Adultery Dad's Enemy Made My Mom Heartless (COMPLETED!!)

[thoristhanos]

The next semester break arrived, and the atmosphere in the house had shifted again, warping into a new, tense configuration. Aakash was still very much part of our lives, but his presence had a different rhythm. He wasn't living there every day anymore. He’d show up twice, maybe three times a week, often late in the evening. The seamless cohabitation had fractured.


My mother was now profoundly pregnant. Her body, once a site of sensual power-play, had become a vessel stretched to its limit. Her belly was a taut, enormous sphere, her movements slow and waddling. Her face was puffy, her ankles swollen. The sleek, backless-blouse seductress was gone, replaced by a woman in oversized kurtas and maternity leggings, her beauty buried under the physical toll of gestation.

And with this transformation came the fights.

They weren't loud, dramatic shouting matches. They were colder, more corrosive. Snapped comments over dinner. Aakash arriving later than promised, my mother’s voice tight with accusation: "You said you'd be here by seven." His irritable deflection: "I got held up. Do you track every minute?" Her hormonal tears, which he met with a weary, dismissive sigh. The slamming of a bedroom door—his old room, not theirs—when he chose to sleep apart.

I watched these skirmishes from the sidelines, a grim spectator. In my bitterness, I diagnosed their strife with a cruel, simplistic logic. Her raging pregnancy hormones, I thought. And him—he's bored. She's fat now. Ugly. Mature-looking. The thrill is gone. He got what he wanted, a son on the way, and now the used-up vessel holds no allure. It was a narrative that fed my dormant hope. Maybe this was the beginning of the end. Maybe the grotesque fantasy they’d built would crack under the pressure of mundane reality. Maybe he’d leave, and some shattered fragment of my old life could be salvaged.

That fragile, hateful hope peaked one Sunday afternoon. My mother was sitting on the sofa, complaining of back pain, when a strange look crossed her face—a mixture of shock and sudden, profound calm. A gush of fluid soaked through her clothes and onto the cushion.

Her water had broken.

What followed was a frantic, surreal few hours. Aakash, who happened to be there, was uncharacteristically flustered. He helped her to the car, his earlier irritability replaced by a focused urgency. I was left behind, alone in the suddenly silent, waiting house. The fight from that morning—over something trivial like the brand of ghee she’d bought—felt like it had happened in another lifetime.

Hours later, my phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number. It was Aakash.
‘Boy. Both fine.’
That was it. No exclamation points. No shared joy. Just a stark, factual report.

A healthy baby boy.

For the next two months, Aakash was back. Fully, constantly back. He moved into the master bedroom without discussion, his belongings reclaiming their space. But the dynamic was utterly transformed. The fights evaporated. The coldness melted away.

It was worse than any argument.

They became… a family. A sickeningly sweet, doting, young couple with their first child. All the earlier tension was rewritten as pre-birth anxiety, now blissfully resolved. Aakash looked at my mother with a softness I’d never seen—not lust, but a possessive, proud affection. He’d kiss her forehead as she nursed, call her “maa” in a tender voice, bring her glasses of water without being asked. He was enthralled by the baby, spending hours just staring at the tiny, wrinkled face, his rough fingers tracing the curve of a miniature ear with unbelievable gentleness.

My mother glowed. Not with the illicit heat of before, but with a serene, fulfilled radiance. Her body, still heavy from childbirth, was a source of pride now, a life-giving fount. All her attention, every ounce of her energy, poured into the infant. She named him Vivaan.

And we, Rohan and I, ceased to exist.

We were ghosts in our own home. Furniture to navigate around. Our presence elicited no more reaction than a potted plant. Meals were haphazard, often just for us two brothers, cobbled together from leftovers. Conversations were monosyllabic, functional. If we spoke, their eyes would glaze over, already returning to the cocoon they’d built with the baby. The message was deafening: Their love had produced a physical form. Vivaan was the real child, the legitimate heir to this new union. We were relics of a discarded past, inconvenient echoes.

This wasn't the angry exclusion of the fighting days; it was a far more complete annihilation. They weren't pushing us away; they had simply forgotten we were there. My hope for a separation curdled into a deeper, more permanent despair. Their happiness was the final nail in the coffin of my childhood. They weren't just together; they were complete, and that completeness explicitly required our erasure.

Rohan, younger and more emotionally raw, couldn't intellectualize it. His hurt manifested as a sullen, boiling hatred. He stopped speaking to her entirely, slamming doors and eating in his room. She didn't even seem to notice.

And then there was the constant, casual intimacy of motherhood, which felt like a further violation. She breastfed Vivaan everywhere—on the living room sofa, at the dining table, in the garden—with a total lack of self-consciousness. She wouldn’t bother with a nursing cover. Her breasts, larger and veined now, her nipples darker and stretched, her areola a wide, brown target, were constantly on display. To her, it was a natural function. To me, it was another layer of exposure, another way the private, sacred boundaries of my old family had been dismantled and made commonplace. I’d avert my eyes, my face burning with a shame that belonged to no one but me.



I couldn't take it. The internship offer came like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. A big electronics instrument company in another city. I grabbed it without a second thought. I told my mother I was leaving early for my final semester project work. She nodded absently, jiggling Vivaan on her hip, her eyes never really meeting mine. “Okay. ”

I didn't come back home after that semester. I stayed in the company hostel, burying myself in oscilloscopes and circuit boards, the clean, logical world of electronics a sanctuary from the messy, emotional wreckage of my home. I spoke to Rohan occasionally on the phone, his voice getting harder, angrier. He was counting the days until he could escape too.