A Wife's Rage, A Husband's Fall

“For five years, I was a ghost in my own life, a silent wife to my deceased sister' s husband, raising children who treated me like their servant. Then came the accidental pregnancy, a tiny flicker of hope that was brutally extinguished when Mark, my stoic husband, ordered the doctors to let me and our baby die during a complicated labor. I survived, but he delivered the news of our baby' s death with chilling conviction, feigning grief while his eyes held only contempt. He gaslighted me, convincing me I was hysterical, that my memory of a baby' s first cry was a delusion. "Your duty is not to this dead child," he sneered, "Your duty is to Josh and Emma." My world fractured further as his cruelty escalated. He turned our niece and nephew into miniature tyrants who physically abused me, killed the only kind soul in the house, my maid Lily, for daring to question him, and then, in a final sadistic blow, let my parents die after I begged for money to save them. Lying beaten and broken, listening to the casual gossip about my parents' car accident, something inside me snapped. The old Chloe, the one who tried to please everyone, died on that cold marble floor. A new, more terrifying resolve began to form.”