I Lost My Breast Giving Birth,My Husband Betrayed Me

Three years after they cut off my breast and threw me out with nothing. That's when Rhys Griffin called.

Dahlia's been gone for a while now. Why haven't you come home?

Oliver starts school next week. You should come back and spend some time with him, or he won't even recognize you.

His tone was casual, like we'd only been apart since yesterday.

I frowned. "Rhys, we're divorced."

A few seconds of silence. Then a sigh from the other end.

"It was a sham divorce."

"We agreed you'd come back once Dahlia got her city residency permit."

"That's all done now. Why are you still making this difficult?"

I hung up and laughed.

Signed. Stamped. Filed.

Divorce was divorce. There was no "real" or "fake" about it.

I was a little surprised to see Rhys standing outside my apartment building.

Then again, it made sense.

I'd left with nothing in the divorce. The only thing to my name was this small apartment I'd bought before we got married.

Where else would I be?

He wore a long trench coat, his posture tall and straight.

His face, though, carried the same impatience it always had.

"Where the hell have you been? Coming home this late."

That habitual, accusing tone. It couldn't stir a single thing in me anymore.

I didn't want to deal with him. I walked straight toward the other elevator.

He froze for a second, then stepped in front of me, his chest heaving.

"What kind of attitude is that?"

It was the after-work rush. People streamed through the lobby, and more than a few turned to stare.

Curious eyes landed on me. I instinctively pulled my coat tighter.

Rhys's gaze followed, settling on my chest.

What had once been hollow and flat, after several reconstructive surgeries, now looked almost normal again. Surprise flickered across his face. "You disappeared for three years just for this?"

When I didn't warm up, his expression soured. He pressed on.

"How many times have I told you? Even without your breast, I wouldn't have looked down on you."

"Instead of wasting your time and energy on something so trivial, you should've taken a page from Dahlia's book. Learned how to be a good mother. A good wife."

Comparing me again. To the woman who'd repaid my kindness by stealing everything I had. Even with all the calm I'd built over three years, anger sparked in my chest.

"Who gave you the right to lecture me?"

He didn't back down. If anything, he looked more earnest.

"Serena Clarke, honestly? As a woman, you're just not in Dahlia's league."

That serious expression of his landed in my wide eyes, and whatever fight I had left just drained out of me.

Right. In his mind, I could never measure up to the little nanny.

The little nanny whose whole world revolved around our son. Around him.

And me? I'd had the audacity, while my newborn was crying for milk, to spiral into my own grief over losing a breast.

Three years ago, those words would have shattered me. I would have sobbed and screamed. Demanded to know if he was disgusted by me. If he'd stopped loving me.

Now, all I felt was how absurd it was. How laughable.

"Mr. Griffin, we divorced three years ago."

"Legally, you're Oliver's guardian. First grade orientation isn't a reason I need to show up."

"I'll keep depositing child support into his account on schedule."

"As for you and me, we're strangers. Complete strangers. And I'd appreciate it if you stopped contacting me in any form."

Rhys stared.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"It was a sham divorce!"

"You were eighteen when you followed me. You cut off your own family to marry me. You nearly died giving birth to my child..."

"After everything we shared, you're telling me we're strangers?"

Before I could respond, he put on a look of sudden realization.

"Ah, I get it. You're still angry?"

He pulled an envelope from his pocket and held it out to me. "Don't be mad. I brought it for you."

"What happened back then was my fault. I knew this was the only thing you cared about, and I held it hostage just to spite you."

"But you've got to admit, your temper is something else. All this time, saying those hurtful things to me just to prove a point."

His long, elegant fingers hung in the air, the envelope swaying lightly between them.

"Go on, take it. Wasn't this what you gave up everything for in the divorce? The one thing you insisted on keeping?"

Rhys wore an expression of smug certainty, as if he'd already decided I would snatch it up with joy and follow him obediently back to that house.

He was wrong.

I wasn't the stubborn woman I used to be.

Ding.

The elevator doors opened.

While he was distracted, I slipped inside.

"I don't need it anymore. Burn it."

What Rhys had brought was a photograph.

A photograph of my son, placed on my chest by a nurse moments after he was born.

Five minutes after that photo was taken, I had a mastectomy.

The hormones that had surged through my body during pregnancy had turned an unremarkable nodule into a six-centimeter malignant tumor in just five months.

To save my life, I had no choice but to deliver my son by emergency C-section at thirty-five weeks.

When I woke up, Rhys was kneeling at my bedside.

He was sobbing, his voice broken and ragged. "This is all my fault..."

"It's my fault for wanting a baby. I poked holes in the condoms behind your back."

"I'm the reason you got cancer."

"You were so beautiful... what are we going to do now..."

He broke down completely, raising both hands and slapping himself across the face.

Each slap landed sharp and loud.

I fought through the searing pain from my incision and reached out to stop him. "Don't blame yourself. I just have bad luck."

Oliver Abbott's arrival had been unexpected, that much was true.

But the decision to keep him was one I'd made with clear eyes and a full heart.

I'd been naive enough to believe that all the misfortune had been carved out of me along with that tumor.

