No Longer His Wife, His Mother

As the building crumbled around us, my husband, a paramedic, held the only oxygen mask.

He gave it to his high school sweetheart, not to me, his wife who was struggling to breathe.

Pinned under a beam, I gasped that I was pregnant. He told me to stop being dramatic and left me to die, taking our son with him. My own son agreed, telling his father I always "bounce back."

I lost our baby, alone in a hospital room, while they fussed over her "anxiety attack" across the hall. They had chosen her, leaving me and our child in the rubble without a second thought.

When he finally confronted me, it wasn't to apologize, but to demand I stop my "games." So I gave him exactly what he and our son had wished for.

"I'm divorcing you," I said calmly. "And you can have Jax. I no longer want to be his mother."

Chapter 1

Alisa POV:

My husband handed the oxygen mask to his high school sweetheart, Bria, not to me, the mother of his child, as the building around us crumbled. The dust choked me, burning my lungs with every shallow breath. I watched him, my heart hammering a frantic, irregular rhythm against my ribs, fully aware that this was the end.

It was Jax' s seventh birthday. We had planned a small party at home, just us. Jonas, my husband, had surprised me earlier that morning.

"Bria' s coming over," he' d said, his voice flat. "Jax insisted. She' s bringing the cake."

My stomach churned. It always did when Bria' s name entered our household like an unwelcome draft.

"Jonas, it' s our son' s birthday. Just us, remember?" I tried to keep my voice even, but a tremor escaped. My heart condition flared with stress, a constant, unwelcome reminder of my fragility.

He sighed, a long-suffering sound that always made me feel like an unreasonable burden. "Alisa, don' t start. Jax loves Bria. She' s like an aunt to him. What' s the harm?"

The harm? The harm was in her constant presence, her manipulative tears, the way she subtly undermined my authority as a mother, and how Jonas always, always sided with her. The harm was the gaping hole she tore in our family.

"She' s not family, Jonas," I retorted, my voice rising despite my best efforts. "She' s your ex-girlfriend who decided to suddenly reappear in our lives a year ago. She' s destabilizing everything."

Before he could answer, the world convulsed. A deafening roar swallowed our words, followed by a violent tremor that threw me against the wall. The building groaned, a tortured sound of metal and concrete tearing apart. A gas explosion. The thought flashed through my mind just before the ceiling above us disintegrated. Dust, thick and acrid, filled the air, instantly coating everything in a suffocating shroud.

A sharp pain lanced through my side as something heavy struck me. I cried out, my breath catching. The dust