"I’m your mother! How dare you speak to me like that? Noelle is pregnant with Nathaniel’s child. You must divorce him immediately. If you don’t, I will not be held responsible for whatever happens next!"

A sharp slap had landed on Estelle Lockwood’s face before she was subjected to this angry tirade.

Estelle looked up at the woman who had done this. It was Rose Lowell, the woman who claimed to be her own mother.

At nine months pregnant, while waiting to give birth alone in a hospital room, Estelle had allowed herself to feel foolishly hopeful when the nurse had announced that she had visitors.

She had naively thought that her parents had finally remembered her existence. Instead, they had come to tell her that her sister was pregnant with her husband’s child.

"Rose, that’s enough." Adrian Lockwood entered the room at the sound of the commotion. "Estelle is also our daughter after all."

Then, he turned to her. "Just get an abortion and divorce Nathaniel. I know it may be hard on your body, but don’t blame your mother and me for favoring Noelle. If you hadn’t shown up here, Nathaniel and Noelle would have been married years ago. Your marriage to Nathaniel was a mistake right from the beginning. If you have any humanity left in you, you’ll let Noelle have him again, won’t you?"

Rose glared at Estelle and snapped, "No need to waste your breath on such an ungrateful brat. If she won’t listen, we’ll make her do it."

Before Adrian left the ward, he placed a consent form for induced labor on the bedside table. "See? Nathaniel agrees with us, too. Be sensible and save yourself any unnecessary trouble."

Estelle watched them quietly as they left, the last trace of the familial bond between them vanishing along with them.

When she was a little girl, she had been abducted by human traffickers due to atrocious negligence on Rose’s part. For eighteen years, her life had been stolen, while Noelle Lockwood had lived a nice life in her place.

The Lockwoods had looked for her, not because they had felt guilty about her fate, but because Noelle had fallen ill and they had needed her to donate her bone marrow to her.

And then there was Nathaniel, whom she had loved deeply.

Estelle lowered her eyes to the signed consent form. After a long moment, she picked up her phone and called Nathaniel Sloan.

Meanwhile, two nurses happened to walk past the ward.

One of them whispered excitedly, "Guess what... I just saw Nathaniel Sloan and Noelle Lockwood!"

Estelle paused.

The nurse continued, "Noelle said that she had a stomachache, and her fiancé wouldn’t leave her side. They even used a VIP pass. He was such a caring and considerate fiancé."

"He’s not a mere fiancé! Noelle is going to be Mrs. Sloan very soon."

"Noelle was born in a noble family, and now Mr. Sloan will become her husband. She has definitely won the life lottery. Do you think that all Lockwoods are born lucky?"

"Not every single one of them. There is a pregnant Lockwood girl in that ward, and her parents are just ignoring her! She will be going into labor soon, and her own husband hasn’t even shown up."

Estelle felt like she couldn’t breathe. Her heart seemed to be broken in a million pieces, causing pain to spread throughout her entire body.

Then, her call went through.

Nathaniel frowned as he answered the call.

"Hello? Estelle, is that you?" he asked, sounding very distant.

"Where are you? I need to talk to you right now." Estelle sounded as fragile as a piece of glass ready to break at a single touch.

Frowning even deeper, Nathaniel said in a lower tone, "I’m not available."

Estelle’s eyes reddened, yet she replied stubbornly, "You’re not available? Then who is the man standing next to Noelle right now?"

A soft, clingy voice came from the other end of the line. "Please, Estelle, I fell sick out of the blue, and Nathaniel is with me because he’s really worried about me and the baby. Please don’t get the wrong idea."

"Get some rest." Nathaniel calmed Noelle down quietly and then stepped outside the ward with the phone and said in a colder voice, "I don’t have much time, Estelle. What do you want?"

Estelle’s voice was shaking, yet she would not be able to believe what had happened if she didn’t hear the answer with her own ears. "Nathaniel, you care a lot about Noelle’s baby, but what about mine? Do you feel nothing for it at all?"

"I have already hired the best nurse and nanny in the country for you," Nathaniel answered coldly. "As for Noelle, you are the one who pushed her down the staircase at the banquet and caused a scene, making her almost have a miscarriage. Did you expect me to just ignore her?"

"I told you, it was not me!"

A few days earlier, at a banquet, Noelle had pretended to fall down a staircase and blamed the whole thing on Estelle, who had instantly become the villain in everyone’s eyes. Rose had even threatened to call the police and put Estelle in prison, but she had hoped that at least Nathaniel would believe her explanation.

"I told you that she fell of her own accord, but you didn’t believe me," Estelle said as she bit her own lip. "But you believed everything Noelle told you. Have you forgotten that I’m your wife, not Noelle?"

Estelle truly found that ridiculous.

Nathaniel paused briefly before he said, "It doesn’t matter what I think. You will go to jail if that incident is blown out of proportion. I will protect you, just as my grandpa asked me to."

Estelle’s lips twitched, but she couldn’t force out a laugh.

Horace Sloan was the one who had arranged the marriage between her and Nathaniel. The whole world had assumed that the bride would be Noelle, but she had turned out not to be the real heiress, so when Estelle had returned home, she had become Nathaniel’s new bride.

Unfortunately, Noelle had refused to let it go. She had repeatedly gotten Estelle into trouble because she wanted desperately to be with Nathaniel herself.

Estelle was the polar opposite of Noelle in every aspect. One of them was kind, generous, and graceful, while the other was vicious, petty, and malicious.

After Estelle and Nathaniel’s wedding, Noelle had moved into their home and kept Nathaniel company all the time, causing endless gossip to spread among the public.

No matter how devoted Estelle was to Nathaniel, nothing had changed. This marriage, which Estelle had committed herself fully to, had turned out to be just a favor her husband’s grandpa had asked of him. That’s all it had ever been to Nathaniel.

Suddenly, Estelle felt exhausted. She closed her eyes and made a decision in her heart.

After a long silence, Nathaniel said, "If that is all, I will..."

"Nathaniel, I want a divorce."

The words were soft, but they stung. Nathaniel’s grip on the phone tightened as he said, "Stop being a child."

"I am not." Estelle suppressed tears as she replied briefly, "Goodbye, Mr. Sloan."

Then, she ended the call before Nathaniel could respond.

Sitting on a bench in the hospital corridor, Estelle thought that she had finally lost all hope in this marriage. She just felt tired.

The moment Nathaniel had decided to take Noelle’s side, there had basically been no part of him that she’d wanted anymore. None at all.

Estelle felt that it was time to leave.

A moment later, she went into the ward and drafted a divorce agreement. All of a sudden, she felt a sharp pain in her belly. Her vision was filled with flames, and she saw the panicking figures of nurses hurry over to her.

"Fire. Run!"

"A woman is in labor! We need help!"

A long while later, Noelle’s voice drifted through the fog. "Leave her there. Nathaniel has given up on her. Kill the children if she doesn’t want to abort them. Nathaniel only wants to keep mine."

The fire that had broken out in the delivery room of the hospital caused no casualties among the medical staff, but Estelle Lockwood, the wife that Nathaniel Sloan had refused to be with in public, ended up passing away in the flames.