All Chapters of After the Body Swap, His Own Mother Broke Him: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

At nine that morning, I left the lounge in Kevin's $4,000 custom suit and walked into his private office.He used to come home every day and slam his briefcase onto the couch. Then he would point a finger in my face and unload."Do you have any idea how exhausting my job is? Do you know how much pressure I'm under every single day?"You sit at home living the good life. How can you not even manage one decent meal?"I used to believe his workplace really was a battlefield.But when I pushed open the door to that spacious, sunlit private office, I couldn't help letting out a cold laugh.The room advertised comfort at every turn: a leather executive chair, climate control, and a high-end coffee station.Beside the coffee station stood a whole row of out-of-print collectibles for killing time. Outside the door, every employee who saw me greeted me with a deferential, "Good morning, Kevin."This was unbearable pressure? This was work so grueling he couldn't survive it?At ten sharp, the sec

At two that afternoon, I had just come out of a department meeting at the office.A young colleague in a tight pencil skirt, drenched in perfume, appeared at my office door.She swayed into my office with a cup of boba in hand. Her name was Alice Reed. She was famous in the department for being two-faced, and she was Kevin's favorite office confidante."Kevin." She drew the name out in a sugary voice and pushed a report across to me, deliberately bending low enough to show off a generous amount of cleavage. "This data is so complicated. I can't figure it out. Could you do it for me?"Kevin used to eat this up. He would gladly do her work for her, then come home and sneer at me."Look at Alice. She's beautiful and knows how to talk to people. Not like you, walking around like some worn-out old housewife. It turns my stomach."I leaned back in the chair and watched her quietly. I didn't take the report, and I didn't touch the boba."Alice." I borrowed the hard, clipped tone Kevin used wh

Kevin was hauled back to the farm.The former sales manager was now beaten out of bed with a broom before dawn every day, then forced to wash filthy clothes, shovel manure, and work sixteen-hour days.The hands that used to do nothing but type and sign contracts were now covered with chilblains and blood-filled blisters.He tried to run. But he had no state ID and no cash. He had barely made it a quarter mile down the road when Sofia rounded up nearby relatives, dragged him back, and beat him until he could not get out of bed for three days.His one hope was the tenth of the next month. That was the day his salary used to land.He knew I had always used an authorized-user card tied to his account. When they took him away, he had hidden the old phone in the crotch of his pants so well that no one found it. He planned to buy a bus ticket in secret the moment his salary landed and escape back to the city.Before dawn on the tenth, he hid in the mildewed storeroom, turned on the phone with

The day the divorce was finalized, heavy snow came down over the city.Sofia drove Kevin out of the house with a broom. In that thin, ragged winter coat, holding nothing but a state ID, he walked along an unfamiliar state highway like a ghost, his skin purple with cold.A black Mercedes slowed to a stop beside him. The window came down, and I looked at him coldly from the back seat."Kevin."I said his name softly enough that only the two of us could hear. He jolted and turned around."Didn't you always say being a full-time housewife is the easiest job in the world, that all you have to do is lie around at home?" I looked at his weathered face, which now looked ten years older, and smiled."Well, you're free now. Go enjoy that fair society of yours where hard work is all it takes."The window rose slowly. It shut out the cutting wind and snow, and shut out his desperate howling too.In the rearview mirror, I watched him stagger two steps after the car through the snow, then fall hard