Chapter 3
I was about to respond to Mrs. Thompson when I heard Samuel Hartley’s voice from the hallway.
41
“Mrs. Thompson, hurry up! The baby spit up again, and Lila’s too weak to hold him.”
The door to my room swung open, and Samuel stood there, momentarily taken aback.
Our eyes met, and he spoke with a nonchalant tone. “Our son is still in the incubator, so we don’t need Mrs. Thompson for now. I’m letting Lila use her. I assume you don’t mind.”
“Oh, and I called your parents to come take care of you. I’m too exhausted from looking after Lila to take care of you too. I hope you
understand.”
As he finished speaking, a few of his colleagues arrived, their arms full of gifts.
“What are you doing here? Lila needs you!” one of them said.
“What’s wrong with Lila?” he asked instinctively, already moving toward her room.
His colleagues followed, leaving Mrs. Thompson in the room with a confused look on her face.
“You’re really Dr. Hartley’s wife, right? Isn’t Lila just a friend? Why does everyone call her ‘Mrs. Hartley‘?” she asked, puzzled.
I chuckled. “It’s probably just a misunderstanding.”
Mrs. Thompson threw her cloth onto a chair in frustration. “He can’t correct them? He just lets people believe it? Seems to me Dr. Hartley
wants everyone to think Lila is his wife.”
Anyone unfamiliar with Samuel would see his intentions clearly.
Lila Whitmore had been his unattainable college crush. He never dared to confess, but everyone knew he was infatuated.
If it weren’t for that alumni gathering, I wouldn’t have realized that even someone as proud as Samuel could act so humbly.
When faced with Lila, he would always look down, unable to meet her gaze.
His old college friends would joke with the newly divorced Lila, saying, “If you’d accepted Sam’s confession back then, you’d be the wife of
<
Midtown’s top OB–GYN now, not someone else.”
And I, that “someone else,” would sit quietly at the table, cutting my steak.
Samuel’s college friends never liked me. They saw me as the obstacle between him and Lila, the reason their “goddess” was alone,
Samuel seemed to agree. After the reunion, he became distant, using work as an excuse. He would come home once a week at most and even stopped attending my prenatal appointments.
But he appeared regularly in Lila’s Instagram Stories, painted as her “good friend.”
Lila never denied the assumption that she and Samuel were together; she’d just smile and let it pass. Samuel was the same way. He seemed to enjoy people believing that the beautiful and charismatic Lila was his wife.
We had argued about this once. He said, “The truth speaks for itself. I don’t need to prove anything. Respect my right to have friends”
Whenever Lila showed even a small hint of affection, he would leap forward eagerly, like an obedient dog.
But with me, he assumed he was my best option. He believed that before the baby, I needed him, and now with the baby, I needed him even more. It made him increasingly audacious.
What he failed to understand was that I wasn’t like him. I wasn’t going to be a loyal dog that would always come back for scraps.
Lila’s room was right next to mine, and a steady stream of visitors, including Samuel’s colleagues and Dr. Mason Wright, who’d helped with my emergency, went in and out.
“Samuel! What you’re doing is disgusting! Your wife Isn’t Lila, and yet you don’t correct anyone. We’ve all been calling her ‘Mrs. Hartley‘ for so long, and it was humiliating when I realized that we got it wrong while saving your actual wife,” Dr. Wright’s voice boomed through the thin walls.
Samuel was silent for a while before replying, “I never told you to call her that. You chose to.”
