I Was His Wife, Then His Widow, Then No One's But My Own novel Chapter 461

On the other side of the city, Finnegan's fever spiked again the moment he returned home and was haunted by the memory of Nora's icy indifference.

When Adelaide Fletcher pushed the bedroom door open, he was propped up against the headboard, a damp towel draped over his forehead.

In just a few days, he had lost a shocking amount of weight. His eyes were sunken, dark circles bruising his skin, and rough stubble lined his jaw. He looked nothing like the ruthless, high-powered corporate titan he used to be.

Seeing her son in such a miserable state, Adelaide's eyes instantly welled with tears. She slammed the thermal soup container onto the nightstand and sat on the edge of his bed, glaring at him with fierce disappointment. "What on earth are you doing to yourself? Do you have a death wish?"

Her voice trembled, a mixture of severe heartache and maternal fury. She had heard the briefing from Liam. She knew her son had spent the entire night braving a freezing storm outside Nora's house, landing himself in the ER, and that heartless woman hadn't even glanced his way.

Finnegan cracked his eyes open, noted it was his mother, and heavily closed them again.

"Mom, I'm fine. It's just a mild cold."

His lethargic, defeated tone pushed Adelaide over the edge. She snatched the damp towel off his forehead, her voice shaking with rage. "A cold?! You call a hundred-and-four-degree fever a cold?! Finnegan Fletcher, you are my only surviving son! You were raised with the best of everything. Since when have you ever degraded yourself like this? You're throwing your life away over a woman!"

Finnegan didn't offer a single word of defense, simply keeping his eyes squeezed shut in the silence.

Outside, the sky was a bleak, oppressive grey—a perfect mirror of his soul.

Seeing him so unresponsive, Adelaide felt a spike of helpless frustration. She sank into the nearby armchair and softened her tone, trying to reason with him.

The sudden mention of his daughter caught Adelaide off guard. Her expression stiffened. What did Cassie have to do with this?

Finnegan's lips pulled into a devastating, self-mocking smile. "When Nora was pregnant with Cassie, she suffered from hyperemesis for six straight months. She threw up everything she ate. She withered away until she weighed barely ninety pounds. Can you even fathom that? A woman, heavily pregnant, weighing ninety pounds. She went to her prenatal checkups entirely alone. She navigated her pregnancy entirely alone. She collapsed from hypoglycemia on the sidewalk once, and a total stranger had to rush her to the hospital."

He paused, his voice trembling with self-loathing. "And where was I? I was right there in the same city, living under a fake identity, playing house with another woman. I didn't take her to a single doctor's appointment. I didn't even know what a prenatal exam entailed."

Adelaide's face drained of color, her posture going rigid. She had never known any of this. Or rather, she had never bothered to look.

"But even after she found out the truth, she never once complained. She just swallowed the pain. Once, while heavily pregnant and running a high fever, she stepped in to manage the corporate crisis caused by my supposed death. She went to dinners with cutthroat clients. When they pressured her to drink, and she refused, they nearly killed the deal. She pushed herself so hard she ended up hospitalized with threatened premature labor."