Reborn to ruin him

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Chapter 2 What about your daughter?

The presentations started in our second year.

He would gently mention a project over dinner and I would ask questions because I was curious and I liked understanding how things worked, and somewhere between the asking and the answering I would start seeing the shape of it. The data that needed framing. The way the narrative should move to land with the right customers.

I would write it down after dinner. Just notes at first.

He would find it in the morning pasted to the refrigerator door.

By our third year, I was writing the full presentations, researched and structured and ready to submit, and Callum would read them over breakfast and make two small changes and send them with his name on the cover.

Then, I would wash the breakfast dishes and feel proud, that my thinking was in those rooms and it helped him shine.

His promotion came sooner than expected.

Youngest executive director in the company's history. He called me from the office and his voice was electric in a way I had not heard in years, and something in me responded to it the way it always had, that stubborn faithful thing that had survived everything and was apparently still there, still hoping, still saying, maybe now.

I cooked his favourite meal, put Lily in her good dress.

I stood at the door and I waited and I was, God help me, glowing. Thirty-four years old and still capable of hope in a way I now understand was not a virtue but a wound I had never learned to treat.

The door opened.

Nadia Voss walked in on his arm.

She was pale and ice blonde and wore a dress that cost more than our monthly groceries and she looked at our apartment with an upturned nose.

Callum kissed my cheek at the threshold, "You've outdone yourself," he said, glancing at the table and introduced her as a colleague.

He smiled at me the whole evening.

I smiled back.

It felt like perfection.

The next morning I watched his interview on the television after he had left for work, a wine bottle in my hand feeling proud of my husband.

The interviewer had asked, “What role does your wife play in assisting you achieve such a tough feat?”

He’d given that easy laugh which one was of his best features before he opened his lips to say the words that would lead to my demise or would it be my deliverance?

“Marrying Sera was me doing charity. If I had my way, if she had not relentlessly chased me, I’d have gone for the one I truly love.”

A scoff had followed, “I’m a philantrophist.” His laugh shot out like a bark.

The bottle in my hand fell to the cold floor staining the white carpet a bright red.

Charity.

Ten years of burned fingers, thirty-two missed calls, three surgeries and stolen presentations.

And I was charity.

For the man I burned my whole world for just to provide the firewood he needed.

I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to, my eyes burning holes into the television.

Then I picked up my car keys.

---

The cabin door was unlocked so I pushed it open with my free hand, my other hand holding firmly onto Lily resting her head in the crook of my neck.

I needed a space to rest my head.

I couldn’t absolutely confront Callum now. My world will come crashing down. And Lily …. A girl needs her father present in her life.

They were on the couch.

My first instinct was to apologise.

That is the thing about being diminished slowly. It rewires you so completely that even when you are the one who has been wronged, even when you are standing in a doorway looking at your husband and another woman, your body's first response is to make itself smaller. To say sorry for being hurt.

My mouth opened.

"I," I started.

Then stopped.

Lily shifted against my shoulder, small fingers tightening in my collar, and the pressure of those tiny hands was the only thing that kept me upright.

Callum bolted from the couch, then paused.

“Oh, it’s just you.”

"Sera." His tone was calm, like I didn’t just catch him cheating on me with Nadia Voss! Like he didn’t just call me charity in front of National tv!!.

The same tone he used when he needed me to understand that whatever I was feeling was inconvenient.

My knees threatened to go down. I forced myself to retain my last bit of willpower.

I refuse to let a stranger see me crumble.

"Why?." It came out as a whisper.

Not the confrontation I had rehearsed in the car, not the words I had lined up on the drive over, just this, just one small cracked syllable that contained everything I could not say.

"Callum. Why?."

He sighed.

My shoulders curled inward at the sound.

Ten years and I still flinched at his sighs. Ten years and my body still read his impatience as my failure, still rushed to find what I had done wrong, still scanned back through the last twenty-four hours looking for the thing I had missed, the thing I should have done differently, the way I could have prevented this.

“You’re such a piece of work. " he groaned, raising a hand to massage his temples.

"I," I tried again. My voice was shaking now, a fine tremor I could hear even if I could not stop it.

"I just want to understand. That's all. I just want you to tell me—"

"Callum." Nadia's smooth and sultry voice sounded from the couch.

"Allow me."

He gestured with a small wave of his hand without looking at her.

And that, somehow, was worse than anything he had said. The way he handed me off like a problem he couldn’t be bothered with and simply needed someone else to file away.

Nadia stopped in front of me, a full head taller in those heels and she used every inch of it.

"Look at you," she said eyes roving over me with obvious pity. "When did you last do something for yourself? Your hair?."

She tilted her head. "Your skin?, You smell like a kitchen, darling, like a hospice housekeeper."

My free hand moved before I could stop it.

Up to my hair.

Touching it, feeling the unwashed weight of it, the way it sat flat and dull against my head, and I hated myself for the gesture, hated that my hand had moved at all, hated that this woman had said one sentence and my body had immediately rushed to check if it was true.

I dropped my hand but it was too late.

Nadia had already seen it. She smiled, her tongue running over her bright red lips.

"Everything he has achieved ---," I began.

My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. I tried again, pushed more air behind it.

"Every project, every presentation, every idea his board has praised, that was me. I built those."

"Sera." Callum's voice rang out. A warning wrapped in patience.

"You know it was me." I blinked back hot tears.

"What I know ----," he started, coming to stand beside Nadia now, the two of them arranged in front of me like a wall I had no way through,

"--- is that you have no proof. No portfolio, zero professional presence. You have been out of the workforce for six years and you have made yourself completely invisible and that was your choice. I did not make it for you."

"You asked me to—"

"I asked you to support my career. You decided what that looked like. Don't rewrite history." He shook his head condescendingly.

My throat was closing.

I pressed my lips together and held Lily a little tighter.

"And your daughter," I said, quieter now. "What about Lily?."

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