“Mom, can you divorce Dad?”
It was nine at night. She was sitting by her son’s bed, coaxing him to sleep. Just when she thought he was finally drifting off, he suddenly dropped that question.
One short sentence.
It hit her like a punch, and for a long moment she couldn’t even react. Even the hand patting his back froze in midair.
A sharp sting pricked her chest without warning.
All these years, things between her and Marcus Ashford had been pretty good.
Logically speaking, a child raised in a home where he was loved should feel happy, right? Safe. Warm. Like life was good.
But...
Why would he think something like that?
She couldn’t make sense of it, but she still kept her voice gentle and asked softly, “Why would you say that?”
Her tone was as mild as possible.
She was afraid that if she sounded even a little too serious, she might scare him.
“Because you never let me eat KFC... and you never let me have ice cream...”
He was already half-asleep, his words slurring together, his voice small and fuzzy with that childish softness only kids his age had.
She honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
So just because of those tiny, random little things, he wanted her to divorce his dad...
A kid’s world really was that simple. No filters, no layers, just pure straight-line logic.
She listened as his breathing slowly evened out, light and steady, and knew he had fallen asleep. She was just about to get up and leave when—
Ding.
A notification sound came from the direction of his bedside.
She turned around.
There was a glow coming from under his pillow.
She lifted one corner of it, and sure enough, a tablet was tucked underneath.
She let out a quiet sigh.
Leo was still little. She’d always worried that too much screen time would mess up his eyesight, so she’d been strict about how long he could use any electronic device each day.
He complained about it all the time, muttering and pouting like the world had ended, but in the end he always followed her rules.
She never expected that tonight, of all nights, he would secretly hide the tablet.
She pulled it out without thinking. She was about to power it off, but before she could, a group chat lit up on the screen and hit her completely off guard.
Group name: Happy Little Family ^_^
One look, and she knew that had to be Leo’s style. That smiley face was his favorite thing to use.
The group icon looked like a family photo of four.
Her fingers paused. Then she zoomed in on the profile picture.
The woman in the photo looked bright and open, all sunshine and ease, with two children in her arms.
One of them was her son, Leo Ashford. He was holding a huge ice cream cone, grinning from ear to ear, the kind of happy that didn’t need faking.
And her husband, Marcus Ashford, was standing right behind that woman.
He was looking at her with a soft, lingering tenderness in his eyes.
The same look he used to give her back when they had first fallen in love.
A sharp pain pierced her chest, sudden and vicious, like a needle going straight through her heart. But even so, her eyes still dragged themselves, almost against her will, to the woman’s name.
In the group, Leo had saved her contact as Mom.
Her whole body went cold, like she’d been struck by lightning.
With trembling fingers, she tapped open the woman’s profile.
Right there on the screen, her nickname was: Pei’s Bright Moon.
Bright Moon...
Irene Norwood? Marcus Ashford’s first love?!
For a second, it felt so unreal she honestly wondered if she was dreaming.
Her husband and her son had built a family group chat with his first love and her child.
And she was the only one left out.
They had made a new home with someone else.
It felt like an invisible hand had clamped down on her heart so hard she could barely breathe.
The chat history was so packed her mind almost stopped working. Her fingers had gone numb, but she still kept scrolling up, one message after another...
Actually, the three of them had a small family group too.
But other than the occasional message from her asking Marcus Ashford when he was coming home for dinner, that group had been dead silent, like it barely even existed.
Then, all of a sudden, “Mom” dropped a video into the chat.
Her hand shook as she tapped it open.
One look and it was obvious the video had been carefully edited.
...
In barely a minute, scene after scene flashed by.
Fried chicken. Cola. A Ferris wheel. A carousel...
Leo Ashford’s little face was bursting with pure, reckless joy.