Chapter 4

As soon as I got home from the farm, I immediately dug out the gun license I had obtained last year.

After the extreme cold arrives, reasoning will be useless. Only firearms can give people enough confidence.

I organized my passport, ID card, and bank cards, and stuffed them into my bag together with that license.

At that moment, my phone lit up. It was a message from Ethan.

“There’s a company dinner. I’m not coming home to eat.”

I stared at that line of text and only found it laughable.

That so-called dinner was nothing more than an excuse for Ethan to sleep with women outside.

In the past, I would always get angry over the perfume smell on his collar.

But after it happened so many times, I had already become numb to his cheating.

Even if Ethan wasn’t coming home for dinner, I still had to prepare dinner for my son Noah.

Just like usual, I went into the kitchen.

When the soup was halfway done, I heard the sound of a chair being dragged in the living room.

When I came out carrying the plates and saw what was on the table, I almost couldn’t breathe.

My bag had been turned inside out. Every document was scattered all over the table.

That gun license had already been torn to shreds. The plastic seal was split, and the paper edges were all rough and frayed.

My son, sitting beside this mess, looked up at me and grinned.

“Mom, why are you hiding these?”

I set the plates down, keeping my voice as calm as possible.

“Give me back my bag.”

Noah didn’t move.

With two fingers, he picked up that license and slowly shook it.

“What do you want this for, a woman like you?”

“Guns are men’s stuff.”

He threw the scraps back onto the table, his tone full of self-righteousness.

“You should just be responsible for cooking, and responsible for being obedient.”

Although I had long realized he was no longer the little boy who, at three years old, would comfort me not to cry,

at this moment, I still felt heartache.

He didn’t suddenly turn bad.

He just learned to say out loud what Ethan taught him.

I held down the anger surging up in my chest and forced myself to stay calm.

“Noah, you go back to your room right now and reflect on yourself!”

Noah gave a snorting laugh.

“I’ve seen the neighbors.”

“A man beats his wife until she’s like that, and when the police come they just say a few words to persuade him.”

He leaned forward a little, his eyes bright.

“I heard that in the past month you’ve been getting very close with Kelly next door. Do you also want to taste what it’s like to get beaten?”

Hearing Noah’s words, my fingertips tightened at once.

Not because of the humiliation coming from my son’s mouth, but because of the pain I felt for Kelly.

The bruises densely covering Kelly’s lower abdomen would not leave my mind.

Seeing that my mind was elsewhere, Noah immediately stood up, grabbed my arm, and yanked me over hard.

“Stop pretending. If you don’t want to get beaten by Dad, give me some money right now.”

His strength was greater than I imagined.

The plate I didn’t hold steady fell to the floor, and the rotten meat sauce splattered across the ground like sprayed bloodstains.

I immediately thought of the moment in my last life when Noah stabbed my stomach with a small knife. My throat tightened in fear, yet my heart was still aching.

This was the child I had carried for ten months and given birth to with such effort.

“I don’t have money. The cash is all with your dad.”

“This is this month’s food money...”

I pulled out a hundred from my pocket and handed it over, my hand shaking just enough.

“Tch.”

Noah let out a hard burst of hot air through his nose, snatched the money in one grab, afraid I would take it back.

He shoved me hard.

I went along with it and fell to the floor. My back hit the leg of the chair, and it hurt so much my vision went black.

But he laughed even more happily.

“Trash.”

“Working every day and you only make this much.”

“Why don’t you go out and do something that brings in money faster?”

He said it very softly, but it was like a cleaver being sharpened next to my ear.

“If you went and stood on the street, you’d definitely be better than you are now.”

I lay on the floor, my palm braced against the icy ground, my chest feeling hollowed out.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been humiliated.

But he was my biological son, my baby I had carried for ten months.

He made me completely understand that there was nothing in this home worth missing anymore.

Noah stuffed the money into his pocket and turned to walk toward the door.

“My dad was right.”

“You’re just a useless piece of trash.”

Every word he said was what Ethan repeated in his ear every day.

He slammed the door so hard it shook the place.

I slowly sat up. I couldn’t cry anymore.

I picked up the shredded documents on the table piece by piece, and suddenly remembered there were still intact photos of the documents on my old phone.

I swayed as I stood up, supported my bruised back, and walked into the room.

Only then did I notice there was an extra USB drive next to the old phone.

Looking at it, my heart strangely jolted.

After plugging it into the computer, I saw that the USB drive was full of secretly filmed videos of me showering and changing clothes.

There were also screenshots of different transfer records.

All the profile pictures were Noah.

There were also several chat logs. In them, Noah was sending smiling emojis, celebrating that he had gotten another sum of money to buy drugs.

I sat on the chair, my whole body stiff.

What was inside this USB drive made me colder all over than the apocalypse’s weather.

It destroyed my persistence and effort for this family over the past ten-plus years.

I picked up my phone and immediately dialed my divorce lawyer.

I told the lawyer everything about my marriage with Ethan, including his affair during the marriage and all the facts of him cooperating with our son to sell my private photos, and I directly filed for divorce.

Next, I found workers I knew and moved away more than half of the supplies Ethan had hidden in the basement. The remaining cardboard boxes were all filled with stones.

At the same time, I installed surveillance cameras all over the house.

The moment I thought about Ethan and Noah, at the very last moment when the food ran out, seeing these boxes filled with stones, and the expression that might appear on their faces,

I felt satisfied!

You father and son—at the end you must bite each other like dogs.

Go die for me!