Hypocrisy

"I don't want to go with you on this business trip," Lucy Landon said at the dinner table. Her voice was calm, so calm that no one could sense anything unusual. Steven Cooper's trip was set for June 1st. It wasn't their wedding anniversary, nor was it anyone's birthday. Just an ordinary Children's Day. Three days ago, she had stumbled upon a voice message on Steven's phone. A child's soft and childish voice had said, "Daddy, for Children's Day, I want to go to Maldove to see the fishes!"

The night before our wedding anniversary party, my husband—Harvey Clarke—receives constant calls from his first love, Cassie Moss. He responds by holding me closer, and I ask, "Aren't you going to pick up? What if it's urgent?" He firmly shakes his head and says he has already moved on. But when he receives news of her at the party, he breaks down right there and then, oblivious to the room of staring guests. When he tries to leave, I stop him in a panic, but he turns to me with a pure look of disgust. "Cassie's dead. Happy now?" The words hit me like a lightning bolt.

When my family went bankrupt, I was drugged and sent to the bed of my childhood sweetheart, Craig Kennedy. From that night, he brought women home every evening, tossing a divorce agreement in my face. "Beg me, and I won't leave you." He stood above me, watching as I humbled myself to dust, pleading to preserve our marriage. He even ordered me to kneel in his office and massage the feet of his secretary, Lucia Langston. On the day the Moore Group needed ten million to survive, she blocked all my desperate calls for help. I waited 24 hours, watching my family's legacy collapse and my parents take their lives. Craig, with Lucia at his side, entered the house and threw the signed divorce agreement at me again. "You wanted money to save your family, didn't you? Beg me, and as long as I don't divorce you, no one will touch them." But I signed it with calm despair. "Don't bother. We no longer need your help."

The day before our wedding, my fiancé Cyrus eloped with his long-lost love. I chased after him, but he shoved me away viciously, causing me to lose consciousness. When the doctor called him as my life was on the brink, all he did was scoff and say, “She’s just pretending again. In a coma? Hah, she’s still alive, isn’t she?” That moment, my heart shattered. After I was discharged from the hospital, I cancelled the wedding, just as he wanted. But then he began to regret it…

Imagine my shock when I found out that my husband, a professor who had proudly embraced a childless life for half of his years, had an affair with one of his own students. She even had his six-year-old son. The day I planned to report him to the university, Zia Thompson came to my door with the child and knelt in front of me. "Maybe you and Zeke were in love once," she said. "But he's over forty now. Who doesn't want to have a child? A legacy?" "I don't need a title," she went on. "I can give up the child too. I just beg you, don't tear our family apart." I looked at my husband, who stood protectively in front of them. I felt terrifyingly calm. "Cut ties with them," I said, my voice flat, "or prepare to be reported to the university. You choose." Without a moment's hesitation, he tore the report letter into shreds. I thought that was his answer. But on the fifty-second night of a bed grown cold and a home echoing with silence, he still hadn't returned. Instead, I received news that Zia was pregnant again. She had graduated by then. The report I never sent no longer posed any threat to them. Zeke didn't bother to hide his fatigue and irritation anymore. "Treat Zia and the kids well," he said, "or keep living alone in that empty house. It's your choice." My heart was already a wasteland. "I have one more option," I said. "I choose divorce."

My roommate is the kind of person who has to get to the bottom of everything and doesn't stop asking questions until she's satisfied. One night, while I'm sound asleep, she suddenly stands by my bed and calls my name, "Melissa, are you asleep?" Having been awakened by her, I shoot her an annoyed glare, but she just says, "See? You weren't really asleep. Otherwise, how could you have answered me?" One day, she decides to skip class. Thinking that I could help by signing her in on my phone, I do just that. However, near the end of the lecture, she suddenly bursts into the room and asks the professor, "I wasn't here today, so why does it show I was marked present? Is the system down?" The professor traces it back to me, fails me on the spot, and makes me retake the class. Later on, I join a speech contest. My roommate stands up in front of everyone and asks why my speech sounded exactly like her ideas. I get disqualified, lose my scholarship, and am labeled a plagiarist. Devastated, I climb onto the rooftop late at night. When I open my eyes again, I'm back to the night when my roommate first asked if I was asleep.

Three days after I died, my fiancé got a call to ID the body. He just scoffed. "She's dead, so what? Call me when she's in the ground." The cops, out of options, hit up my backup contact—my childhood friend. He actually laughed. "She's really gone? Not my problem. Burn her or whatever." Then my body hit the internet— And suddenly, both of them looked like ghosts.

I had anemia, so getting pregnant was not easy for me. My husband and I tried for ten years, and we finally had a son. When our son turned eight, he got into a car accident. The doctor said that he needed a blood transfusion, but his blood type was A. Both my husband and I were type O. My husband started to suspect that the child was not his and did a paternity test right away. The result showed that the boy really was not his son. I could not believe it and asked for another test, but the result was the same. My mother-in-law accused me of cheating and called me horrible names. My husband asked for a divorce and told me to leave with nothing except my son. We were kicked out of the house and ended up living in a cave in the mountains. A sudden rainstorm caused a landslide, and my son and I were buried alive inside. After I died, my spirit stayed near my husband. I heard him talking on the phone. “Don’t worry. I made her leave with nothing. We’ll get our marriage certificate tomorrow.” It turned out he had been seeing another woman for a while and had planned everything to make me leave with nothing except my son. What I could not figure out was how he managed to fake the paternity test in front of everyone. Luckily, I returned to the past. I woke up on the day of my son’s car accident.

In my previous life, I, Ruth Spencer, fell seriously ill. Because of that, I managed to stop my husband, Zayne Colman, from going on a business trip to the country border. He immediately canceled his flight, pulled me into his arms, and gently comforted me. Over the phone, he gave instructions to my younger sister, Reagan Spencer. "The project comes first. You go in my place." But no one could have known that the so-called business partner was actually a ruthless scam syndicate. Reagan had her organs harvested and was tortured to death. I was devastated. Zayne held my frail body in his arms and hoarsely promised that even though Reagan was gone, he would still love me twice as much. And he kept his promise. For ten years, he never let me suffer at all. In fact, he spoiled me rotten. This went on until the day I gave birth. The pain nearly knocked me unconscious, but Zayne put his hand over the call button to prevent me from summoning help. The words he spoke were laced with malice. "If you hadn't gotten sick at such a convenient time back then, Reagan wouldn't have gone alone! I could have saved her. "It's your fault she's dead! She must feel so lonely down there. You and this bastard child can go keep her company!" That was when I finally realized that our love were nothing but a lie. When I open my eyes again, I am back on the day he is about to leave for that trip to the border. This time, I release them to the path leading to freedom, or, in other words, to hell.

After three years of secretly dating my boyfriend, I finally called my mom. "Mom, I've decided—I'm coming home to run the family business." She practically squealed through the phone. "That's such good news! But... what about your boyfriend?" I stood at the door, took a breath, and said, "Don't worry. In ten days, he's history."