Chapter 1 When severe turbulence slammed my abdomen against the armrest, causing heavy bleeding, I turned to my husband for help. But Arthur, who wasn’t wearing his hearing aids, violently shoved me away and scrambled frantically toward the row behind us—to my best friend, Chloe. I watched, helpless, as he pulled Chloe into his arms. I listened as he and my brother, Liam, continuously comforted her. It wasn’t until the plane leveled out that the passenger next to me, recovering from the scare, joked with Arthur. “When I saw you arguing with the lady next to you earlier and you took off your hearing aids, I thought you actually couldn’t hear.” My brother, Liam, looked apologetic. “Sorry you had to see that. It wasn’t an argument. It was just my sister talking a mile a minute.” “She loves to chatter non-stop at her husband. It’s annoying, so he just pretends he’s deaf.” Chloe pressed an index finger to her lips, whispering. “Shh. It’s our little secret. Don’t let Nora hear. We’ll tell her when she finally learns to be quiet.” Arthur just chuckled softly, staying silent. Blood continued to run down my thigh. My face was deathly pale, and the only thing left on my lips was a self-deprecating smile. I used to be a quiet person. I only became a chatterbox because the doctors told me that constant talking would help stimulate my husband’s hearing recovery. In the end, that became the exact reason they all kept me in the dark. Since they wanted to keep secrets from me, there was no reason for me to stay in this silent world anymore. …… “There’s… there’s a pregnant woman here! She’s hemorrhaging! Is there a doctor on board?!” It wasn’t until the flight attendants were doing their post-turbulence checks that they realized I had almost passed out. Arthur rushed to my side, desperately shouting my name. The flight attendant asked, “Are you her husband? I saw you sitting next to her earlier.” Arthur opened his mouth, but then his hand flew to his empty ear. Looking utterly lost and with red eyes, he shook his head. “What are you saying?” Chloe and my brother hurried over, exchanging a quick glance before covering for him. “Sorry, he’s deaf. He can’t hear.” The flight attendant sighed, pulling Arthur aside to make room for the doctor, and handed him a slip of paper. Don’t worry, we’re landing soon. There’s a doctor here. Your wife will be fine. Arthur cooperatively forced a relieved smile. The residual sweat from his palm still burned my skin. It made me wonder, almost absurdly, if him flying past me to save Chloe and leaving me behind had just been a hallucination. In the hospital, I was woken up by a noisy conversation. It was Chloe, complaining about her boss giving her a hard time at work. Then she angrily criticized a new movie that was apparently terrible. These were the exact mundane little things I used to talk to Arthur about. But he didn’t take off his hearing aids. He just stared intently at Chloe, catching every shift in her mood and earnestly agreeing with her. My brother, Liam, stood off to the side, watching them affectionately and occasionally chiming in. Their laughter felt like the sharpest knife, carving into my numb heart. I couldn’t even remember the last time Arthur and I had a conversation that joyful. It wasn’t until a nurse sharply reprimanded them, “No loud talking in the wards! Keep it down!” that Chloe finally shut her mouth, playfully sticking her tongue out. I timed it perfectly and opened my eyes. Chloe looked thrilled and tightly grabbed my hand. “Nora, you’re finally awake! You scared me to death.” “Seriously, you knew you were pregnant! Why didn’t you say anything when you started bleeding?! Even if Arthur couldn’t hear, you could have grabbed him! You almost lost the baby!” I shifted my gaze to Arthur. He looked guilty and turned his head away. My brother quickly stepped in to smooth things over. “Alright, this is partly your fault too, Nora. Why did you have to talk non-stop from the second we got on the plane? Who can handle sitting next to a nagging mother hen?” “Arthur got annoyed and took out his hearing aids. Look at you now—you ruined everyone’s good mood.” My fingers curled violently into my palms. When we were on the plane, my screams were loud enough to make the other passengers turn and stare. Yet the three people closest to me in the world were lying straight to my face. They knew perfectly well that I only became a chatterbox because the doctors said Arthur needed constant auditory stimulation. The dull ache in my abdomen was a fraction of the agony in my heart. “Okay. It’s my fault. Nora… don’t worry, I won’t take out my hearing aids anymore.” Arthur finally broke his silence. But moments later, he muttered under his breath, “But you really don’t need to talk to me that much every single day. It’s really… overwhelming.” I closed my eyes. My mind was