I am the calculated secret. The bastard son. I spent my life resenting my half-brother, Liam Miller, and then I did the one thing that guaranteed my own destruction: I fell in love with his fiancée. I tried to win her back. I fought for a year, clawing at a wall that wouldn’t crumble. It was useless. Today, Nora Bennett is having her “Wedding of the Century,” a lavish affair designed to cement her place in the Miller dynasty. Everyone expected me to show up and make a scene—to play the desperate villain, to be humiliated and laughed out of the valley. A tragic punchline for the socialites to gossip about over brunch. But I didn’t go. Instead, I stood outside a fluorescent-lit corner deli, finishing a bowl of spicy broth skewers—the exact ones Nora loved most before she lost her memory. I finished the last bite. I turned around. And I started walking down a different road. 1 As I reached the bottom of the paper bowl, a thought drifted through my mind: They wouldn’t dream of eating this today. Not on their wedding day. Nora would be a vision of perfection, every hair in place, her silhouette as sharp and elegant as the life she now leads. The wedding was an exercise in excess—a sprawling estate tucked into a private valley, transformed into a floral wonderland. I’d heard the dress was custom Vera Wang, and the diamond on her finger was the size of a postage stamp. Was it half a million? A million? I couldn’t remember the numbers anymore. Just a string of zeros that meant nothing to me. I wasn’t invited, of course. I stayed on the periphery, watching the fireworks bloom over the ridge from a distance. I didn’t need an invitation to see the ceremony. My social media feed was a digital scrapbook of their happiness. They looked like the protagonists of a high-end magazine—radiant, wealthy, “right.” I was the only one left in the dark, nursing a grudge that was starting to feel like a heavy coat in the summer. I scrolled through the comments on a mutual friend’s post. People were actually taking bets. [Do you think Ethan Miller is going to show up?] [My money’s on yes!] [Duh. Everyone knows Ethan is obsessed with Nora. He’s been trying to homewreck his own brother for a year. He’s pathetic.] [Is there even a doubt? He’ll be there, making a fool of himself.] [Place your bets: Will Nora leave with him? Like a movie?] [Not a chance. One is the legitimate heir to the Miller fortune. The other is a discarded mistake from the wrong side of the tracks. Nora clearly despises him.] [If he shows up, he’s just asking for a beatdown. LOL.] [Can’t wait for the drama…] The thread continued, but I lost interest. I shoved my phone into my pocket and downed the last of the salty, spicy soup. 2 I’d wasted enough of my life on Nora Bennett. It was time to go. Just as I was about to toss the empty container into the trash, a little girl, maybe six years old, popped out from behind a newsstand. She looked at the deli counter with wide, hungry eyes. “Is that good, mister?” she asked. I froze. I hadn’t expected my goodbye to Nora to mirror our first meeting so perfectly. Nine years ago, I was crouching outside a convenience store near our high school, eating these same skewers. Seventeen-year-old Nora had walked past, then doubled back. “Excuse me,” she had said, her voice soft but curious. “Those smell amazing. Are they as good as they look?” I hadn’t even looked up. I just pointed toward the deli. “Right there. Go try them yourself.” She had smiled, a bit shy, about to say something else when a group of students walked by, their laughter cutting like glass. “What could Nora even afford in there?” one girl sneered. “She lives with that old guy who picks up scrap metal. Don’t talk to her, Ethan. She probably smells like the junkyard.” I didn’t smell a junkyard. I only smelled the spicy aroma of the broth. My mother always told me that good things were meant to be shared. “I’ve got two of the best ones left,” I said, standing up. “They’re yours.” I shoved the container into Nora’s hands before turning to the girl who’d spoken. “I don’t smell trash, but I definitely smell a bully. What’s your name and grade? I’m on the student council, and I’m sure the Dean would love to hear about your ‘olfactory concerns.’” Memory is a strange thing; it filters out the boring parts. I don’t remember how the school handled that girl. I just remember turning back to Nora. She was painfully thin, her frame swallowed by a hand-me-down hoodie. She was beautiful, but there was a hollowness in her cheeks that spoke of missed meals. She wasn’t the polished, untouchable heiress she is now. But I loved that version of her. She had held her head high, her spine like iron, and said, “I can’t take these.” I’d patted her shoulder. “I’m full. If you don’t eat them, they go in the trash. Do me a favor?” Only then did she blush and accept them. That was the day those cheap deli skewers became her favorite food in the world. Correction: they were her favorite food before the accident. Now that she’s a Bennett again, she wouldn’t be caught dead eating five-dollar street food. But I still loved them. And clearly, this little girl did too. I knelt down to tell her where the shop was, but she reached out a small, sticky hand and brushed my cheek. “Why are you crying, mister? Did I say something bad?” She hadn’t. I was just realizing that I’d been living in the past for too long, and the air was getting thin. 3 The little girl told me her grandfather was around the corner, collecting cans. She pulled out a handful of crumpled bills and coins—forty-seven dollars and fifty cents. “I want to buy some for Grandpa,” she said, her eyes shining. “It smells like home.” There are a thousand places to get skewers in the city, but Nora and I had never found a place better than the one by our old school. We used to drive across town just for the nostalgia. After