On my husband’s 60th suicide attempt, he succeeded—after Isabelle sneered, "You’re revolting." He jumped from the 33rd floor, demanding his ashes be buried beneath her window to watch her forever. I, his wife, inherited only debts and blame. "Clara, this is your fault!" His family smashed my head against the wall at the wake, forgetting it was me who dragged him from the burning wreckage, me who ruined my health reconstructing his face. Then my heart gave out. I woke up on the day of the crash. This time, when Isabelle provoked him, I didn’t intervene. I turned off my phone and entered the OR. Let them reap what they sowed. 1. “Dr. Wright. Your gloves.” My apprentice, Leo, held the sterile gloves with both hands, his eyes downcast, unable to hide the hesitation flickering within them. It was the twentieth time he’d snuck a glance at my face. I held out my hand, letting him carefully smooth the latex over my fingers. “What is it you’re trying to say?” His hand trembled, nearly knocking over a tray of instruments. “I’m sorry, Doctor. But I saw the message from your husband.” My fingers paused inside the glove. His voice dropped to a whisper. “I grew up near there. Blackwood Ridge… it’s a treacherous place. There are accidents all the time.” The operating room fell into a terrifying silence. I could feel the gazes of every assistant fixed on me, all of them holding their breath, waiting for my reaction. “He’s a famous actor. His agency has him surrounded by more bodyguards than you can imagine,” I said, pointing to the anesthetized patient on the table. “Instead of worrying about him, you should be worrying about us.” “Today, our task is to reconstruct an entirely new neural pathway inside her brain.” On the table, the young woman’s head was secured in a frame. Through the cranial window, we could see the gentle pulse of her cerebral cortex. “If we succeed, not only will she be able to play Chopin’s most difficult pieces again, but we will have proven the possibility of plastic reconstruction in the human brain. This will be a milestone in neurosurgical history.” “But if she dies on this table, every single one of us in this room can say goodbye to ever touching a scalpel again.” A fine sheen of sweat broke out on Leo’s forehead. The other assistants lowered their heads. My voice was cool and even. “If you can’t maintain your focus, you can all leave now.” At my words, every spine in the room straightened. Their gazes became sharp and focused. “Let’s begin.” The roar of an engine on Blackwood Ridge had nothing to do with me. I knew they were all worried I’d abandon the surgery and race to Gordon’s side. After all, he loved to make bets with his friends, summoning me at a moment’s notice, and I never once lost my temper. When it came to him, I would crawl, broken and bleeding, as long as I had a breath left in my body. Everyone thought I loved him to the bone. On our wedding day, he never even showed up. But I had stubbornly walked down the aisle alone, completed the ceremony alone. The socialites had a name for me after that: “The Devoted Saint.” The surgery lasted seventy-two hours straight. When I snipped the final suture, my fingers were spasming so badly they wouldn’t straighten. The moment I stepped out of the OR, the world went dark and I collapsed. I was dead to the world, buried in a deep, dreamless sleep until a thunderous pounding on my door woke me. “Clara Wright, you get out here right now!” My mother-in-law’s shrill voice pierced the door, mingling with the nurses’ attempts to placate her. “Ma’am, Dr. Wright just finished a three-day surgery. She needs to rest…” “Rest? My son is fighting for his life, and she has the nerve to rest?!” “So this is where she was hiding! Does she have any sense of duty as a wife?!” Annoyed, I got up and pulled open the door to my on-call room, only to be met with the blur of an incoming hand. SLAP! A fiery pain exploded across my left cheek. I staggered back, my body crashing into a metal locker. Stars burst behind my eyes. “Gordon’s condition is critical, and you’re in here sleeping!” my mother-in-law shrieked, her meticulously maintained face twisted into a grotesque mask. I could finally see the bodyguards standing behind her, blocking the nurses who were trying to intervene. “You’re a curse! It’s because he married you that my son got hurt!” The taste of blood bloomed on my