5
I secretly took photos of evidence until dawn. My husband was still asleep in bed.
I hadn’t slept. I first went to check on my daughter in the next room. She was curled up in a ball, sleeping uneasily.
I gently stroked her head and whispered that this life wouldn’t last much longer.
When my husband got up, I had already made breakfast and cleaned the house.
My mother–in–law, who wanted to find fault early in the morning, circled the house but couldn’t find anything to criticize. At breakfast, she vented her frustration by scolding me a bit.
My husband thought he had completely beaten me into submission after last time. I smiled and went downstairs to see him off to work. Nearby residents who saw us exchanged some joking remarks.
Of course, there were also some particularly judgmental people who saw me holding my husband’s arm as I sent him off. They cursed me as a
slut who deserved to be beaten.
Even though I had just been hospitalized and my injuries hadn’t fully healed, I was still clinging to my husband, they said.
My husband drove to work while I walked to the nearby market to buy groceries.
Half a year after our daughter was born, my mother–in–law pressured me and I got pregnant again.
But when I was a few months along, my mother–in–law took me to a private clinic for an ultrasound. When they confirmed it was another girl,
she insisted I get an abortion.
I refused, preferring to have this daughter and try for a third child. Whether it was a boy or girl didn’t matter to me.
When my husband found out he and his mother both pressured me to abort. When I wouldn’t listen. they tricked me into drinking
12:27 PMN
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abortion–inducing drugs. I only realized what had happened after I miscarried.
It was while I was recovering from that miscarriage that we had an argument and he slapped me for the first time. Things spiraled out of control after that.
件
I didn’t call the police right away with the phone evidence, afraid of alerting them. Instead, I took a cab to a nearby law firm.
I showed the lawyer some of the photos from the domestic abuse group. He was silent for a long time, then looked at me with pity. He said I could hire him to file for divorce and he was confident he could win the case with this evidence.
As for the other women in the group, he said there wasn’t much he could do. Even if reported to the police, at most the cyber police would contact the group owner to shut it down. But WhatsApp accounts rarely used real names, so it would be hard to find the men’s real identities.
More importantly, the “victims” in the group couldn’t be identified either.
Unless they came forward to report it themselves and the police opened an investigation, the result would likely just be a warning to those men. They might not even face any real punishment.
I declined the lawyer’s kind offer. I had figured things out now.
Divorce wasn’t a good option for me either. First, I wouldn’t be able to get custody of my daughter.
I hadn’t worked for over a year since the miscarriage and abuse started, so I had no income.
The previous times I filed for divorce, my husband threatened to kill our daughter and me if I went through with it!
I didn’t dare gamble on whether he would follow through.
So I would have to use my own methods to resolve this.
I bought groceries and went home, carefully preparing four dishes and a soup for when my husband returned from work.
