Chapter 4 — A Marriage Where Love Was Buried

Gia Hang looked at me with a pained expression, his eyes filled with a feigned disbelief that made my stomach turn.

Loan, did it really have to come to this? he asked, his voice dripping with calculated sorrow.

His theatrical gaze could no longer reach me, let alone sway me. I truly loved you, Loan, how could you be so cruel to me? I could not fathom how a man could speak of love in the same breath as he struck the woman who offered it to him, only to turn around and coddle another. Yet, the confusion had long since burned away into ash. I slid the divorce papers across the table. Sign it. Reluctantly, driven entirely by the fear that a public scandal would ruin his precious reputation, Gia Hang picked up the pen and signed his name. The moment the ink dried, my mother shrieked.

Why!

She lunged across the table, her hands clawing for the divorce papers. Why did you sign!

I stood frozen, utterly stunned by her violent reaction. I watched in horror as she gripped Gia Hang by the sleeve, her eyes bloodshot and blazing with a manic fury.

I have lived my entire life trapped in misery, so by what right does she get to leave! Why was I denied this, while she gets to walk away?

How could you sign those papers!

Even Gia Hang was taken aback by the sheer hysteria of her outburst, though he quickly dismissed her to refocus his pleading eyes on me.

Loan, do you really want to throw everything away?

Before the shock of my mother's words could even begin to settle, I looked at Gia Hang’s mask of hypocrisy and felt a profound, unwavering certainty.

Choosing you was the greatest mistake of my life.

And perhaps, that was not even the half of it. I turned my gaze to my mother, my eyes brimming with a devastating disappointment.

As of today, we are no longer mother and daughter.

We climbed into the car alongside our eldest sister, leaving the police station and the wreckage of our past behind us. She looked over at me with a gentle, steady warmth.

This was never your fault, she said softly.

There are countless women out there, still drowning in the same abyss, waiting for someone to reach down.

And as for us...

Perhaps we are destined to be their final lifeline.

Inside the car, the youngest of our group, usually quiet and withdrawn, slowly rolled up her sleeve. She always dressed in heavy layers, and I had simply assumed it was her preferred aesthetic. It was not until I saw the constellation of jagged scars crisscrossing her forearm that my breath caught in my throat.

My stepfather did not just beat my mother, she whispered, her voice hollow. He beat me, too.

And to keep him from striking her...

A bitter, humorless smile touched her lips. She was the one who pushed me into his bed.

My biological father killed him to avenge me, and for that, he was sentenced to death.

I used to believe that the person who loved me most in this world had to be my mother.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and fierce. But in the end, the only person who truly loved and protected me was the woman my mother spent every day cursing.

Looking at the physical evidence of her torment, my throat tightened, and tears stung my own eyes. Before I could even find the words to comfort her, she reached out and pulled me into a tight embrace.

Sister, she murmured against my shoulder, the world may fail to love you, but you must never, ever stop loving yourself.

We cannot choose the blood in our veins, but we can choose the family we build.

My mother had once been the ultimate pillar of my existence. Yet today, she had used the most brutal means possible to teach me a terrifying truth: perhaps she had never truly loved me at all. Or perhaps, she had simply never known what love was in the first place. Even if she had loved me, it was never enough. The wound she inflicted cut far deeper than anything Gia Hang had ever done, making me question every single memory of my twenty-some years of life.

It was only now, cradled by the fierce loyalty of these remarkable women, that the ice around my heart began to thaw. I looked at them and felt an inexhaustible well of strength rising from deep within. I finally understood what our leader often said.

I refuse to watch women remain as mere shadows trapped within the four walls of a home, she would say, and I refuse to let us wither away like unwatered flowers.

Flowers could bloom, and their brilliance could endure – simply because they were cherished.

Desperate to derail the divorce, Gia Hang resorted to desperate measures, attempting to tear down everything we had built. He and my mother colluded online, launching a vicious smear campaign against me and our organization. My mother sat before the camera, weeping theatrical tears, claiming that the dutiful daughter she had raised for over two decades had been brainwashed by a dangerous cult. She wailed that I refused to return home, disowned my own flesh and blood, and demanded a divorce all under the dangerous guise of women's liberation. Beside her, Gia Hang donned the mask of the heartbroken, long-suffering husband, his voice choking with feigned emotion.

Loan, as long as you come back to me, I will always be waiting.

He did not stop there. He rounded up the abusive husbands of the other survivors and brought them onto a livestream to play the roles of desolate, wronged partners. Every single one of them put on a tearful performance, accusing our leader of brainwashing their wives and tearing their families apart, demanding public justice. Some even dug into her past, weaponizing the fact that she had once served a prison sentence for murder. The calculated outrage sparked an immediate firestorm across the internet. Netizens began baying for her blood, flooding her pages with vile curses, branding her a homewrecking menace. Some deranged trolls even photoshopped her pictures into black-and-white memorial portraits, publicly praying for her demise.

Seeing public opinion overwhelmingly rally behind the abusers, Gia Hang sent me a direct threat.

Lam Loan, you had better crawl back to me on your own! Otherwise, the woman who saved you is going to pay the ultimate price because of you. Watch your back and wait for your karma!

Staring at the screen, picturing his smug, gloating face, I trembled with fury. But I forced myself to swallow the rage. I had to endure. I needed to let the public frenzy spiral completely out of control. I wanted the scandal to reach such a fever pitch that it could never be swept back under the rug. I wanted these monsters to face a reckoning, to be permanently nailed to the pillar of shame.

While the internet screamed for our heads, my sisters and I remained meticulously organized, gathering undeniable evidence and retaining top-tier legal counsel. We did not cower in the shadows. The moment Gia Hang and his coalition of abusers launched their livestream offensive, we went live to meet them head-on. We dispatched formal legal notices to every digital vigilante spreading malicious defamation, while simultaneously unleashing an avalanche of hard evidence to strip away their masks of innocence.

Among us, the person who had suffered the most unspeakable horrors was our leader’s own niece—a woman whose face had been brutally mutilated by her husband. She sat before the camera, choosing not to hide her scars, laying the devastating proof bare for the world to see.

Just because I was a few minutes late waking up, he poured a boiling kettle of water straight onto my face.

When my flesh melted and burned, not only did he refuse to take me to the hospital, but he looked at me with sheer disgust, declaring me too hideous to bear, and grabbed a kitchen knife to carve away the scorched skin himself.

Her voice shook violently, trembling with the weight of terror, a testament that pierced straight through the hearts of anyone listening. Yet she bravely peeled back the layers of her trauma to drag her nightmarish memories into the light.

It was a butcher's knife. I was treated like a pig waiting for the slaughterhouse. My screams meant nothing. He merely told me to shut my filthy mouth, grabbed me by the hair, and beat me all the harder.

It is not as if I never went to the police, she sobbed, tears cutting tracks through the scarred tissue of her face. But they always dismissed it as a domestic dispute. I was driven so deep into despair that I wanted to die.

It was my aunt who pulled me from the jaws of hell. If not for her, I would have been dead years ago!

Another woman stepped forward, holding up official medical examination reports detailing permanent physical disabilities.

I can never work a normal job again. After years of relentless abuse, I was stripped of even the right to end my own life, reduced to nothing more than a beast waiting for the slaughter.

It was our sisterhood, and our leader, who brought me back to the land of the living!