tongue, and with it came a chilling clarity. I had truly been reborn. “Are you smiling?” Her roar made my eardrums ache. “If your family hadn't forced this marriage on us with that old contract, I…” “Who forced whom?” I interrupted, my voice hoarse but clear. “It was the Vance family who begged me to marry him. Have you forgotten? When your company’s stock was in freefall, who was it that came knocking with a marriage contract, begging for a bailout?” Her hand froze in mid-air. Humiliation turned to rage, and she raised her hand to strike again. I caught her wrist, my smile widening. “You’re right,” I said. “I should go see Gordon.” Not to save him. But to watch, with my own two eyes, as the man who had destroyed my life once before finally destroyed himself. The VIP room reeked of antiseptic and burnt flesh. Gordon was wrapped so tightly in gauze he looked like an unfinished mummy. It seemed his injuries were far worse this time. My mother-in-law threw herself onto the bed, her cries like a funeral wail. “My boy! My Gordon! What will you do, burned like this? You’re a star!” “Not only is his face burned, but he’s lost an eye.” She whipped her head around, her nails digging into my arm. “Are you made of stone? He went street racing, and you didn’t stop him! Don't you dare let me find out who talked him into it! I’ll make sure they have no place to be buried!” The same scene, the same lines. Last time, my mother-in-law had been just as hysterical. I had dragged Gordon from the burning tanker, suffering severe injuries myself. But from his hospital bed, he had pointed at me and said, “I wanted a divorce, but Clara refused. She lost control and crashed the car.” “I got these burns trying to save her.” His mother had lost her mind, grabbing my hair and slamming my head against the wall. “You curse! You were born and your parents died! Your grandfather takes you in and he drops dead two years later! And now you’re trying to kill my son!” She had shrieked, her hands around my neck. “You bringer of ruin! I regret the day my son ever married you!” Back then, her words had sent me into a trembling shock. The truth was that Isabelle had sent me a positive pregnancy test to taunt me. I had driven to find them, only to witness their sports car slam into the fuel tanker. I had tried to speak, but no sound came out. And then, Gordon had spoken up. “Mom, don’t be like this with her.” He had reached for me, his bandaged hand gently taking my fingertips. In that instant, all my grievances had dissolved into tears. “Clara, I’m sorry,” he’d whispered. “I just can’t accept what I’ve become…” I had squeezed his hand back, clinging to that fleeting moment of warmth, even knowing it would vanish, knowing he would be cold and distant again in the next breath. “I understand,” I had promised solemnly. “I’ll always be here for you.” I had willingly stepped back into the cycle: hurt, forgiveness, and more hurt. I convinced myself that he needed me. Until the day he snuck out to see Isabelle. He returned a hollowed-out shell of a man. “She said I’m disgusting… that the sight of me makes her sick…” From that day on, he started his cycle of suicide attempts. One moment, he’d be clinging to me, whispering, “You’re all I have.” The next, he’d have his hands around my throat, screaming, “Why wasn’t it you who was disfigured?” The hospital gave me an ultimatum: return to work or resign. I chose the latter. To fix his face, I worked day and night. I tested formulas on myself until my stomach bled, practiced new techniques on my own hands until I suffered nerve damage in my right. The day I could no longer hold a pen, Gordon had smiled, a genuine, happy smile. “Good,” he’d said. “Now we’re the same.” The last time, he slipped sleeping pills into my drink. When I woke up, he had already jumped from the rooftop, killing five pedestrians on the pavement below. The police handed me his will. It left everything he owned to Isabelle and demanded I transfer all of my company shares to her as well. Just then, on the hospital bed, Gordon’s eyes opened. A faint groan escaped from beneath the gauze. He struggled to move his right hand. His mother immediately grabbed it. “Gordon! Gordon, you’re awake? What are you trying to say?” Suddenly, the heart monitor began to shriek, his heart rate soaring to 130. “My son… my poor son…” His mother’s trembling hand hovered over