My mother was the villainess of a story. When I was born, the story came to its end.

In the past, she was a rich heiress who drowned herself in luxury and pleasure. At present, everyone condemned her and spat in her path.

After my father, the male lead of the story, betrayed her, her family went bankrupt.

She knew nothing and had no skills, but for me, she was willing to learn from scratch.

I heard from the nurse that when my mother gave birth to me, she didn’t even know that she was pregnant.

She just thought that she had gained a lot of weight.

On the day she became bankrupt, and all her bank cards were frozen, she learned that she only had twenty thousand dollars left in her bank account.

Those funds included money she had received from her relatives as a birthday gift. However, she never touched that money because she thought it was too little.

As she stared at the twenty thousand dollars she had left in her name, she felt her stomach clench in pain. She went to the hospital.

Then, she gave birth to me. While giving birth to me, my mother had insisted on living in a VIP ward. She even said that she did not want to go to a normal delivery room.

So, one zero disappeared from the remaining twenty thousand dollars. She only had two thousand dollars left.

I had arrived in her life suddenly, and when my mother saw me for the first time, she acted like a complete idiot.

She was simply too shocked, because she never thought about having a child, not even when her love for my father was at its greatest.

After all, she needed tons of love, and only my father could give her that love. He could only give her all his love as well.

They had sworn an oath when they were children.

“I, Shawn Quinn, can only love Willow Stanton.”

While they were growing up, he honored his oath and only loved my mother.

When he was eighteen, he said, “I love you, and I’ll love only you.”

He fulfilled the promise he made when he was a child, and everyone knew that Shawn Quinn belonged solely to Willow Stanton.

Whenever my mother kept my father in line, those who knew them would tease them, saying, “Miss Stanton, you’re so possessive.”

However, the eighteen-year-old Shawn had felt happy with how possessive she was.

Her possessive nature reminded him of a green-apple flavored lollipop, and the sweetness reached his heart.

While blushing, he bid his friends farewell and ran toward the source of his happiness.

However, when he turned twenty-four, her possessive nature made him depressed.

It was like a dipping sauce that had not been made to perfection, but he could not spit it out. When it stayed on his tongue, it only brought him endless suffering.

His friends teased him for being a henpecked husband.

Whenever he heard his phone ring, his heart started sinking.

If a person could not find an outlet for all the pent-up frustration in his heart, he would start creating one for himself.

So, he cheated and fell for another woman.

He knew that doing this meant betraying Willow, so he kept it hidden from her.

In the beginning, he still felt guilty, but as the happiness he gained from his affair grew, the happiness outweighed the guilt, and he chose the other woman.

When all his lies fell apart, they had an ugly fight.

They insulted and fought against each other so badly that their home no longer felt like one.

In the end, they even swore that they would have nothing to do with each other anymore.

They got a divorce last month.

As the villainess of the story, my mother was insanely obsessive.

Whenever my father did not show enough love for her, she would start being paranoid.

She called him three times a day at fixed times, and she picked out his clothes. She also made a rule that he had to come home before 7 p.m. every day.

Yet even when she did her best to protect her relationship, my father still ended up falling into another woman’s arms. It seemed effortless—like tumbleweed carried by the wind.

It started with brown hair found on his jacket, then it was an unidentifiable perfume clinging to his collar.

At the beginning of their fight, my mother had stated clearly to him that he stank.

The cheap scent was so sweet that it made her dizzy.

In order to hide his guilt, my father had removed his jacket and feigned nonchalance as he said, “I went to the supermarket just now. That scent must have accidentally gotten on me from there.”

Later on, it was a silk scarf from some unknown brand. The housekeeper had found it in my father’s pocket.

When the housekeeper asked her about it, my mother realized that it did not belong to her.

As time progressed, they started sleeping with their backs turned to each other.

When they held each other, his gaze wandered.

My mother could not ignore such changes, so she hired a private detective to figure out where my father went.

When she received the photos, my mother could not believe her eyes.

He had cheated on her with the person she hated the most.

Perhaps it was due to her instincts as the villainess of the story, but from the moment she saw this woman, she hated her from the bottom of her heart.

She had a face that was completely different from hers.

Meanwhile, the model husband in other people’s eyes and the person who once loved her the most was holding this woman’s hand and even hugging her while working. They acted as if no one else existed.

They interacted with such intimacy that it seemed as if they had been together for years, even though a year ago, my father had badmouthed this woman with her in the middle of the night.

