Husband Fled with First Love, I Saved World with Medical Expertise Chapter 02
On the third day after the outbreak, we were running out of food.
Evelyn stood before the open fridge, rummaging through the near-empty shelves before slamming the door with a sharp bang.
“This is all we had? Why didn’t you stock up sooner?”
“Adrian said there was no point. He thought the lockdown would be lifted quickly.”
She shot me a look. “Couldn’t you think for yourself for once? Did you really need my son to micromanage the pantry for you, too?”
I didn’t answer.
I drove to the nearest grocery store in the neighborhood, but the shelves had already been stripped bare.
A notice taped to the produce section announced that all produce was pre-order only, with a twenty-four-hour lead time.
I placed an order anyway.
Twenty dollars for a single produce crate: a head of cabbage, a few potatoes, some limp carrots, and a bunch of green onions.
Evelyn leaned over for a look. “Twenty dollars? That’s highway robbery.”
“Then you could go one day without vegetables. They’ll get here tomorrow.”
Her face darkened. “You expected a woman pushing sixty to go hungry?”
She pulled out her phone and called Adrian.
He answered.
“Adrian, your wife didn’t even bother to stock the kitchen. We were about to run out of food in this house. When were you coming back?”
She had him on speaker. His voice came through with a faint echo, like he was in a big empty room.
“Mom, the city is completely locked down. I couldn’t get back right now. Tell Claire to figure something out.”
“Then where were you? Since when did the firm start making people sleep at their desks?”
There was a short silence.
“Yeah… there’s a staff dorm. Don’t worry about me.”
She hung up and turned on me at once.
“Look at you. Adrian is bedding down in an office, and you couldn’t even manage to put a decent meal on the table.”
I said nothing.
A staff dorm.
He was in Port Kensington, telling his mother he was bedding down at the office.
For the first time, I found myself wondering whether she really knew nothing, or whether she knew all of it.
Dinner was toast with butter.
She took two bites and set it down. “I can’t eat this. It’s depressing.”
At two in the morning, a sound in the living room woke me.
The light was on. Evelyn was sitting on the couch, talking on the phone.
Her voice was low, but even through the door, I heard every word.
“…Good. I’m just glad you’re safe. How was Vivian? Is she looking after you?”
Vivian.
Vivian Sterling.
She called her Vivian.
“Don’t worry about the visa yet. Vivian’s family had connections. They’d get it taken care of.”
I leaned against the doorframe, my fingertips turning cold.
She knew.
She knew everything.
She knew her son had gone to Port Kensington.
She knew he was there with Vivian.
She knew all of it, and still she stayed under my roof, ate the food I cooked, used the groceries I bought, and berated me for my supposed incompetence.
“Don’t worry about Claire,” she said, her voice drifting through the crack in the door.
“I was keeping an eye on her. Don’t sell the house yet. Wait until the lockdown ends. Let her keep paying the mortgage for now.”
Keep the house.
Let her foot the bill for a while longer.
I stepped back into the bedroom as quietly as I could without making a sound.
Then I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
In that house, I was the only one who hadn’t seen the light.