Chapter 3

I shook my head vigorously, frantically waving my hands.

"No! I didn't!"

"Ethan, I swear on my life, I never did anything to hurt you."

My voice broke into a ragged, desperate sob. "I deleted those recordings because... because I didn't want you to see them. I didn't want you to wake up, watch yourself lying there helpless, and feel like you lost your dignity as a man!"

"Please, I'm begging you... if you want to watch the footage, we can watch it privately. Don't broadcast it to the world, please!"

My pitiful cries instantly sparked a storm in the comments section.

—*Just hopped in. Who's the villain here?*

—*Wait, I saw this woman on the local news! Her husband was in a coma, and she sold everything she owned to nurse him for three years until he miraculously woke up! They were supposed to be couple goals, what kind of trashy drama is this?*

—*I'm their neighbor, and I know the whole story! The guy lost his mind the second he opened his eyes, swearing his wife is a clone or some shit. Poor Olivia wasted three years of her life on this ungrateful psycho...*

As the internet dug up our history, the chat turned viciously against Ethan.

Yet Ethan didn't flinch. He sneered at the lens, his jaw set with delusional certainty.

"She is not my wife! She's a deceitful bitch wearing my wife's clothes, and she wiped all the footage of the times she was alone with me!"

"I'm streaming the recovered files right now. You'll see what kind of monster she really is!"

He was so obsessed with "unmasking" me that he had crossed into full-blown madness; he couldn't wait even a single second.

He hadn't even screened the recovered files himself before screen-sharing them directly into the broadcast, completely convinced that the footage would catch me red-handed.

I lunged forward, grabbing his arm desperately. "Ethan, we loved each other so much! Why can't you believe me?!"

"Don't play those tapes on a live stream, Ethan, you'll regret this!"

My frantic begging only fueled his twisted excitement. He split the screen with a few swift taps, plastering the recovered hospital footage across half the stream.

A mocking sneer curved his lips. "Game over. You're not fooling anyone anymore—"

The next second, the words died in his throat.

There was no footage of me abusing him behind closed doors, no sinister behavior, and no cruelty.

On the screen, I was kneeling beside his hospital bed, clutching his limp hand, weeping until my voice was entirely shredded:

*"Why won't you wake up? Ethan, I miss you so damn much..."*

*"I'm going to sell the business. I'll take you to the best medical center in the country. Even if there's only a one-in-a-million chance, I'll give up everything I have, and I won't ever regret it."*

The raw, gut-wrenching heartbreak in the video made his parents choke back tears. When they looked at Ethan now, their eyes held nothing but profound, bone-deep disappointment.

The comment section erupted in tears and fury.

—*He has a wife this devoted, and he's streaming this circus instead of worshipping the ground she walks on?!*

—*His brain is definitely fried. Bro, if you don't want her, pass her over here, I'd treat her like a queen.*

A flash of bewilderment washed over Ethan's face, but he quickly snapped back into his delusion. "No... this is wrong. This is impossible," he muttered, feverishly scrubbing through other video timestamps.

Yet in every single clip where I appeared, I was either gently sponging his body, massaging his atrophied limbs, whispering encouraging words into his ear, or feeding him through a tube.

The comments turned feral.

A selfless, loving wife who gave up her entire youth.

A paranoid, ungrateful husband who only breathed because of her care, yet treated her like a sworn enemy.

A tidal wave of hate comments flooded the screen, tearing Ethan apart.

He blocked it all out, trapped entirely inside his own psychosis, his fingers violently swiping across the glass, desperate to find a single frame that would prove his delusion.

Unable to watch this disgrace any longer, his parents turned around and walked out of the room, trembling with disgust.

The comments kept rolling:

—*Is this guy even human? She spent hours every single day turning him over so he wouldn't get bedsores! It breaks my heart just watching her, and he has the nerve to say she's an imposter?*

—*Holy shit, look at the timestamp—when he suffered severe impaction, she manually cleared his bowels with her bare hands! Even real family members would gag doing something that degrading! She didn't flinch once! She threw her entire soul away on a piece of human garbage...*

Seeing the stream broadcast such deeply humiliating and private care, I scrambled up from the floor to cover the lens.

"Ethan, stop it, please!"

"Do you see now? I deleted the footage because I didn't want you to see yourself like this! I didn't want you to feel indebted or emasculated!"

"I really am your wife, I—"

Before I could finish, his palm cracked across my face with sickening force.

*Smack!*

"Shut your mouth!" he bellowed, his eyes wild.

"I didn't realize how deep your schemes went. You really played the long game, didn't you?!"

"Don't look so smug! I hired a private investigator to dig into your background. Over my dead body will I let you take Olivia's place!"