They had both believed that this was a manipulative witch who was highly skilled in pretending to be innocent.

Yet, like some twisted romcom, the woman had become her husband’s lover and the homewrecker of their relationship.

To salvage their relationship, my mother had tried talking to this woman, but the latter refused.

She tried again. This time, she went to the company to find that woman.

When the woman finally came downstairs, she was holding onto her husband’s arm.

The moment my father saw my mother, he immediately shielded the woman behind him.

My mother laughed at that.

“Aren’t you going to explain yourself, Shawn?” she asked.

My father did not answer my mother. Instead, he turned around to say a few things to the woman before asking her to leave.

Once she did, he tried to hold my mother’s hand.

He did not defend himself. He just confessed that he had fallen for another woman while apologizing to my mother and slapping himself.

Then, he fell to his knees and begged my mother not to file for a divorce.

My mother remained silent for a long time before she left.

When he thought that my mother would still insist on their divorce the next day, my mother forgave him, much to his surprise.

However, while she was fine with not divorcing him, he had to cut ties with the woman.

Then, things changed, and the woman sought my mother out.

My mother refused to see her, and she came to our house to find my father.

When he saw how pathetic his lover looked, he gave in to the pity in his heart as he left with her.

He only came back one month later.

It was dark that day, and it was pouring. My father came back drenched and smelling of rain.

Just as my mother thought that her cheating husband had finally come home because he realized how good a wife she was, he threw a stack of photos in her face. The sharp corners of the photos cut into her face.

It was then that she woke up from her dream. My father had not come to reconcile. He had come to confront her.

“Willow, you’ve become even more disgusting. I feel sick just looking at your face. How could you be such a horrible person? You know just how important the party is to Yvonne, and you still had people ostracize her?

“Don’t you know how many all-nighters she pulled for the sake of the party? Are you even human? Does the idea of someone else becoming successful annoy you that much?”

My mother was stunned. She never expected her husband of many years to fly into a rage for someone else.

In an instant, all the hurt she felt burst forth.

“Yeah, I can’t stand that she’s becoming successful. Why should a homewrecker’s life improve? Why aren’t you asking me how many times I’ve cried for you or how many all-nighters I’ve pulled for your career?

“Why should she become successful?!” she cried out hysterically. Then, like a wilted flower, she grabbed her hair, curled up, and started crying.

The cold raindrops fell on her collar, extinguishing all her passion for the relationship.

My father continued staring at her coldly.

He found this situation familiar.

In the past, whenever she cried this way, his heart would ache for her.

However, all he could think about at that moment was getting out of there.

So, he said, “Let’s get divorced.”

My mother’s mind turned blank, and she slapped his left cheek.

My father was stunned.

“I can’t believe you had the guts to say that. It’s your fault that we’ve ended up this way! I don’t understand it. All other couples will choose to face their problems when something pops up in their marriage, but you chose to get rid of me and cheat on me!”

My father flew into a rage. After all, they seldom put up with each other whenever they got into an argument, not even when they were children.

So, he shoved her against the mirror.

“What about you? Have you ever taken a look at yourself?”

Then, they looked at the woman in the mirror.

Her hair was messy. She had a long cut on her face, and her eyes were dull and bloodshot.

Before all her sadness and anger could disappear, she saw this, and she was stunned as she stared at herself.

At that moment, she remembered looking into this very mirror for the first time when they got married. They had been smiling back then.

Yet at present, one of the faces was filled with disgust, and the other with anger.

Suddenly, she thought that it was meaningless for her to get hung up on whether she should or should not get divorced.

There was no longer any love between them. It was not as if she could not live without him.

When they signed the divorce agreement, my mother checked the signed agreement multiple times.

Then, her attorney asked her whether something was wrong.

However, she simply said, “We’ve been married for years. I need a proper goodbye.”

She picked up the sheets of paper and said in exhaustion, “I just hope that we won’t see each other again.”

To my mother’s surprise, the Stanton family went bankrupt a month later.

When my mother learned of this, she was preparing to move out.

The house was registered under both their names, but it was meaningless for her to continue to stay there.

When she drove to her family’s house, it was left empty.

She was not expecting herself to have a baby in that sort of situation.

Despite losing everything, she got a child.

My arrival had pushed the fast-forward button to instantly divide her life into Before and After.

Even though everything had happened so suddenly, she accepted me into her life, only to realize that she did not even know how to take care of herself, much less a baby.

