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.”