In Manila, people looked at me like a failed woman: no husband, no child, no family backing me up. Friends became cautious around me. Relatives sighed whenever they saw me. No one said it outright, but I understood… they pitied me.

But no one knew that right after I signed those cold divorce papers,
I was already carrying his child.

His name is Ethan Parker, three years older than me. We had once been married, once lived together in a small apartment in Quezon City. Ethan wasn’t a bad man. He never was.

He was just… too silent.

His mother, on the other hand, was the opposite.

She never accepted me. To her, I was just a provincial girl from Laguna, never good enough for her son. At every family meal, I felt like an outsider.

The breaking point came with my first miscarriage.

That day, I was curled up in pain on a hospital bed in a public hospital. Ethan arrived late. His mother didn’t come at all.

That evening, she said it straight to my face:

“This family doesn’t keep a woman who can’t give birth.”

Ethan stayed silent.

That silence… killed something inside me.

I carried that pain out of my marriage, signed the divorce papers quietly—no arguments, no fights, no begging to stay.