The worst was behind me. From here on out, things could only get better.

It took time to learn how wrong I was.

I had overestimated myself.

And I had overestimated human nature.

In the beginning, Rhys took care of Oliver and me with extraordinary devotion.

He fed the baby a dozen times a day, changed every diaper.

Burping, rocking him to sleep, bathing him. He was meticulous and endlessly patient.

After Oliver drifted off, Rhys would prepare a medicinal foot soak for me, massage my lower back, and kneel on the floor to carefully apply scar cream along my incision.

Whenever he had a spare moment, he sat at the computer, researching which hospitals performed the best breast reconstructions.

He compared every surgeon with painstaking detail, filling notebook after notebook with his findings.

At night, he followed guides from books, doing his best to give me emotional support.

Watching him spin like a top from dawn to dusk, I realized for the first time just how many hours a single day held.

Enough hours to do so many things.

He often fell asleep slumped over the edge of the crib.

In two months, he lost over twenty pounds. Nearly half his hair had gone gray.

It broke my heart. I suggested we hire help.

He just smiled. "You know me. I don't like strangers in the house."

"Besides, the people I love most deserve my personal care."

"So if you really feel bad for me, just focus on getting better, okay?"

The guilt nearly crushed me.

Because I was discovering that I hadn't accepted my body the way I thought I had.

Three months after leaving the hospital, I still hadn't looked in a mirror. Not once.

I couldn't bring myself to look down. The lopsided, unnatural lines across my chest made it impossible to breathe.

I couldn't even hold my own son. The way he turned his little mouth, rooting for milk, scraped against every raw nerve I had.

I felt useless.

I was getting worse than before.

Every night, after Oliver and Rhys had fallen asleep, I locked myself in the bathroom and sobbed. Hand clamped over my mouth, not daring to make a sound.

I wanted so desperately to get better. To be a normal mother. An ordinary wife. To do what I was supposed to do.

But I couldn't.

I spent my days drowning in oversized clothes, every inch of my body hidden, tucked away in the corner of the bedroom like something that didn't belong.

The look in Rhys's eyes grew more confused with each passing day, but he still reassured me. "There's no rush. Your health comes first."

The kinder he was, the more I hated myself.

The more I believed that nearly dying to give him a child had been worth it.

I forgot.

People change.

Or rather, exhaustion and pressure have a way of stripping a person down to who they really are.

That day, Rhys wasn't home.

Oliver woke up wailing.

I panicked. I tried to copy what I'd seen Rhys do, scooping him up into my arms.

He squirmed against me, and his head slammed straight into the wound on my chest.

The tears came instantly.

Every vein in my arms stood out as I clenched my jaw and lowered him gently back onto the bed. That was the moment Rhys walked in.

He took one look at the scene and erupted. "You can't even hold him? You won't even do that much?"

His voice was thick with disappointment.

"Just because you lost a breast, you think you can't be a mother anymore?"

"How much longer am I supposed to put up with this before you step up and take some responsibility?"

Shame and guilt crashed over me in waves, dragging me into a spiral of doubt.

Had I really been wrong all this time?

I was a mother. How could I neglect my own son like this?

But...

I wasn't only a mother.

I was also myself.

I could be a good mother.

I just needed a little time.

Just a little.

Because I wanted that little bit of time, I made a terrible decision.

During a follow-up appointment at the hospital, I met a girl who'd gotten pregnant out of wedlock, delivered a stillborn, and been abandoned.

Her name was Dahlia Voss.

The sight of her clutching that lifeless baby in the hospital corridor, sobbing with a desperation that seemed to swallow her whole, drove into my chest like a blade.

We shared something. We were both mothers. I couldn't just walk away.

I paid for the baby's cremation and brought her home with me.

At first, Rhys didn't agree to let Dahlia stay.

She grabbed the hem of his shirt, tears streaming down her face. "Please, sir, just give me a chance."

"I'll treat your baby like he's my own son. I swear."

Her face was drenched, her eyes wide and pitiful.

Rhys hesitated.

Right on cue, Oliver started crying.

Dahlia sprang up from the floor as if on instinct, stumbling toward the sound until she found him.

She pressed him close to her chest, murmuring softly, "Shh, shh, it's okay. I'm here. I'm right here."

Her cheeks were still streaked with tears, but a tender smile had already settled on her lips.

Rhys stared at her, something unreadable shifting behind his eyes.

I seized the moment. "You've been running yourself into the ground taking care of him alone."

"Dahlia just lost her baby and has nowhere to go. Helping her helps us too. Please."

And just like that, Dahlia stayed.

Later, I understood. What I'd seen in Rhys's eyes that day wasn't hesitation. It was admiration. It was the first stirring of something more.

After Dahlia moved in, she took care of both Oliver and Rhys with effortless devotion.

Oliver grew plump and rosy. The dark circles under Rhys's eyes faded, and he carried himself with a lightness I hadn't seen in months.

As for Dahlia, with Oliver to pour her energy into, she visibly emerged from the shadow of losing her own child.

I was happy.

I felt like I'd finally done something good for everyone.

