He was tall, handsome, spoke eloquently, and always looked at me with loving eyes.
He told me his family was very well educated and strict, that his parents were very kind, and that he had a younger sister, Zola, who was the family treasure because she had been orphaned young.
He insisted that I should treat Zola very well.
I believed him.
I believed every word.
The house where his family lived wasn’t huge.
A modest, well-kept bungalow on a quiet street in the Cascade Heights area.
His mother, Mrs. Octavia Johnson, greeted me with a polite smile.
She wasn’t overly enthusiastic, but showed no discomfort.
She asked a few questions about my job and my family and nodded, saying that being a doctor was a good profession for saving lives.
But for some reason, I felt an invisible distance in her words.
And then Zola appeared.
She came out of her room in an immaculate white dress, her long dark hair falling to her shoulders.
She had large, round, clear eyes and a smile so innocent it could melt the hardest heart.
She ran to hug Cairo and said in a sweet voice, “Brother, you came. I missed you.”
Then she turned to me, blinked, and said, “So, this is Selene. She’s gorgeous.”
In that moment, I was completely fooled by her pure appearance.
I thought she was truly pitiful.
A poor orphaned girl.
I promised myself that when I became her sister-in-law, I would treat her like a blood sister, making up for all the emotional neglect she had suffered.
Oh, how naive and foolish the five-years-ago me was.
I didn’t realize that behind those clear eyes hid an abyss of calculation and jealousy.
Our wedding took place soon after.
I invested almost all my savings accumulated over years of work to prepare a decent wedding alongside Cairo.
I wanted his family to feel proud in front of their relatives and friends.
On the wedding day, Zola also wore a white bridesmaid dress.
She cried buckets when Cairo placed the ring on my finger.
Everyone said she was crying tears of joy seeing her brother find happiness.
Only I glimpsed a strange look in her eyes at that moment.
A look I would only understand later.
It was one of regret and resentment.
But the bride’s happiness soon made me forget that uneasiness.
In my first days as a daughter-in-law, I did everything possible to adapt.
No matter how hard the work was at the hospital or how many shifts I had, I would get up at 5 in the morning to go to the market and prepare breakfast for the whole family.
No matter how tired I was when I returned at night, I would rush to the kitchen to prepare Cairo and his family’s favorite dishes.
I bought my mother-in-law the best nutritional supplements and my father-in-law the set of cigars he longed for.
I treated Zola better than a sister.
New clothes.
Expensive cosmetics.
I denied her nothing.
I did all of this without a single complaint.
I just wanted to be accepted, to feel the warmth of a family.
But all I received in return was indifference.
My mother-in-law never praised me.
No matter how good my food was, she would just eat in silence and occasionally blurt out, “This is a little salty,” or, “Today’s soup is bland.”
She never asked if my work was hard or if I was struggling.
In her eyes, I, a doctor saving lives, seemed to be nothing more than the unpaid maid of the house.
And Cairo, my husband, where was he during these moments?
He was there.
He sat beside me at every meal, but he never said a word in my defense.
When his mother unfairly scolded me, he simply bowed his head and ate.
When I was exhausted after a long shift, he didn’t offer a single word of comfort.
He only knew how to say one thing.
“Have a little patience. Mom is like that.”
“But deep down, she loves her daughter-in-law very much.”
It seemed that all his love was reserved for his sister, Zola.
Zola did absolutely nothing around the house.
She would get up at 9 or 10 in the morning.
After eating, she would retreat to her room, close the door, and spend the day on her phone or out with friends.
My mother-in-law always defended her.
“Leave her alone. She’s just a child. What would she know?”
“Besides, she’s always been delicate. She can’t do heavy work.”
Delicate.
And I, who had just finished an eight-hour emergency surgery, was a rock.
The favoritism became increasingly blatant.
Once I caught a terrible cold with a high fever and couldn’t move from bed.
I asked Cairo to make me some soup.
He said yes and went down to the kitchen.
Half an hour later, there was no soup.
But Zola came up with a bowl of steaming chicken noodle soup, placed it on the nightstand, and said in her sweet voice, “Sis, drink it while it’s hot.”
“It seemed my brother wasn’t getting the hint, so I made it.”
In that moment, I almost cried with emotion.
I thought that finally someone in that house cared about me.
But that night, passing by my mother-in-law’s room, I overheard their conversation.
“Mom, see, I told you. You have to let that woman get really sick to snap her into shape.”
“A woman who only thinks about working and can’t even prepare a decent meal for her husband.”
“My poor brother.”
Zola’s voice was no longer innocent.
It was full of sarcasm.
My mother-in-law replied, pleased, “My girl is the best. Come on, tomorrow. Mom will buy you a new handbag.”
I stood outside the door, frozen.
The bowl of soup I had held in my hands that morning suddenly turned into bitter poison in my throat.
So that was it.
It was all an act.
They, the mother-in-law and sister-in-law, had been conspiring to portray me as useless in my husband’s eyes.
I wanted to go in and expose them.
But I didn’t.
I knew that if I did, Cairo wouldn’t believe me.
He would think I was jealous of his poor sister, that I was petty.
I chose silence.
I swallowed my tears.
I consoled myself by thinking that as long as Cairo still loved me, everything would be fine.
But I didn’t know that my silence that day was a form of tolerating evil.
And so it grew day by day.
And on this fateful night it exploded, shattering everything.
“Scalpel.”
My voice echoing in the OR snapped me out of the painful rush of memories.
I looked at Zola’s wound, which was still steadily bleeding.
The anger inside me suddenly calmed, leaving only a doctor’s sense of responsibility.
Her life was now in my hands.
But if I saved her, would she repent?
Or would it be the start of an even more cruel conspiracy?
Zola’s surgery lasted over three hours.
She had a ruptured vessel causing severe internal hemorrhage.
It was a complex surgery that required extreme concentration.
And during those hours, I erased every personal feeling from my mind.
Before me wasn’t the sister-in-law who had betrayed me with my husband.
It was simply a patient.
A life that needed saving.
I worked with the utmost professionalism and medical ethics.
I meticulously sutured every ruptured vessel, stopped the bleeding, and treated the wound with the greatest care.
When I finished the last suture, I let out a sigh of relief and felt all the energy drain from my body.
The operation had been a success.
Zola was out of danger.
I walked out of the operating room.
The dim hallway light hurt my eyes.
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