In the beginning, she kept up with her old spending habits and wanted the best of everything.

However, she did not know that she needed to pay twelve dollars for a cab to the hospital.

She did not know that the food she had eaten in the past was so expensive. She could not even cover the small change for a simple meal anymore.

So, she was forced to learn how to take care of herself and of me.

She never wanted a child, but she seemed to love me. She always hugged me and nuzzled against my cheek or held my hand while she spoke softly to me.

When the nurse took care of me, she watched from the side and learned like a clumsy, newborn fawn.

She deleted all the lowbrow literature on her phone and downloaded all sorts of parenting insights, though she often fell asleep while reading them.

I loved staring at my mother’s sleeping face. When she slept, she was quiet and beautiful, like a bloomed rose by a windowsill, swaying gently in the wind.

Whenever I slept, my mother would pat my back gently.

Once, she whispered to the nurse, “What sort of baby formula is best for my baby?”

The nurse replied just as softly, “You can try the baby formula from this brand. Your baby is tiny, and that’s because she didn’t get enough nutrients while you were carrying her.”

When my mother saw how expensive the baby formula was, she turned to me while I blew bubbles in my cradle. She felt troubled.

In the end, she gritted her teeth and ordered a whole crate.

Once she was done, another zero disappeared from her savings. She only had two hundred dollars left.

Even though I was given quality care in the hospital, I was often sleepy and had trouble breathing.

My mother never noticed anything wrong and said that I was a little piglet who slept 24/7.

The nurse then gave me a full-body checkup, and the doctor told her that I had congenital heart disease.

He even told her that I might not make it to adulthood.

The first few days after learning about this, my mother cried nonstop while hugging me.

She had not even recovered from her pregnancy yet, so the doctor asked her to calm down. He asked her not to cry so much. Then, he asked her who my father was.

My mother just kept crying and could not answer. She felt as if someone had viciously cut into her life.

She had lived more than twenty years of her life drowning in luxury and pleasure, so she was ignorant of how life worked.

Fate decided that she was living her life too comfortably and made her a mother, though she barely knew anything.

Then, as if thinking that her life was not horrible enough, it kicked her while she was down.

The nurse was displeased. How could she have married such a horrible, negligent man?

“You need to learn how to let it go. No matter the troubles you face, it’s nothing before life and death,” the nurse comforted her while patting her back.

They even hired a therapist for her, just in case she had postpartum depression.

The nurse would also often sigh as she looked at me.

She told me that she hated my mother in the beginning because she thought that she was not a suitable mother.

Later on, she pitied my mother because she reminded her of a recently bloomed flower that would lose its petals whenever the wind blew against her.

She met several such women every year.

Perhaps I was too much of a good, cute girl, because whenever she saw me, she wanted to take good care of me. She felt pity for me to be fatherless.

However, no matter how much others pitied me, the costly medical fees still crushed my mother.

In the past, she had acted maniacally in order to salvage a ruined relationship. She did all sorts of embarrassing things. She lowered herself to curry favor with others, paid others to make Yvonne Lane’s life miserable, threw red wine on Yvonne in public, and ruined her career opportunities.

Even so, she had always longed for someone to help her up when she fell, not laugh.

My father was the only one who ever helped her up, though.

Her parents worked hard for the family and never had time to educate her. That was why she was rude, arrogant, spoiled, and did whatever she wanted. No one tried to control her behavior, anyway. They only ever humbled themselves to her status and identity.

However, without those things, she could only wither away, just like how a newly bloomed flower would when exposed to even the slightest rain.

She knew this, but she did not know what to do. She did not know how to take something that she never had.

All she knew was to use everything at her disposal to seize control of the little bit of love that was given to her. In the end, she ended up with nothing, even though all she wanted to do was protect the fragile relationship she had.

After taking a few deep breaths, she started calling her “friends” to ask them for money.

However, the line was either engaged, or they insulted her the moment she answered.

Before she called the final person, she hesitated for a long time.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“It’s me, Linda.”

“I was wondering who it was. It’s you, Miss Stanton? Why did you call?” Her voice was full of mockery. “You want money? How much?”

My mother gave her a figure, but before she could finish, Linda snorted.

“Aren’t you rich? You spend a few million dollars at the drop of a hat. Why are you asking for money from nobodies like us? I do have money, but with your current situation, you wouldn’t be able to return it to me, right?

“Why don’t you bark like a dog? I might just lend you that money if I pity you enough.”