Until the day Rhys and Dahlia took Oliver for his pediatric checkup and came home.

The red dress Dahlia was wearing was Rhys's anniversary gift to me.

I hesitated, then asked if she'd grabbed it by mistake.

She shrank behind Rhys with Oliver in her arms, her voice trembling on the edge of tears. "I'm sorry. I just thought I should look presentable when we went out. I didn't want to embarrass Rhys."

She cowered like I was about to slap her across the face.

Something hot and nameless flared inside me. I stepped forward and grabbed the fabric. "Take it off."

"Enough!" Rhys cut in, his voice low and sharp. "It's just a dress. Let her have it."

"It was your anniversary gift to me!"

Impatience flickered through his eyes. His gaze dropped to my chest and lingered there for a few seconds. "So what? The way you look now, it's not like you'll ever wear it again."

He said it like it was nothing. Then he put his arm around Dahlia and walked past me.

As she passed, Dahlia lifted her eyebrows at me. A quick, deliberate taunt.

I stood there like a nail had been driven through my feet into the floor. I couldn't move.

My heart clenched so tight it hurt, like something inside me was tearing loose, breaking free of whatever had been holding it in place.

Dahlia and Rhys started acting more and more like husband and wife.

They took Oliver to early-learning classes, to his vaccinations, spent entire days at the mall together.

When they came home, Dahlia peeled off her coat without a shred of self-consciousness, revealing my cashmere sweater underneath, my pearl necklace around her throat, my lace bra against her skin.

At night, when Oliver cried, Dahlia locked the nursery door and shut me out.

Her thin, reedy voice squeezed through the crack. "I've got this. You can't really do anything anyway. Go back to bed."

I pounded on the door.

"Don't wake Rhys up," she said.

"You lie around the house all day, so you wouldn't understand. Men work hard. They need their rest."

"Try being a little more considerate, okay?"

I knew what Dahlia was doing. She was eating my life piece by piece, and one day there would be nothing left for her to take.

But I was powerless to stop it.

Every time I told Rhys I wanted Dahlia gone, his face darkened. "You invited her in and now you want to throw her out? What's wrong with you?"

"Isn't this arrangement working?"

"With Dahlia here, Oliver doesn't cling to you, and you've got all the time in the world to sit around mourning your chest."

"Stop stirring up trouble when there's none."

The contempt in his voice made one thing perfectly clear. Things had gone off the rails.

But I still lied to myself. I told myself Rhys defended Dahlia because she was a good nanny. That it wasn't Rhys who couldn't live without her. It was Oliver.

Until the day I came home from the hospital.

Dahlia was sitting on my bed, nursing Oliver.

Rhys was pressed against her side, one hand cupping her breast, guiding it toward Oliver's mouth.

Pale, soft flesh squeezed rhythmically between his fingers. His eyes were glazed, almost reverent.

My scalp went numb.

Every ounce of humiliation I'd swallowed over the past weeks erupted at once. I lunged forward and slapped Rhys across the face as hard as I could.

I was shaking so badly I could barely stand. "You're doing this in front of your son. Does that not disgust you?"

Rhys looked at me. Cold. Dismissive. He spat two words like he was flicking away something dirty.

"Filthy mind."

"Massage helps the milk flow better."

"You read the breastfeeding guide, didn't you?"

"What, did they cut out your brain along with your breast?"

His tone was flat. Casual. And it froze every drop of blood in my body.

The same man who had knelt beside my hospital bed months ago and whispered that he was sorry was now using the most painful thing that had ever happened to me as a weapon against me.

The string inside me, stretched to its absolute limit, finally snapped.

I screamed until my throat was raw and tore the apartment apart. Smashed everything I could get my hands on.

I told Rhys that if he didn't send Dahlia away, I would jump off the balcony.

The look on my face scared him. He was afraid of a scandal, afraid of a death on his hands, so he sent Dahlia away.

But she was back within a week.

Oliver had gotten used to breast milk and refused the taste of formula. He screamed until his voice cracked, his tiny face flushed crimson, and no amount of coaxing could make him take the bottle.

Rhys hurled it against the floor. "What kind of heartless mother are you?"

"Because of your sick, twisted jealousy, you'd let your own child starve?"

"I'm telling you right now, if you don't agree to let Dahlia come back, I'll take Oliver and go find her myself!"

So Dahlia came back.

She walked through the door like a rooster strutting after a victory.

I told myself to endure it. Just endure it until Oliver was weaned, and then Dahlia could be sent away for good.

But every night, a rhythmic jingling drifted from the study.

I knew what that sound was.

I could picture it perfectly: the little bell bouncing up and down, two naked bodies tangled together.

That sound burrowed into my brain. It was driving me insane.

More than once, I stood outside the study door with a hammer in my hand. But I never swung it. I never smashed that door open.

Tearing off the mask meant divorce, and I couldn't afford a divorce.

Rhys was a lawyer. Given my condition, I would lose everything.

I could walk away from the wealth I'd spent ten years building. But the child I'd nearly died to bring into this world? How could I just hand him over?

How could I have known then...

That later, I would willingly abandon everything just to run, all because of one sentence from that little boy.