After my thirty-second round of IVF, I was finally pregnant with Julian Thorne’s child.
But the very night I told him the good news, he slipped abortion pills into my milk.
I collapsed in a pool of blood, my eyes burning as I asked him why.
He looked utterly indifferent.
Seraphina is already pregnant with my child through artificial insemination. I owe her too much; her child *has* to be the sole heir to the Thorne family.
I angrily demanded to know why my baby had to die just because Seraphina was pregnant.
Julian Thorne sneered.
“Whose fault is it that you tried for years and failed to conceive?”
“Seraphina was just trying to help me have a child; I can’t betray her good intentions.”
“Besides, haven’t I already given you the title of Mrs. Thorne? You have more than enough; you have no right to compete with Seraphina anymore.”
My tears ran dry, and I closed my eyes.
“If that’s the case, I don’t want the title of Mrs. Thorne either.”
“Julian Thorne, let’s get a divorce.”
The words barely left my lips when Julian’s mother, Martha, who had always been so cold towards me, suddenly lunged forward and slapped me across the face.
“Divorce? What right do *you*, woman, have to talk about divorce with my son!”
“If it weren’t for marrying a barren hen like you, my son wouldn’t be in his thirties without a child!”
“I had Seraphina’s baby checked — it’s a boy! Who knows what you even had in your belly; if it was a girl, what right would she have to compete with my grandson for the inheritance!”
Martha’s questions came out like a machine gun, leaving me no room to defend myself.
In the past, when she bullied me like this, Julian would usually say a few words in my defense.
But this time, he just watched me cry with a cold, detached expression.
“Clara, you’re becoming increasingly unreasonable. You even dare to talk about divorce.”
“Why are you always so emotional? You never think about me.”
“Seraphina is much more considerate than you are. She doesn’t even ask for a title, only wants to help me with my worries, and she even offered to let you raise the baby after it’s born, saying it wouldn’t threaten your position.”
His tone was so self-righteous, as if everything was my fault.
I stared in shock at the man I had loved for over a decade, feeling like he was impossibly distant and unfamiliar.
We met in college.
Back then, Julian Thorne was a poor student receiving scholarships, while I was the sole heiress of a renowned corporation.
From falling in love to getting married, I endured countless whispers and judgments.
I poured my money and effort into him, helping him complete his studies, then slowly building a company with him.
I grew Thorne Corporation from a small startup into a top-ten enterprise nationwide.
He once told me, tears in his eyes, that I had illuminated his once-struggling life, and that he wouldn’t be who he was today without me.
When I first started IVF, Julian would accompany me, running around and taking care of me.
But after thirty-one consecutive failures, his patience for me dwindled.
I don’t know if he was influenced by his mother’s nagging.
He came to believe that the responsibility for not conceiving rested solely on me, and that I deserved all the suffering and pain that came with it.
During my thirty-second IVF attempt, the doctor saw my abdomen, covered in bruised needle marks, and couldn’t help but tear up.
Lying on the operating table that day, I silently swore to myself that if I could successfully have a child, I’d willingly sacrifice ten years of my life.
But when I finally had the chance to be a mother, it was snatched away by the man I loved most.
I lay in a pool of blood, my voice hoarse as I whispered.
“Julian Thorne, that wasn’t just *my* child, it was yours too.”
“Don’t you feel any pain abandoning this baby?”
I lay on the cold floor, blood still seeping out from beneath me.
Julian Thorne’s gaze fell on my lower abdomen, his Adam’s apple bobbing, as if a flicker of reluctance had crossed him.
But that reluctance lasted less than half a second before he looked away, his voice turning cold again.
“Clara, it’s not that I’m heartless; you have to think about me.”
“Seraphina has been on the operating table three times for this baby. Each egg retrieval was painful enough to make her cry, yet she didn’t ask for a single penny in compensation and even comforted me not to be stressed.”
“She’s given up so much, not even asking for a title, so I can’t let her child be wronged, can I?”
He knelt down, finally meeting my gaze.
“Our Thorne family only has one male heir this generation, and my mom has been longing for a grandson for years. You know that.”
“Just be reasonable, stop making a scene, okay?”
Reasonable.
Those two words pierced my heart like needles.
I thought of the past decade and more, how I gave up the chance to study design abroad to stay home and help him manage the company, all for the sake of being “reasonable.”
For the sake of being “reasonable,” I bit my tongue and remained silent when Martha insulted me for being barren in front of relatives.
For the sake of being “reasonable,” I endured the intense pain of IVF, lying on the operating table again and again.
It turned out my “reasonableness” meant nothing to him, only brought out as a bargaining chip when he needed me to compromise.
I wanted to laugh, but as my lips twitched, it pulled at the pain in my lower abdomen.
The sharp pain made me gasp, and tears welled up again.
Seeing me like this, Julian didn’t reach out to help me. Instead, he frowned.
“Don’t act so wronged. You’ve always had trouble conceiving, and this was only successful after over thirty attempts. How good could the embryo quality be?”
“Last time during the prenatal screening, didn’t the doctor say the risk was high? What if this child was born with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, or developed a congenital heart defect later? Am I supposed to hand over the Thorne Corporation’s legacy to a defective person?”
He actually used “defective person” to describe *our* child.
All the blood in my body seemed to freeze at that moment. I couldn’t even feel the pain anymore, only a chilling emptiness.
I stared at that face, which had once made my heart race countless times, and now it felt terrifyingly alien.
He continued to ramble, as if searching for more excuses for his cruelty.
“Actually, I’m doing this for your own good. Think about it, your body is so weak, even if you carried this child to term, you might not be able to raise it properly.”
“Now it’s fine, you don’t have to suffer the pain of childbirth, and you’ll still have a son to dote on. Seraphina is generous; she won’t mind.”
I had lost my own child, but he expected me to accept another woman’s child as my son, and to gratefully accept his charity.
I couldn’t take it anymore. Clutching my lower abdomen, I mustered my last ounce of strength to sit up from the floor.
The pain persisted, but my heart was already dead.
“I used to think that if I just held on a little longer, if I could just get pregnant, you’d go back to being the man I loved.”
“Now I know how wrong I was. How incredibly wrong.”
I slowly moved to the bedroom and pulled out a divorce agreement from the very bottom of a dusty old box – the one he’d given me when we first got married.
Back then, he said that if I ever felt he wasn’t good enough for me, I could use this agreement, which he had already signed, to regain my freedom.
I signed my name and placed the agreement in front of him.
“We’re done.”
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