The sterile buzz of the doctor’s office matched Victoria’s shattered world as Mr. Chris Beao shared what he had to say: another miscarriage. Tears poured down her face, and she shook with sobs.
At her side was Chris, her husband of 5 years, his hand lifeless on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Vic,” he muttered, his eyes going away to where he was in the only work she had ever given up anything for.
Victoria, who toiled away as a secretary working 12- and 14-hour days so Chris could indulge his dream of creating his own construction company. Two miscarriages had robbed her of their future children, and she’d become depressed.
Hormones ran rampant through her body, and it ballooned from its former slimness, but this was surely not a slothful paunch; no, this extra sheath formed for the sake of grief’s wicked signature. Food was her consolation, every mouthful a temporary relief from the emptiness.
Neighbors murmured behind closed doors, their gossip a relentless bully: “Look at her, letting herself go.” While she’d once had a vibrant Victoria figure, now she was hidden in baggy clothes, her mirror an enemy.
Chris was oblivious as he ascended, but now he looked. “Do you even love yourself anymore?” he spat out one evening, his words a knife. Victoria’s heart shattered, but she choked down her grief, pressing her old dresses before he came back to register his firm so that she could be his receptionist there.
Months faded into exhaustion—phones, schedules—until the turning point: a hotel construction contract after three bruising years.
Joy should have come next, but fear abraded Victoria. A tip from a neighbor steered her to a five-star hotel, and she found Chris all wrapped up with Jennifer, a slick young career woman from his boss’s office.
She was crushed to see how pointless her sacrifices had been. “Love doesn’t pay the fucking bills, Vic,” Chris quipped, voice like steel. “I need a classy young woman and not… this. He indicated her plumpness, his gaze remorseless.
Victoria pushed through the door, betrayed, and ran from the room with a weight of imbalance that was heavier than her body. Her attorney served me with divorce papers the next day. Chris’s goodbye kiss was a perverted parody, underlining her loathsome humiliation.
As she lurched out of the hotel, fate stepped in. Her college classmate William Hargrove, a powerful real estate tycoon now, arrived in his low-slung sports car. “Victoria? My God, what happened?”
He was truly concerned, unlike Chris, who was mean. Over coffee, William explained: he was the one who’d signed Chris’s contract—but he had no idea his imprimatur would release a monster like this! “He LEFT you after four years of hell? Let me help.”
Reluctant and afraid of other people’s judgment of her looks, Victoria took him up on his offer of a house in Lagos—a hideaway filled with garish kitchens laden with fresh supplies.
Inside the ornate room, Victoria found a women’s health magazine whose pages pledged “transformation.” Pictures of herself in college—thin, glowing—stared back, and it sparked something. Not for Chris, not for revenge for Chris or to get even, but to do it on her own behalf.
William stood by her, paying for the services of a trainer and nutritionist. The workouts were punishing, the tears falling among the sweat drops, but each workout revealed a glow. Victoria resurfaced five months later, confident and with her curves toned and spirit unbreakable. William’s eyes brightened at the shift. “But you’re a phoenix, Vic.”
He took her out to dinner in a classy Banana Island restaurant, and she was seen in a red dress that clung perfectly to her restored shape. Heads turned, admiration replacing pity. Victoria was a radiant figure at the high-profile business gala, laughing and throwing her head back.
Chris, across the room, froze. “Victoria?” he cried out, seeing who the lady had become. He was struck with shame when William presented her as his fiancée. “She’s at the helm of your project right now,” William said coldly.
Chris turned pale, his procrastinations having stacked up, and Victoria had been demanding extensions with all power and no grace. “Come back to me every week,” she ordered, her voice steel. Chris, a former bully, was now pleading for mercy, his empire crumbling as it failed.
Feeling the change, Jennifer dumped him and demanded refunds for work that never came. “You were just the means to an end,” she hissed away from Chris. His character was in tatters, accounts frozen, and clients fleeing.
A healthy Victoria looked on from a distance as Karma’s blade struck. For Chris, that moment of financial despair came when she phoned William: “The project’s bombed. Freeze his assets.”
With a car and mansion but now without a friend left in the world, Chris recognized the cost of his betrayal—the very woman he had ridiculed would now have been queen.
Victoria’s life blossomed. She married William in a lavish ceremony, her dress signifying rebirth. Bold and beautiful, she walked the aisle, shadows of the past banished. Chris was watching from the wreckage, and her triumph must have been a stark reminder of his meanness.
And Victoria’s narrative roared, moving from agony to victory: self-creation renders the beast silent, transforming the ill-fated into slayers of doom.
