Chapter 2

At that moment, my best friend was lying in the hospital bed next to mine.

She was still very weak, yet she forced herself to stand and came to sit beside me.

Her eyes were red. She was crying quietly, trying to hold it in.

I thought she was mourning her own child.

I didn’t expect the first thing I heard from her to be an apology.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “When I went out for a walk, I saw a suspicious woman. It was so late, and I didn’t dare to catch her. She disappeared so quickly.

“If I had stopped her, you wouldn’t have…”

She wrapped her arms around my shoulders carefully, but her sobs grew louder.

My foolish friend.

She was the one who saved me.

I was about to comfort her when her phone suddenly rang.

It was her husband, Ethan, who worked in the fire department.

“You texted me saying you miscarried? And you even cursed my brother?” he snapped.

“Are you out of your mind? The babies had Vicky’s protective spell. How could anything happen? I told you already, Vicky is a friend. A friend. Do you even understand that?

“And arson? What nonsense are you making up now? At least make your lies believable. Do you know what my job is? Don’t joke about fires.

“Oh, you said you miscarried and want a divorce? Fine. I’ll divorce you. Don’t come crawling back later.”

My friend tried to say something, but her voice caught in her throat.

She could only sit there, crying in silence.

He cursed a few more times. When no one answered, he hung up.

“Claire,” I said softly, “you’re brave and strong. He doesn’t deserve you.”

She hugged me tightly, all the emotions she had been holding back finally breaking free.

“Maybe we never should have married vampires in the first place.”

We held each other, realizing how foolish we were to believe in love and loyalty from vampire.

My tears soaked into Claire’s shoulder.

Yes. They were loyal.

Just not to their wives.

They were only loyal to Vicky.

The woman who had once abandoned them for a human.

Only then did I understand why Vicky had deliberately mentioned the anniversary of her transformation that day and why our husbands had fallen silent the moment she spoke.

We had thought our weddings happened to fall on the same day as that anniversary.

We told ourselves it was just a coincidence.

We even believed what the two men told us.

We took care of Vicky.

We treated her kindly. We let her treat our home as her own.

In the end, it turned out we were the outsiders.

It was a pity that we only understood this after losing our children.