This is a story I heard from my friend, Ms. K.

At the time, Ms. K had just finished building her dream home. She lived with her husband and their five-year-old son, who was at that delightfully mischievous age. Her husband’s business was thriving, and to anyone looking from the outside, they were the picture-perfect happy family.

In reality, though, Ms. K had a deep worry. It seemed her husband was having a secret affair. The other woman was a secretary at the company he ran. Ms. K had seen her before—she was young, cute, and very much the typical mistress type.

At first, Ms. K trusted him, thinking, "It's just a temporary lapse; he'll surely come back to me," and tried her best to turn a blind eye. But even after six months, her husband's affair showed no signs of stopping. She wanted to confront him directly, but he had a toxic, emotionally abusive streak, and since Ms. K was used to walking on eggshells around him, she couldn't bring herself to take a firm stand.

On top of that, Ms. K had been a stay-at-home mom for a long time, so it was clear she would face financial ruin if they ended up getting divorced.

Trapped by worries about her son and her future livelihood, Ms. K was unable to confide in anyone, and her mental state gradually began to deteriorate.

Eventually, Ms. K found an outlet for her dark, festering resentment in her fantasies. Every single day, whenever she looked at her husband, she would brutally murder him in her mind. Splashing sulfuric acid over his head to melt him into sludge. Repeatedly stabbing him in the stomach with a kitchen knife. Strangling him from behind with all her strength.

Unable to voice a single complaint in real life, she continued to imagine killing him in every way conceivable, all while chatting with a smile on her face. You might think, "It's just a delusion..." but surprisingly, Ms. K said that doing this gave her a strange sense of relief.

It was a little while later that things started going wrong. Her five-year-old son suddenly began wetting the bed.

On top of that, he started crying and fussing a lot during the day as well.

Ms. K panicked, suspecting that her husband's affair and her own unstable mental state were having a negative effect on her child. After all, children are acutely sensitive to adult dynamics.

That day, too, while the three of them were sitting at the dinner table, her son suddenly broke down crying. As the boy collapsed onto the table, sobbing hysterically, Ms. K flusteredly tried to comfort him. "There, there, what's wrong? Are you okay? What happened?" Then, her son snapped his head up and looked at Ms. K with eyes full of tears.

"Mommy, don't kill Daddy. Don't stab him with the knife. Daddy's gonna die. It's scary."

Ms. K said her heart almost stopped beating. Because at that exact moment, while sitting at the dinner table, she had been immersed in that very same fantasy of killing her husband.

"Wh-what are you talking about? I would never do that. Stop saying such weird things." "But, Mommy, you kill Daddy every day. You choke him and run him over with a car, and it's scary! I hate it! Mommy, stop it!"

As she hugged her sobbing child, Ms. K felt the blood drain from her face.

"Okay. I get it. It's okay. Nothing scary is going to happen anymore. Mommy won't kill Daddy. I promise I won't do anything like that, so don't worry."

After managing to soothe and calm her son, Ms. K turned over a new leaf, realizing she couldn't go on like this. She swore off escaping reality through dark murder fantasies once and for all, and made up her mind to get a clean divorce.

Ms. K found a job and achieved financial independence. Furthermore, she gathered solid evidence of her husband's affair, hired a lawyer, and successfully obtained proper alimony and compensation from both her husband and his mistress.

Before long, she and her son safely started their new life together.

Yet, Ms. K says she still finds it strange even now. How had her son sensed her delusions back then? Could her intense fantasies have somehow leaked into reality? She'll never know the truth now. But Ms. K genuinely believes that her feelings reached them like a curse.

"Because, you know, both my ex-husband and his mistress died after that. I stopped fantasizing about killing him myself, but I never stopped imagining them dying in an accident. Ah, it feels so good. There's no way I could ever forgive them, right?"

I still can't forget the smile on Ms. K's face as she said that.