email.

And now, just as he had always done, he had written again. I took a deep breath, wiped my tears, and pulled myself together. Then, I opened the email.