My Husband Realized He Loved Me After I Stopped Loving Him Chapter 01
The eighth time I caught him cheating, Grant Ashworth said nothing.
He simply picked up a bottle of concentrated rubbing alco//hol and poured it over his own gen!tals.
“Is that enough?”
His face had gone bloodless. He looked at me across the wreckage of the room the way you’d look at a lunatic.
Three words—the first time in his life Grant Ashworth had ever shown me weakness.
I stood frozen, gripping a shard of broken porcelain, and for a moment I felt nothing at all.
Because the time I went the hardest—I’d strapped bombs to myself and his mistress and forced him to choose between us.
In return, he’d tied himself and my parents to five trucks, bumper to bumper, smiling as he asked if I still wanted him to choose.
That was the decade-long war the two of us had been fighting—two lunatics locked in mutual destruction.
Neither of us would choose. Neither of us would back down. Neither of us would let go.
Right now he seemed to think I looked pathetic enough to pity.
“Don’t touch Chloe,” he said, gentler than I’d ever heard him. “She’s a normal person. She’s not like you.”
“Whatever payback you want, I’ll take it. This time you can do anything to me you like.”
I froze.
“What do you mean?”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes.
He looked exhausted as he tugged the corner of his mouth into something like a grin.
“It means I’m giving in.”
“Happy now? Isn’t this what you wanted?”
Yes. He was giving in.
But who was it for? The answer was obvious.
Those eyes of his, soaked in hatred, made the last ten years of my life look like a joke I’d been telling myself.
For one moment, a wave of helplessness rose in me.
I suddenly wanted to let us both go.
…
While my mind wandered, the shard slipped across my wrist. Blood came fast.
A flicker of “here we go again” irritation crossed Grant’s eyes.
He watched me for a few seconds, then crossed the room in two strides, hauled me up with no expression at all, and dumped me into the bathtub.
The cold hit my whole body before I understood what he was doing, and I started to fight him.
“Grant! I’m pregn— mmph!”
“Shut up!” He crushed the word in my throat with his hand.
He pinned my wrist above my head and stared down at me for two long seconds, disgust written across every inch of his face.
“You drugged me because you wanted me to sleep with you, right? Wasn’t that enough to satisfy you?”
I lay there, stunned, a wave of absurdity rising in my chest.
Somehow finding the strength to wrench free of him, I snatched up whatever was within reach and hurled it at him like a madwoman.
“Get out! Get out of here!”
He didn’t dodge.
He took it all with a strange numbness, as if he were long since used to it.
When I’d finally spent myself, he wiped away the blood trickling down his temple without a trace of feeling, and pulled away, cold as ever.
“The videos you took of me—I had them restored with some tech guys. Whether they go to the press or get printed as billboards across town is up to you.”
“The file you’ve been trying to use to blackmail me is on the USB drive on the desk. Use it however you want.”
He’d already assumed I wouldn’t let this go, so he’d laid out every weapon I might use against him in advance.
Because, at least, those were consequences he could survive.
He was afraid of me.
The clarity of it made me laugh until I cried.
“Grant Ashworth. Then why won’t you just divorce me?”
He paused at the door, as if the question itself were absurd.
“Would you agree to it?”
“Vivian Calloway. I’m stuck with you for the rest of my life. I’ve accepted that.”
Whatever hope I’d had left shattered in that instant.
“Please—just leave Chloe alone.”
The door slammed with the words, leaving me stunned and unable to breathe for a long time.
That was the third time in my life I’d heard the word “please” come out of Grant Ashworth’s mouth.
The first time, I was eighteen.
He knelt for three days and three nights at the gates of the Ashworth estate, without a sip of water, without a bite of food.
And when weakness finally brought him to the ground, he still held my hand—and said to them:
“I, Grant Ashworth, will marry Vivian Calloway or no one. So please—expel me from the family if you wish, or beat me to death if you wish.”
The second time was after I sank into postpartum depression.
He rushed to the rooftop and yanked me—who already had one foot over the edge—hard into his arms, his whole body trembling.
“We can have another child! Please—don’t leave me! Or I swear I’ll die right here with you!”
And this was the third.
This time, he was begging me to let him go.
I tugged the corner of my mouth into something like a smile, tears sliding into the blood pooling in the tub.
I reached, shaking, for my phone, and my finger slipped, hitting the emergency contact by accident.
I thought no one would answer, same as always.
But Chloe’s voice floated out of the speaker when I was about to hang up.
“Grant, cold showers make you sick… let me help you instead.”
Grant’s muffled reply came through the sound of running water.
“No need. I don’t want to risk hurting our baby. Or you.”
Chloe paused, and I could hear the smile in her voice, sly and testing.
“Then why didn’t you go find Vivian?”