the car crash—after she woke up and forgot I existed—I couldn’t handle going there. I just ordered delivery, eating alone in my apartment. Whenever the silence got too loud, I’d eat until I felt full enough to stop hurting. I wanted to buy the girl a meal, but she insisted on handing me twenty dollars. “Can you show me the way? I want to remember where it is.” I took her to the old deli district. A year had passed since I’d last been here, and the neighborhood was changing. The pizza place was a fried chicken joint now. The noodle shop had moved. But the deli was still there. The old woman behind the counter had more grey in her hair, but she recognized me instantly. She adjusted her glasses, a spark of recognition in her eyes. “You’re back! Where’s the girl who’s always with you?” Before I could answer, she started packing a large container, humming to herself. “It’s been so long. I thought you kids grew up and got too fancy for my cooking.” “He still likes it!” the little girl chirped. “He just ate a whole bowl!” The shopkeeper nodded, pouring the broth. “You probably order it on those apps now, right? You’re busy professionals. It’s hard to make the trip. Here, I put in extra for both of you.” She always did that. She’d pack it so tight the lid barely fit. Back then, I’d pretend I couldn’t finish it and shove the rest toward Nora. Nora, always proud, would try to sneak money onto the counter to prepay for my next meal so she wouldn’t feel like a charity case. Eventually, I’d just deposited two thousand dollars with the shopkeeper and told her to keep Nora fed. I’d spent years making sure that girl, who was five-foot-six and barely ninety pounds, finally reached a healthy weight. I’d fed her and loved her, only for someone else to reap the rewards. “I remember the day you graduated,” the old woman said, lost in her own memories. “She stood right there by the napkins and asked you to be her boyfriend, didn’t she?” She did. Graduation day. Nora had texted me: Meet me at our spot. I’d found her with a bouquet of cheap grocery store roses, a brimming bowl of skewers, and a face full of terror. Her voice had shook. “Ethan, would you… would you be my boyfriend?” Nora forgot. She forgot how solemn her promises were back then. “I’ll work hard, Ethan. I promise, one day, you’ll never have to struggle again.” We were twenty-six now. Old enough to marry, old enough to build a life. But the girl who made those promises was gone. I didn’t have the heart to tell the shopkeeper. I just nodded, took the food, and drove the little girl home. She held a skewer up to my mouth. “Have some, mister.” I shook my head. “I’m finished with those. I don’t think I’ll be having them again.” If she could forget, so could I. It was better than being the only one who remembered. 4 I went back to the grind—the clock-in, clock-out rhythm of a normal life. But in a city like this, you couldn’t escape the Miller-Bennett wedding. It was everywhere. “A whole valley of flowers,” a coworker sighed in the breakroom. “The florist probably retired to New Zealand after that paycheck.” “She looked incredible,” another added. “It’s like a fairytale. Rich, handsome groom, beautiful heiress. Why can’t my life be a romantic lead’s?” I kept my head down, burying myself in spreadsheets. But then, the inevitable happened. “Hey, look at this photo,” someone said, shoving a phone toward the group. “Doesn’t the groom—this Liam Miller guy—look exactly like Ethan from accounting?” The room went quiet. “Holy shit. He does.” “Same face, totally different lives. Talk about a glitch in the Matrix.” Of course we looked alike. We shared half our DNA. But that was a secret kept within a very small, very wealthy circle. To my colleagues, I was just Ethan, the quiet guy who worked too much. I forced a smile. “People have doppelgängers. The guy at the taco truck downstairs looks like Ryan Gosling if you squint. Doesn’t mean he’s winning an Oscar.” The tension broke. They laughed, moving on to the next topic. The sun began to set, casting long, bruised shadows across the office floor. I stared out the window for a long time. Giving up on Nora wasn’t as agonizing as I’d feared. It was a dull ache, like an old injury in cold weather. Maybe we only believe in “forever” when we’re young. Nora had once sworn to me: “Ethan, if I ever betray you, I hope I end up alone and miserable.” Words are cheap. Now she has the money, the power, and the “right” brother. The gap between us was a canyon I could no longer bridge. To even try for revenge felt like a joke. The only thing left to do was pretend we never met. Pretend I never loved her. I forced myself to forget the hospital room after the crash. I forced myself to forget the coldness in her eyes when her real parents finally found her and wiped me from her history. “I’m sorry,” she had told me, her voice like ice. “I have no memory of you. And frankly, I find it hard to believe I would ever fall for a man like you.” Nora didn’t just lose her memory. She lost her soul. 5 But memories are stubborn. They haunt the 2:00 AM silence. I’d lie awake, imagining her with Liam, and the pain would twist in my gut until I couldn’t breathe. I stayed away from the Millers. I stayed away from her. Six months passed. The pain faded from a sharp blade to a dull throb. I could get through a day without her name tasting like salt in my mouth. One Friday, my coworkers dragged me down to that taco truck to see the “Ryan Gosling” lookalike. We were standing on the sidewalk when the wind shifted. I smelled it. The spicy, savory scent of the skewers from the corner deli. I expected to feel sad. Instead, I just felt a strange relief—the old lady was still in business. But then, a familiar voice drifted through the crowd. “That smell… I know it from somewhere.” I froze.
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