I had been married to James for five years. From the very first day I became his wife, I got used to his cold words and indifferent glances. James wasn’t violent or loud, but his apathy made my heart wither a little more each day.

After our wedding, we lived in his parents’ house in a neighborhood in New York. Every morning, I woke up early to cook, do laundry, and clean, while he quietly went off to work.

Every evening, I sat and waited for him to come home, only to hear him say,
“Yeah, I already ate.”

I often wondered if this marriage was any different from being a tenant. I tried to build, I tried to love, but all I got in return was an invisible void that I couldn’t fill.

Then one day, James came home with a cold, blank face.
He sat down opposite me, handed me a divorce paper, and said in a dry voice,
“Sign it. I don’t want to waste either of our time anymore.”

I froze, but I wasn’t surprised. With tears welling up, I took the pen with a trembling hand. All the memories of waiting for him at the dinner table, of the times I had stomachaches in the middle of the night that I endured alone, suddenly came flooding back like deep cuts.

After signing, I packed my things.

There was nothing in his house that belonged to me, except for a few clothes and the old pillow I always slept with.

As I was pulling my suitcase out the door, James threw the pillow at me, his voice full of sarcasm:
“Take it and wash it. It’s probably about to fall apart.”

I took the pillow, my heart constricting. It really was old; the pillowcase was faded, with yellowed stains and torn spots.
It was the pillow I had brought from my mother’s home in a small town when I went to university in the city, and I kept it when I became his wife because I had trouble sleeping without it.

I didn’t expect to find something strange when I took the pillowcase off to wash it. There was something lumpy inside the soft cotton fluff. I reached my hand in and stopped dead. A small paper bundle, wrapped very carefully in a nylon bag.

I opened it with trembling hands. Inside was a stack of money, all 500-dollar bills, and a piece of paper folded into four.

I opened the paper. My mother’s familiar handwriting appeared, shaky and wobbly:
“My daughter, this is the money I saved for you in case of hardship. I hid it in the pillow because I was afraid you’d be too proud to take it. No matter what, don’t suffer for a man, my dear. I love you.”

Tears fell heavily onto the yellowed paper. I remembered on my wedding day, my mother giving me the pillow, saying it was very soft so I would sleep well.

I laughed and said,
“You’re getting old, Mom, what a strange thing to think. James and I will be happy.”

She just smiled, with a distant, sad look in her eyes. I hugged the pillow to my chest, feeling as if my mother was sitting beside me, stroking my hair and comforting me.

It turned out she always knew how much a daughter would suffer if she chose the wrong man. It turned out she had prepared a backup plan for me; not a wealthy one, but one that kept me from despair.

That night, I lay on the hard bed in my small rented room, holding the pillow to my chest, my tears soaking the pillowcase.

But this time, I wasn’t crying because of James. I was crying because I loved my mother.

I cried because I felt lucky, that at least I still had a place to go back to, a mother who loved me, and a big world out there waiting to welcome me.

The next morning, I woke up early, folded the pillow carefully, and put it in my suitcase. I told myself I would rent a smaller room, closer to my job.

I smiled at myself in the mirror.
This woman with swollen eyes, from today on, would live for herself, for her aging mother back home, and for all the unfinished dreams of her youth.

That marriage, that old pillow, that sneer… all of it was just the end of a sad chapter. As for my life, there were still many new pages waiting to be written by my own resilient hands.