Chapter 6 - Enjoy the Life You Chose
Five years after the divorce.
The rain fell steadily over the small town of Oakridge, washing over the muddy construction site of a low-income housing project.
Dominic Vance sat on an overturned plastic bucket inside a half-built wooden framework, eating a cold sandwich from a tin lunchbox. He was forty-two years old, but he looked fifty-five. His body was stiff from years of hard manual labor, his hands cracked and calloused, his gray hair plastered to his forehead by the rain.
He pulled a damp, worn newspaper from his tool belt—a copy of the International Financial Times that a surveyor had dropped near the site trailer earlier that morning.
On page three was a prominent full-color photograph.
The headline read:
AVERY INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES $500M GLOBAL PEDIATRIC HEALTH INITIATIVE
In the center of the photograph stood Audrey Avery-Sterling. She wore a stunning cream-colored silk gown at a gala in Geneva, radiating grace, beauty, and absolute happiness. Resting against her side was Gabriel Sterling, his arm wrapped lovingly around her waist.
And sitting on a velvet chair in front of them were two vibrant, healthy three-year-old twins—a boy and a girl with clear, sparkling hazel eyes, laughing as they held their mother’s hands.
The Avery Foundation celebrates the birth of Audrey and Gabriel Sterling’s twin children, the caption read, as they dedicate a new $500 million endowment to children’s hospitals worldwide.
Dominic stared at the picture of the twins.
The doctor had told him he was permanently infertile. But Audrey... Audrey was whole. Audrey was blessed. Audrey had been given the beautiful family she had always deserved, with a man who cherished her value and protected her heart.
A tear slipped down Dominic’s muddy cheek, blending with the cold rain dripping from his yellow hard hat.
He slowly folded the newspaper, placing it carefully inside his coat pocket—not out of anger, not out of bitterness, but as a silent, solemn monument to the life he had thrown away.
He looked up at the grey, rainy sky, hearing the echo of his own mother’s arrogant voice from years ago: “Stop making everything into a drama.”
And then, he remembered Audrey’s final message, the seven words that had reshaped his entire destiny:
May you like
Enjoy the family you chose.
Dominic Vance closed his lunchbox, stood up in the cold rain, picked up his hammer, and went back to work in the mud—alone with the choices he had made, while the woman he had destroyed lived in the light of the glorious world she had built.