flooded with memories—of the countless train tickets I bought traveling across the country for three years to find treatments for him. Of the stacks of notebooks in his study, filled with precautions and care instructions for the deaf, stacked higher than a person. A single tear slid down my cheek. I remembered when Arthur’s business rivals wanted to crush him. They hired someone to kidnap me. When they tried to assault me, Arthur broke into the warehouse alone to save me. The kidnappers had rigged explosives. When the blast went off, he used his hands to shield my ears. But he lost his own hearing. In the dead of night, he used to hold me tight, confessing his deepest fears. “Nora, are you going to leave me?” I used my train tickets and my notebooks as proof, telling him over and over again that I never would. When people mocked him for being deaf, I—a woman who had never raised her voice in her life—got into a physical altercation and ended up in a police station for him. But now I realized my profound devotion had just made me a clown. “Okay,” I croaked out, my voice raw. It was time for this circus to end. Chapter 2 Just as he promised, after I was discharged, Arthur listened intently to every word I said. It almost gave me the illusion that the rift between us had never existed. When I was feeling better, Arthur insisted we make up for the trip we had missed. “Let’s go to a club! I researched it before we came—Miami’s nightlife is legendary.” The doctors had explicitly warned that Arthur’s auditory nerves were still incredibly fragile. The deafening bass of a nightclub could cause permanent damage. “He can’t go to a club…” But my words were drowned out by the three of them excitedly debating which club to hit first. My mouth twitched, and I didn’t want to go. But I couldn’t stop worrying, so instinctively, I followed them. The ear-splitting noise hit me in violent waves. Even with perfect hearing and cotton stuffed in my ears, I could barely stand it. After losing his hearing, Arthur’s temper had grown erratic. Sometimes, if I spoke a little too loudly or talked a bit too much, he would scowl. “I’m wearing my hearing aids! I can hear you! You don’t have to yell. Are you disgusted by me?” “Don’t forget why I went deaf in the first place!” Eventually, whenever I did something he didn’t like, he would rip out his hearing aids, toss them aside, and give me the silent treatment. I had thought about giving up. But then I’d remember how he fought his own family to be with me. How we lived in a cramped basement eating instant ramen. How he worked himself into the hospital to build his startup. Countless times, I cried and begged him to go back to his wealthy family and break up with me. He would place my hand over his heart. “Believe in me, Nora. I’ll make it on my own. If I go back, I’ll have money, but this—” he tapped his chest “—will be empty.” So I swallowed every grievance. Sitting in the VIP booth, I scrolled aimlessly through my phone, letting the bitterness soak into my bones. Suddenly, I stumbled across Chloe’s old, neglected alternate Twitter account. My heart leapt into my throat, and driven by a morbid impulse, I clicked on it. With every post I scrolled past, my heart sank deeper into an abyss. It turned out that while he found my talking “annoying,” Arthur would spend all night chatting with Chloe, listening to her talk until dawn. His ears couldn’t handle loud noises, yet because Chloe loved to sing, Arthur was a VIP at the loudest karaoke bars in the city. Chloe had jokingly asked him why he was willing to listen to her, but not me. Arthur had stayed silent for a long time before answering. “Every time I look at Nora, I remember what she went through… and knowing I let myself get permanently damaged for her, it’s just too much to handle…” A grotesque, ugly smile slowly spread across my face. I never doubted his sincerity back then. But sincerity is fragile. Unable to sit there a second longer, I stood up to leave, but Chloe yelled over the music. “Nora! Don’t just stand there, come dance!” When I didn’t turn around, she jumped out of the crowd and grabbed my arm. The moment she touched me, an overwhelming wave of nausea hit me. I violently shoved her hand away. “Arthur! Help me!” Arthur looked panicked and shoved me hard, sending me crashing to the floor. A sharp, stabbing pain shot through my abdomen. But Arthur acted like he didn’t even notice. With lightning speed, he caught Chloe as she stumbled. He kept whispering to her, soothing her. He asked her three times if she was okay. Only after he got a reassuring answer did he finally spare a furious glare for me. “Nora, what the hell is wrong with you?!” My brother pointed a finger in my face, screaming over the music. “Nora! Isn’t Chloe supposed to be your best friend?! We brought you on this trip to help you relax, and you just