The Wife He Let Die.
NOVEL STATUS: COMPLETED
PUBLISHED CHAPTERS: 25 CHAPTERS
The Wife He Let Die – Sneak Peek
The exact moment I died, Dominic Ashworth was holding another woman’s hand.
Not in the poetic, metaphorical sense—though God knows our marriage had been a masterclass in slow metaphorical death. No. I mean the clinical kind. The kind where the electrocardiogram gives up its little mountain range and flattens into a horizon no one wants to see. The kind where the emergency lights above your body click off like a landlord who’s decided you’re no longer worth the electricity.
While Dominic waited outside Celeste Fairfax’s hospital room—pacing, I imagine, with that particular brand of elegant anxiety he reserved exclusively for her—I lay on an operating table so cold it felt personal. Tubes ran in and out of me like I was a city losing its infrastructure. Each mechanical beep from the monitors served as a polite reminder: you are running out of time, and nobody is coming.
Nobody came.
The surgery on Celeste was a complete success. They announced it over the intercom with the same cheerful efficiency of a train arriving on schedule. Meanwhile, in the adjacent room, my heart did what hearts do when they’ve finally had enough: it stopped. No announcement. No intercom. Just the flatline and the quiet hum of machines that suddenly had nothing left to measure.
But death, I discovered, is not the clean exit they promise you in the movies. Perhaps it was the sheer volume of unsaid things I’d hoarded—the arguments I’d swallowed, the tears I’d recycled into smiles, the love I’d poured into a man who used it to water someone else’s garden—but my soul didn’t leave. It drifted. It clung. And it ended up exactly where it had no business being: beside Dominic.
I watched him embrace Celeste as she surfaced from anesthesia, his eyes red and swollen with a kind of joy I’d spent five years trying to earn. He held her the way you hold something you almost lost—gently, desperately, as though the universe might change its mind. His hands trembled against her hospital gown.
My chest—or whatever spectral thing was left of it—collapsed inward like a house that had been condemned years ago and was only now getting around to falling.
I wanted to ask him. I wanted to float right up to his tear-streaked face and whisper: When they wheeled both of us into surgery, did you think about me? Even for a second? Did my name cross your mind, or was there simply no room for it between all that worry for her?
The answer, of course, was no. I knew it the way you know your own name—instinctively, without needing proof, though proof was everywhere.
𝖱𝖾𝘢𝘥 𝗼𝗇 a𝘯у 𝗱𝖾𝗏і𝘤e о𝘯 𝗀𝖺l𝗇𝘰vе𝗅s.𝘤𝗼𝗺
Because of Celeste’s illness, Dominic had taken me to court. Not metaphorically. Actual court. He hired the kind of lawyers whose hourly rate could feed a family for a month, and under their meticulous, well-compensated judgment, I lost everything. My savings. My dignity. One of my kidneys.
The kidney—let me tell you about the kidney.
When they cut into me, the pain was volcanic. It erupted from my lower back and consumed everything in its path, turning my vision white at the edges. My hospital gown clung to my skin, soaked through with a sweat that smelled like fear and antiseptic. With fingers that felt like they belonged to someone else, I managed to dial Dominic’s number.
“Sweetheart,” I said, and I hated how small my voice sounded. “I know I’ve made a mistake. But please—please don’t let them take my kidney. You don’t understand how much this hurts. I could die, Dominic. I could actually die.”
Five years of marriage, and I had never begged. Not once. I’d argued, negotiated, sulked, cried into pillows when he wasn’t looking—but I had never begged. I told myself it was strategy: if I surrendered, if I accepted blame for every fabricated crime Celeste had pinned on me, then perhaps five years of shared meals and shared beds and shared silence would count for something. Perhaps Dominic would remember that I was a person, not a problem to be solved.
He laughed. It was the kind of laugh that has nothing to do with humor—cold, mechanical, like a door locking.
“What you need to do is admit your mistake. Saving Celeste’s life is what you should want. Don’t try to run from the consequences. And don’t think that giving her your kidney exempts you from apologizing. Everything you’ve done to Celeste over these years—I’ll settle it all once she recovers.”
– Continue in The Wife He Let Die chapter 1 –
