She Was Never a Stand-In
For five years of marriage, David was the perfect husband everyone envied. He gave me endless gold cards and pampering, only when mentioning children, his eyes were bone-chillingly cold.
Until the day I was diagnosed with a brain tumor and accidentally got pregnant, I broke his lie that had lasted five years: he never traveled on business, but secretly financed a flower shop called “Sylvia” without telling me. The girl in the shop, Emry, had a face identical to my sister‘s, and she stroked her slightly protruding belly, calling him “baby‘s dad” coquettishly. I chose to leave
[Three years later]
I became the most dazzling new star in Milan‘s architecture world. When we met again, I appeared at a celebrity dinner on the arm of my real brother Eric, with a child beside me who had a pair of eyes exactly like his.
This once cold and aloof plutocrat now stopped my car in the rain. He knelt in the mud with red eyes, tugging on the corner of my skirt, and begged humbly, “Alice, please... look at me again.”
I just gently brushed the child‘s broken hair from his forehead, without even pausing to glance at him. “Sir, you‘ve mistaken me for someone else. My husband died in that fire three years ago.”