shoved her?! What is wrong with you?!” I looked at the two men united against me. Ignoring the agonizing pain in my stomach, I suddenly started laughing. I pointed to my ear. “Arthur, you can drop the act. You can hear perfectly fine, can’t you?” Chapter 3 All the color drained from Arthur’s face. The truth was, his hearing aids had fallen out the moment we walked into the club. He instinctively looked at Liam. Arthur opened his mouth, unsure of what excuse to make, when the crowd around us started screaming. “Blood! Call an ambulance!” I saw Arthur let out a microscopic sigh of relief. I knew he was grateful he had dodged the bullet of explaining himself. In the ambulance, three years of repressed anger kept me conscious. I gripped his sleeve in a death grip, demanding an answer. “Why did you lie to me?! When did you get your hearing back?! Is making a fool out of me fun?!” But no matter how hard I pressed, Arthur just clamped his mouth shut, suppressing his impatience, and forced out a few words. “I don’t have my hearing aids in. I can’t hear you. Just wait.” I wanted to keep interrogating him, but the excruciating cramps in my abdomen finally became too much, and I passed out from the pain. When I woke up, Arthur was looking at me with pure joy. He handed me a cup of water. This time, there was no Chloe and no Liam causing a racket. I turned my head away. In the silence, he sighed. “Your brother told me what you asked in the club. I really couldn’t hear.” “It’s just that when Chloe tripped toward us, it caused a commotion. I’m not blind, I saw her falling, so naturally, I ran over.” Even now, he was still lying. The last remaining shred of warmth I had for him completely evaporated. “Arthur, we’re getting a divorce…” A harsh ringtone interrupted me. Arthur shot up from his chair. It was my brother. “Arthur, get to Chloe’s room right now. She’s crying and asking for you.” Arthur grabbed his jacket and bolted out the door, not even bothering to give me a fake excuse. I watched his retreating back, pulled out my phone, and calmly called my lawyer. “Draft a divorce agreement for me.” But my peace didn’t last long. The hospital door was violently shoved open. An enraged Arthur stormed in. “Nora! So you pushed her in the club, and now you have to go online and spread vicious rumors about me and Chloe?!” I was completely lost. Until my brother threw a phone right into my face. Only then did I realize that someone had recorded the incident at the club and posted it online. Chloe had become public enemy number one. “She purposely grabbed a pregnant woman and then threw herself into the husband’s arms? What kind of trash is that?” “Wait, I know that guy! He was on my flight! He faked being deaf!” My brother slammed Arthur’s medical records down in front of me. “What do you mean ‘faked’? You share a bed with him! You took him to all those specialists, you don’t know what his actual condition is?!” I stared at my brother, my head throbbing like it was going to split open. I truly couldn’t fathom why my own brother would team up with two outsiders to gaslight me. We had lost our parents when we were kids. We only had each other. He was brilliant at school, so I dropped out early to work and pay for his education all the way through his Ph.D. When he graduated, he had lifted me into the air with joy. “Being your brother is the luckiest thing that ever happened to me!” When he noticed I was naturally quiet, he encouraged me to talk more. He said I should be more like Chloe, that being outgoing was how you survived in the real world. But when I actually became talkative for Arthur’s sake… he hated it. And now, he was defending Chloe online by throwing mud at me. “My brother-in-law’s hearing is genuinely damaged. My sister just has a terrible temper and loves airing dirty laundry online. Even I, her own brother, can’t stand her.” Chloe trailed behind the two men, cautiously playing the peacemaker. “Okay, stop it, you guys. Nora is pregnant, it’s normal for her hormones to make her a bit moody…” It sounded like she was defending me. But every word was gasoline on the fire. I locked eyes with Chloe. She couldn’t suppress the victorious smirk pulling at the corners of her mouth. In that moment, I knew. The girl I had rescued from an abusive, arranged-marriage situation deep in the mountains—the girl who knelt before me sobbing, swearing she would work like a dog to repay my kindness—was completely, irreparably dead. Sure enough, Arthur’s face darkened. “You are going to hold a press conference with me. I will publicly explain my hearing condition. And you will clarify that there is absolutely nothing going on between me and Chloe.” A bone-chilling cold spread through my veins. For Chloe’s sake, he was willing to publicly brand himself as deaf to the entire world. “Did they say anything that wasn’t