Chapter 3

I didn't go home. I had the driver drop me off at a small apartment I had purchased before my marriage.

Julian sent a single question mark. When I didn't reply, he stopped messaging.

To him, I was probably just throwing a minor tantrum that would blow over soon.

I opened my suitcase. Inside were just a few basic clothes and an encrypted external hard drive.

I opened Instagram. Luna had just posted.

It was a perfect nine-photo grid. There was a close-up of Julian receiving the award on stage, shot of the trophy, and several photos of her working diligently in the study of our home—the one that had been converted into Julian's studio.

She wore a soft white sweater, her hair pinned up casually, with the familiar "Eye of the Cosmos" design interface open on the screen in front of her.

The caption read:

“Witnessing a legend tonight. So honored. Grateful for Professor Vance’s trust in giving me the opportunity to reconstruct the 'Eye of the Cosmos' and breathe new life into it.”

Like a masochist, I clicked on the photo of her working and zoomed in.

I stared at the sketches I had drawn in my notebook years ago, full of bold, unconstrained lines, now rendered by her into something sterile, flat, and painfully unoriginal.

In the bottom right corner of the image, there was a clear watermark: BY-LunaShaw.

To make it even more ironic, Julian had liked the post and commented:

“Your brilliance is what brought it to life.”

It felt like a physical slap to my face.

Right on cue, a text from Julian arrived, explaining things casually.

“Chloe, don’t take it the wrong way. I had Luna redo it with the new software so we could submit it for an international design award. Your original files were in an outdated format that didn't meet the submission guidelines.”

Always the same grand, logical excuses.

Instead of replying, I plugged in my hard drive and pulled up a document that had been buried for five years.

I took a screenshot and sent it to him.

It was a scanned copy of a competition agreement I had signed five years ago.

Julian replied quickly, his tone laced with impatience.

“Why are you bringing this up now? That was ages ago. It was just a student competition.”

A sharp pain pierced my chest, making it hard to breathe.

“Did you forget how you begged me back then?” I typed, my fingers shaking.

The competition he dismissed as "just a student thing" was actually the NextGen Design Awards, the most prestigious launchpad in the industry. I had made it to the global finals with a comprehensive urban ecological design proposal.

At that exact time, Julian was up for tenure. He had met all the criteria except for one thing—a lead-author publication in a top-tier international journal.

I stared at the screen. Right next to that scanned agreement was another file.

It was the paper Julian eventually published that secured him his tenure.

The core case study and architectural models analyzed in that paper were from the very project I had withdrawn from the competition.

Julian’s reply popped up again.

“Chloe, what is the point of bringing this up now? If I hadn't gotten tenure, we wouldn't have the life we have today. You're a housewife now. Stop chasing unrealistic fantasies of fame.”

Every word felt like a knife twisting in my deepest wound.

Completely furious, I shot back:

“And whose fault is it that I became a housewife?”

The memories rushed back like a tidal wave.

The night before the final submission deadline for the NextGen Awards, Julian had shown up at my place with two medical reports. A six-foot-tall man, sobbing like a child.

One was a critical illness notice for his mother.

The other was a clinical diagnosis of "severe depression" with suicidal ideation under his name.

He knelt on the floor, holding my legs, begging me.

He said he couldn't live without me, that his family would fall apart. He said his mother was dying and he was on the verge of a breakdown. He claimed that if I left the country for the competition finals, he didn't know what he would do to himself.

He begged me to give up the competition, hand the design over to him to secure his tenure, and promised that once things stabilized, he would spend the rest of his life making it up to me.

And I, looking at his bloodshot eyes and those two medical reports, let my heart soften.