Bias Wrecker

My husband was dead. He had saved a girl from drowning, yet he himself perished in the icy river. As I sank into a chasm of grief, the girl's father appeared at my door. He glared at me and demanded, "Where is my daughter's necklace? She was wearing it before she fell into the water!" Rage surged through me, and in the heat of our confrontation, he ended up dead. Then my phone… came alive. "Hide the body. The police are coming. I'll teach you how to dispose of a corpse…"

For five years, I was married to Angelo Harmon, who treated me like a queen, earning the envy of everyone around us. But my dream life ended when I discovered he had a second home with a younger woman. When I confronted him, he brushed it off. "It's just a fling for excitement. You’re still my wife. What's the problem?" His callousness repulsed me, pushing me to terminate my pregnancy and walk away.

I die in the corridor of the private hospital my husband established after being forced to give my heart to his true love. Before my death, my six-year-old son tearfully begs him to save me thrice. The first time, he holds my husband's hand and says I'm coughing up blood. My husband sneers. "Looks like she's learned tricks—she knows how to teach children to lie now." Then, he has his bodyguards kick my son out of the ward. The second time, my son grabs his sleeve and says I'm in so much pain that I'm incoherent. My husband frowns. "It's just a heart transplant. The doctor said she won't die." The bodyguards step forward and drag my son out of the ward again. The third time, my son grovels at my husband's feet and grabs his pants, sobbing and saying that I'm already unconscious. My husband is infuriated. He grabs my son by the neck and throws him out of the ward. "I told you Nadia won't die! I'll throw her and you out of the hospital if you come here and disturb Ruby's rest again!" My son gives his most previous item—a guardian angel pendant—to a nurse to save me. The nurse accepts it and arranges for me to be admitted to the last available ward in the hospital. However, Ruby Sharpe has someone stand before it with her pet dog. She says, "Sorry, kiddo. Your father's worried I'll be bored without my dog, so this ward has been set aside for my dog to stay in."

We had been together for seven years, yet my CEO boyfriend canceled our marriage registration 99 times. The first time, his newly hired assistant got locked in the office. He rushed back to deal with it, leaving me standing outside the County Clerk's Office until midnight. The fifth time, we were about to sign when he heard his assistant had been harassed by a client. He left me there and ran off to "rescue" her, while I was left behind, humiliated and laughed at by others. After that, no matter when we scheduled our registration, there was always some emergency with his assistant that needed him more. Eventually, I gave up completely and chose to leave. However, after I moved away from Twilight City, he spent the next five years desperately searching for me, like a man who had finally lost his mind.

Stanley Hamilton and I were basically Southport's favorite hate-watch couple. For Elodie—my oh-so-perfect adopted sister—he wrecked my company and had my parents thrown in prison. I, in turn, drove Elodie to her death, making him watch as she jumped off a rooftop. Our forced marriage? Just a slow ride from mutual disgust straight into mutual destruction. Then came the car explosion. Stanley, who'd hated me forever, still used his last breath to shove me out of the blast. "Vivienne Weston, one lifetime tangled with you is enough. If there's a next one, let's never meet." He touched the tattoo of Elodie's name on his neck, smiling faintly as the flames took him. After he died, I wandered through life half-dead myself until illness finished the job. When I woke up in the past, staring at two betrothal contracts, I didn't hesitate—I picked the guy everyone swore was insane. Stanley and my dad? I handed them right back to Elodie. This time, I wanted no meetings, no memories, no strings. Ever again.

My twin sister, Ruby Stone, and I split up after our parents' divorce. She stays with Mom, while I went with Dad. Since the divorce, he's sunk into a deep depression, gambling away every penny we have. We move into a dark, damp apartment, and life becomes an endless struggle. Every day, I go to school and quietly work a part-time job to keep us afloat. Then, out of nowhere, Ruby—whom I haven't heard from in forever—sends me a link to a live stream. "Check this out, Aria. There's a surprise waiting for you." I click it, and my jaw drops. I'm the one topping the trending live streams. The screen splits in two. On one side, I sit in my dingy apartment, hunched over homework under the dim light. On the other side, Mom and Dad cuddle with Ruby on the fancy couch of their sprawling villa. The comments came pouring in. "Let's see what happens when twins are raised on opposite sides of fortune all the way to 18." "Aria still doesn't know, right? Her parents never divorced. They're loaded and perfectly happy. Ruby's life has been like a dream too." "Poor Aria. She's always starving and never has anything decent to wear. Isn't that basically abuse?" "She's the more sensible one, so her parents decided to raise her poorly."

My husband, Jonathan Rivers, was a notorious playboy in Polesburg's elite circles. Beautiful women surrounded him constantly, yet he claimed to have fallen for me at first sight, saying it was a love that would last forever. He dismissed all the other women around him for my sake. Everyone said I was his destined soulmate. Seven years into our marriage, I had seven abortions for him, simply because he said he did not like children. Then on Father's Day, I saw him on his secretary's social media feed. The same man who claimed to be away on business was there with a child beside him, calling him "Daddy" loudly. It turned out that when he said he did not like children, he meant that he did not like children with me. I dialed his number through tears. "Do you want another wife?"

On my birthday, Connor Simpson's first love jumped off a building due to depression. She died on the spot. Connor blamed everything on me. I never celebrated my birthday again after she died. After the murderer electrocuted me for more than ten hours, they forced me to call Connor. "Connor, it's my 25th birthday today. Can you come over and spend time with me?" However, Connor did not notice anything unusual. His voice was laced with venomous iciness. "Clarisse Winter, Audrey wouldn't have died if it weren't for you. How dare you ask me to celebrate your birthday? If only you were the one who died." I heard him coaxing a woman on the other end just before he hung up on me. That low and gentle tone was what I loved to hear the most in the past. That night, the murderer cut my body into countless pieces, packed them in bags, and threw them in front of the police station. Connor was summoned back overnight. He spent two days and two nights piecing together the body parts, but he did not realize that the dead person was the wife that he hated the most.

My boyfriend's childhood sweetheart bound herself to a transfer system: everything she ate would be redirected straight into my stomach. She opened a streaming account and broadcast herself eating for twelve hours straight. She earned a fortune. Meanwhile, I collapsed with acute pancreatitis and was rushed to the hospital. When I explained the situation to my boyfriend, he only stared at me like I was insane. "How could something that absurd exist? If food could really be transferred, no one in the world would ever starve. You're just jealous that she's making money from streaming." After that, every time his childhood sweetheart went live, I ended up hospitalized again. I kept hovering between life and death. I sought medical help, but the doctors couldn't explain my condition. Some even wanted to commit me to a psychiatric ward. Then, one day, in order to outdo her rivals in a PK match, she devoured ten pounds of rice in a single sitting. At that very moment, my spleen and stomach ruptured, and I bled to death on the spot. When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day of her very first livestream. This time, I was prepared. I rushed out and bought twenty takeout meals. "This time," I said, "I'll eat first."

I was in love with Andy Spraggins for five years, and it left me emotionally drained. In the end, I married Philip Watson, the childhood friend who had always stayed by my side. Everyone saw us as the perfect couple. We even had a sweet little boy together. I thought he was the light that had always been there for me. But one day, I unlocked his old phone. [If you come back, I'll divorce her right away. [You've always been the one I loved.] So it turned out that what I thought was true love was just a joke. I was nothing more than a stand-in, something to pass the time. Even my own son seemed to prefer her. So I cut all ties and walked away without hesitation. But then the father and son both panicked. "Babe, can you please not leave?" "Mommy, please don't go…"