him, afraid to touch the bandaged body. Gordon didn’t answer. “AHHH!” A bloodcurdling scream ripped through the room as his body began to convulse violently on the bed. A yellowish-red fluid of pus and blood seeped through the gauze. A raw, guttural moan was forced from his throat. “It hurts! It hurts so much!” His mother stumbled back and collapsed to the floor in terror. The door was thrown open and his father rushed in. “The pain! It’s too much!” Gordon screamed. “Kill me! Just kill me!” “It hurts… AHHH!” His body thrashed wildly against the restraints. His father slapped his own thighs in helpless panic. “Of course it hurts when you’re burned, son. Just try to bear with it…” Gordon forced the words through his clenched teeth. “Get… a doctor…” His father scrambled out of the room. But his mother, her face streaked with tears, suddenly glared at me, her eyes venomous. “Clara Wright! You’re a doctor! Are you just going to stand there and watch your husband suffer?” I calmly watched his heart rate spike to 140 on the monitor and took a silent step back. “I’m a neurosurgeon. The burn specialists will be here shortly.” Some pain, you just have to experience for yourself. The frantic footsteps of nurses echoed in the hallway. As the painkillers began to take effect, Gordon’s ragged breaths finally steadied. He lay limp on the bed, the bandages rising and falling faintly with his breathing. His mother held his hand, tears splashing onto the sheets. “This is a nightmare. Burned so badly… what will you do now? What will…” “Then I won’t be an actor anymore,” Gordon cut her off, his voice raspy. “Of course you can’t!” she sobbed harder. “You even hurt your eye…” “What?!” Gordon’s one good eye shot open. “That’s impossible! It was just supposed to be my face!” His father gripped the bed rail, his voice trembling. “How could it be just your face when you were in so much pain? The doctor said you have extensive burns all over your body. Son, what were you doing on Blackwood Ridge?” Gordon froze. “What happened? Who took you there?” his father pressed, shaking the rail. He began to struggle again. I slowly reached for the phone in my pocket, ready to expose the evidence of him and Isabelle street racing the moment he tried to frame me like he did last time. But Gordon closed his eye. “Stop talking. I want to be alone.” My hand froze. He didn’t blame me. He didn’t scream hysterically that it was all my fault, didn’t shift all the blame onto me. The phone slid back into my pocket, but my heart sank to the pit of my stomach. He had been reborn, too. “Mom, Dad, get the doctor to prescribe me some more painkillers,” Gordon said weakly, his voice laced with a feigned agony. His mother shot me a glare, as if blaming me for not thinking of such a simple thing. The moment the door closed, the look in Gordon’s eye changed. “I had a dream,” he said, his voice cold and sinister. “In the dream, I was in a car crash too. My face was ruined. And Isabelle… she found me disgusting.” “I tried to kill myself many times, but you… you fixed my face.” “Unfortunately, by the time I was presentable again, Isabelle had already married someone else.” My heart skipped a beat. That wasn’t a dream. It was exactly what had happened in our previous life. “I’m going to make up for the regrets in my dream. I love Isabelle. So what if she isn’t the Wright family heiress?” His expression grew more feverish. “Whether you agree to a divorce or not, I will be with her! I would die for her!” “So what if you’re the real heiress? I never loved you!” “The two old fools who arranged our marriage are dead! Why should I have to put up with the disgust of being with you any longer?” “It’s time for you to step aside,” Gordon commanded, his tone dripping with condescension, as if he were bestowing charity on a pathetic, unloved creature. “Fix my face. I know you can do it. Once my face is healed, Isabelle won’t find me disgusting anymore.” I stared at the man for whom I had once ripped out my own heart. There wasn’t a shred of guilt in his eyes, only a naked, ugly threat. “If you dare refuse, I’ll tell everyone that I was disfigured trying to save you.” “You know how crazy my fans are.” “And you’ve seen what my parents are capable of.” “No one will believe you. Just like before, everyone loved Isabelle. It’s the same now.”
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