5
Baesme SVIP Read all SVIP S
That Afternoon, I Filed for Divorce
By the afternoon, I had already consulted with a lawyer and officially filed a lawsuit to take Luke Harrison to court.
If he refused to go through the proper channels for a divorce, I had no choice but to take matters into my own hands.
I didn’t want to stay in that suffocating house any longer. I packed up everything I could and left.
There’s a tradition in my hometown: when someone passes away, all their belongings are burned to send them off.
9:16 AM D
<
But all my daughter left behind was a small urn filled with ashes.
Just like the day I carried her home in my arms as a newborn, I now carried her out of that house for the last time.
Luke’s calls came one after the other, all of which I ignored. His texts, too, were silenced.
Everything had happened so abruptly that I didn’t have time to find a permanent place to stay, so I moved into a hotel for the time being.
I planned to stay there for a few days, long enough to finalize the division of assets, before taking my daughter back
to
my hometown.
My parents, bless them, had been running around on my behalf these past few days. But they were getting older, and I didn’t want to trouble them any more than I already had.
A Final Meeting with Luke
A few days later, Luke and I met face–to–face.
He looked haggard, with red, bloodshot eyes and dark circles that made him seem almost unrecognizable.
IN
As always, he was dressed in a sharply tailored suit, but without my help, his tie was crooked, his once–polished appearance now disheveled.
For a moment, I was tempted to ask him about the boy’s mother, about the woman who had been hiding in the shadows of our marriage.
But I stopped myself.
We were divorcing. Whatever secrets he had were no longer my concern. Dwelling on them would only hurt me more.
To my surprise, the court case wasn’t as difficult as I had expected.
Luke had his own team of high–powered lawyers, while I had only a small, independent attorney at my side. I thought I would lose everything, that he would fight me tooth and nail.
But instead, Luke conceded to all my demands.
He even went a step further, amending the original divorce agreement to give me far more than I had asked for.
It wasn’t just guilt–it was something else, something I didn’t care to understand.
He handed over all of our properties, along with a generous financial settlement.
The fight I had prepared for never came. We parted on eerily peaceful terms.
When I finally held the divorce papers in my hands, it felt like the end of a long, suffocating chapter in my life.
From the day I met Luke at twenty, to the day I divorced him at thirty–three, thirteen years had passed.
Those years flashed before my eyes as I stamped my signature on the documents.
I saw his young, boyish face from when we first met, and the hardened, distant man he had become.
I remembered the butterflies in my stomach when we first fell in love, and the bitterness and hatred that had replaced them.
I thought about the joy I felt when our daughter was born, and the hollow, frozen emptiness that filled me now.
People always say time reveals all truths, that the fog of uncertainty eventually clears.
But maybe love doesn’t end with a bang. Maybe it slips away quietly, like a tide receding, leaving nothing but the cold, barren shore.
When I first met Luke, I was the one who approached him, nervously introducing myself with a smile.
He barely glanced at me before walking away, leaving me to watch his back as he disappeared.
9:16 AM
く
When we parted, it was his turn to say goodbye.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t even look back. I just kept walking, just as he had all those years ago.