true?” “And what if I refuse?” Arthur froze. He looked away, his tone laced with a forced reluctance. “Don’t push me, Nora. We both have pasts we aren’t proud of, don’t we?” Chapter 4 I stumbled backward in sheer disbelief. The Arthur from the past used to pull me out of the bathtub when I was scrubbing my skin raw. He would kiss my reddened skin, repeating it over and over. “You aren’t dirty. I love you.” But now… That trauma had become a weapon for him to control me. In the suffocating silence, my tightly clenched fists finally relaxed. My voice was raw as I choked out one word. “Fine.” After the press conference, public opinion on Chloe instantly reversed. Furthermore, the details of my past—the near-assault—were conveniently “leaked” to the press. I became a national laughingstock. “So she’s damaged goods. No wonder she guards her husband from her best friend like a psycho. I feel so bad for the CEO, he literally went deaf saving her, and she still treats him like a suspect.” “Even if he WAS faking being deaf, I’d get it. Having a tainted, damaged woman nagging you 24/7? Anyone would get sick of it!” Arthur put on a big show of trying to suppress the rumors. But I was already completely numb. I barely spoke anymore. I just quietly waited for my lawyer to finish the divorce papers. Until our wedding anniversary. He intentionally called me early in the day. “Honey, wait for me at home tonight. I have a huge surprise for you.” Perfect. It was time to put my cards on the table anyway. I waited for Arthur at home. But midnight came and went, and there was no sign of him. Instead, I heard rustling noises coming from outside the front door. My heart pounded in my chest, and I quickly locked myself in the master bedroom. A few minutes later, the front door was forced open. Heavy footsteps stopped right outside the bedroom. The doorknob rattled violently. “I scoped this place out. The husband isn’t home. The woman has been here all night. She’s definitely hiding in there!” “I saw her. She’s gorgeous! We hit the jackpot tonight, boys!” I frantically dialed Arthur’s number, but he didn’t pick up. A long time passed before he finally texted me. “Honey, I left my hearing aids at the office. I’m on my way back now. If you need something, just text me.” I texted him, begging for help. But the typing bubble just kept bouncing. Finally, a single message came through. “Did you forget why I went deaf three years ago? Stop trying to test me with these sick jokes.” Test. Joke. Every word was a sledgehammer to my chest, suffocating me. But the sheer instinct to survive overrode my despair. I called my brother. He answered with a scoff. “What, upgrading your act? You used to just be a nagging housewife, now you’re a drama queen making up home invasions? Do you have any idea that your constant talking just reminds him of the trauma from three years ago?” “Even I’m getting targeted because of you. Sometimes I really wish you weren’t my sister…” He hung up before he even finished his sentence. My blood ran freezing cold. Before I could even react, the bedroom door was kicked off its hinges. Three men charged into the room with vile, sickening grins. My phone was slapped out of my hand. I fought with everything I had, but it was useless. I was forced to watch as my clothes were ripped apart. The agonizing tearing below my waist radiated into my abdomen, making me feel like my entire body was being ripped in two. My phone, lying on the floor, had somehow been accidentally bumped into refreshing Chloe’s alternate Twitter account. She had just posted an update. “We couldn’t hide it anymore. Today is his third wedding anniversary with her. He planned to tell her the truth.” “My brother and I have no secrets left. Tonight, I’m going to make a new secret with him.” The photo attached was the view from a hotel room’s floor-to-ceiling window. I closed my eyes. Total, absolute despair swallowed me whole. It wasn’t until the wail of police sirens pierced the long, dark night that it finally stopped. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Vance. We couldn’t save the baby.” I went numb. It felt like all the oxygen had been vacuumed from the room, but I didn’t even have the strength left to cry. Three hospitalizations. That resilient little baby couldn’t hold on anymore, and it was gone. I didn’t say a single word. I just boarded a flight leaving the city. … In the dead of night, for some inexplicable reason, Arthur felt a sudden, suffocating wave of panic. He sped down the highway, racing toward home. Suddenly, the local radio station broadcast an emergency news bulletin. “A violent home invasion and sexual assault has just occurred in the luxury community of Beverly Crest.” In a fraction of a second, Arthur slammed on the brakes, his face turning ghostly white.
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