Chapter 2

Ethan hadn't been discharged for very long, and his current physical and mental state made it impossible for him to work.

The rent on our run-down apartment and our daily living expenses were all relying on loans I scrambled to borrow from friends.

To keep him alive, I had sacrificed everything and drowned myself in debt, naive enough to believe that once he woke up, life would finally turn around.

Instead, no matter what I did, Ethan looked at me like I was his worst enemy.

He never touched a bite of the food I spent hours cooking, dumping it straight into the trash. When I washed his clothes, he sent them to a lab for chemical screening; even after they came back clean, he took a lighter to them and burned them to ashes. Even having a civil conversation with him was a distant fantasy. Living with him now was a thousand times more agonizing than the three years he spent in a vegetative state.

"Olivia, you're the sole reason Ethan is breathing today," his mother said one evening, pulling me aside.

"If he's going to stay like this forever, you should file for divorce. You're an incredible woman, and we can't let him ruin the rest of your life."

Two months dragged by, and Ethan showed zero signs of improvement.

After agonizing over it, his parents finally gathered the courage to tell me to walk away.

Before I could answer, Ethan kicked open his bedroom door and barged out. "A divorce? In your fucking dreams! Until she brings my real wife back, she's leaving this house in a body bag!"

Tears instantly blurred my vision. "Ethan, I never wanted to leave you. You treated me like a queen before the crash; how could I ever abandon you? If I wanted to walk away, I would have done it three years ago while you were still in that coma."

His father stepped in, his face red with indignation. "We were the ones who brought up the divorce! Ethan, she's suffered enough for you! Forget about the three years she spent wiping your ass in that hospital—just look at how you've abused her since you woke up! And through it all, she hasn't left your side!"

"Are you going to be satisfied only when you've driven her to jump off a bridge?!"

Ethan knew every single sacrifice I had made.

Yet not a trace of gratitude crossed his face. Only a chilled, twisted smirk. "Mom, Dad, did you actually see her taking care of me during those three years? Do you have any idea what she did to me behind closed doors when you weren't looking? She had an agenda from day one!"

My fists clenched instinctively by my sides, a wave of tension washing over me.

His parents stared at him, bewildered. "What are you talking about?"

"Ethan, you were comatose. You don't have memories from back then. How could you know what Olivia did?"

Ethan raised his phone, waving it with manic triumph.

"I didn't know before, but I'm about to find out—"

He grinned, showing his teeth as his predatory gaze locked onto me. "No matter how good your acting is, no matter how thoroughly you brainwashed my parents, it doesn't change the fact that you're not my Olivia!"

"You claim you nursed me with all your heart, but you went out of your way to wipe every single piece of security footage from my hospital room! I knew you were hiding something, so I went behind your back and hired a hacker to recover the deleted files from the cloud server."

"And guess what? I just went live on TikTok. I'm going to expose your sick little act right now, in front of the entire internet!"

To ensure I had zero room to talk my way out of this, Ethan hadn't just hit the live broadcast button; he had also called the local police precinct, demanding they monitor his stream.

The sensational title—*Exposing the Imposter Pretending to Be My Wife*—drew tens of thousands of viewers within minutes.

Seeing how utterly confident Ethan looked, his parents' faith began to waver. They turned toward me, their eyes suddenly clouded with doubt.

"Olivia... why did you delete the hospital cameras?"

"Did you... did you actually do something behind our backs to hurt Ethan?"