Author: Momo Chan

My boyfriend, Todd, insisted on dragging me to the bank to handle the wire transfer. He adamantly demanded that Gigi, his precious childhood friend who was working as a junior teller, process the transaction. He claimed he wanted to help her get some hands-on experience so she could settle into her new job. But the moment I inserted the security key, Gigi did something unfathomable: she dumped the entire capital pool into a failing penny stock called GreenTerra Solutions, which was hours away from being delisted. She turned to me, blowing a mock kiss with a grating, childish lisp. “Don’t be so grumpy, Gwenny! My horoscope said I have massive financial luck today.” “Look at that little stock, it’s so sad and green. Once Gigi doubles the money, I’ll give it all to you to spend, okay?” I was shaking with rage, demanding she cancel the trade immediately. But Todd didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the physical authorization form and signed his name to back her up. “Don’t worry about her petty lecturing, Gigi. Even if you lose every single cent of her pocket change, I can cover it ten times over!” But that wasn’t “pocket change.” That was the hundred million dollars in emergency state funding just released for the Canyon Lake Dam reinforcement project. In my past life, I had literally smashed the glass barrier and ripped the ethernet cable out of the wall to stop the transaction. Because of my desperate intervention, the company secured the materials in time, reinforced the dam, and survived the devastating summer floods. But Todd? He was fired because his precious childhood friend almost caused a catastrophic disaster. He hated me for it. He spun a web of lies, accusing me of embezzling company funds, and eventually locked me inside the archive room before setting the building on fire. “Gigi is so innocent, Gwen. How dare you terrify her? You can turn to ash right along with these records.” Now, I opened my eyes. I was right back to the exact second before Gigi clicked “Confirm Purchase.” I stepped back, folding my arms across my chest. Go ahead. Buy it. Since you, the regional project director, have personally authorized this madness. Let’s see if your horoscope can predict the absolute ruin waiting for both of you. 1 “Ding—Transaction Successful.” The massive capital pool on the screen instantly drained to zero. One hundred million dollars of emergency infrastructure funding had just been converted into shares of “GreenTerra Solutions,” a toxic, frozen stock. Gigi squealed with delight, clapping her hands. “Yay! It went through!” “Todd, look, look! It’s all green! It looks so pretty and full of life, like little grass!” She bit her thumb, spinning around to throw herself into Todd’s arms. She cooed, her voice dripping with a nauseating, high-pitched sweetness. “Todd, isn’t Gigi clever?” “Gigi did some wealth management for her big brother today!” Todd’s eyes softened with absolute adoration. He wrapped his arms tightly around her, stroking her hair. When he turned to look at me, however, his face hardened into a sneer of utter contempt. “See that, Gwen? Gigi is just naturally gifted at this.” I took a sharp step forward, reaching for the mouse, my voice cold as ice. “Todd, this is the emergency infrastructure funding the State Treasury just transferred to our firm. It’s the material procurement budget for the Canyon Lake Dam—exactly one hundred million dollars. If anything goes wrong, the criminal liability falls squarely on your head!” Todd waved me off dismissively, looking at me like I was a hysterical child. “Stop being such a fearmonger. The peak flood season doesn’t start for another month. What’s the rush? Once Gigi doubles the money in a few days, we’ll pull it out and put it back. No harm, no foul.” Looking at his arrogant, clueless face, a strange, freezing calm washed over me. I had already resigned from any active role in the company weeks ago; today, I was only here because he had begged me to accompany him. Since some people are hell-bent on digging their own graves, why should I stop them? “Fine,” I said, my voice completely level. “Since the funds have been moved, you’d better keep the original signed authorization paper safe. That’s your neck on the line.” I needed to make sure the physical evidence remained intact. He had to burn with no way out. Todd let out a harsh laugh, reaching for the official document on the desk. But Gigi’s eyes darted to it, and her restless, destructive fingers got there first. She snatched the authorization sheet, crumpling it in her fists with a childish pout. “This paper is too rough! I hate the texture! Gigi doesn’t like it!” And then, she did something unbelievable. She pulled a designer lipstick out of her Chanel bag. With aggressive, chaotic strokes, she scribbled right over the official state seal. “Look, Todd! I drew a big fat turtle!” She giggled, but she wasn’t done. With a sharp tug, she ripped the document in half. Rip— The legally binding document that held the safety of hundreds of thousands of lives was shredded into tiny pieces. “Oh, that felt so good! Total stress relief!” She laughed, tossing the shredded paper into the air. The white scraps rained down around her like cheap snow, covering the marble floor. Todd noticed me staring at her, and like a rabid guard dog defending its bone, he stepped in front of her. His face twisted in fury as he barked at me: “What are you looking at? Lose the attitude, Gwen!” “I’m the director of this project! How we manage the cash flow is my decision!” “If Gigi wants to rip up paper, I’ll order a truckload of it tomorrow for her to shred. Don’t you dare glare at her like she’s done something wrong!” Gigi peeked from behind Todd’s broad shoulder, sticking her tongue out at me. “Exactly! It’s just some stupid paper. Todd will protect me!” Right then, the stock market opened. The penny stock didn’t even put up a fight. It plunged in a vertical, straight line. Limit down. Frozen at the bottom. One hundred million dollars, instantly locked in a death spiral. Within seconds, ten million dollars of the principal simply evaporated into thin air. Gigi looked at the plummeting numbers and slammed the mouse down in frustration. “Ugh! What’s wrong with this stupid stock? It’s so annoying!” “The green turned to ugly red! Gigi wants to punish it!” Her fingers grabbed the mouse again, switching back to the bank’s internal portal. “I’m going to take the rest of the bank’s vault reserves and buy more to average down! I’ll force it to go back up!” She was actually trying to tap into the bank’s federal reserve liquidity to double down on a delisted stock. Instead of stopping her, Todd grinned, looking incredibly proud. “That’s my girl. Bold move.” Suddenly, the phone on the desk erupted into a violent vibration. The caller ID flashed in bold, urgent letters: CANYON LAKE DAM SITE – EMERGENCY COMMAND Todd reached out to grab it. But Gigi was faster. She snatched the phone away. 2 “So loud! Shut up!” Gigi pouted, tapping the screen to answer. The moment the call connected, a hoarse, panicked scream blasted through the speaker. “Todd! Where is the hundred million? Why hasn’t the wire cleared?!” “The main wall of the dam is already showing structural fractures! Our thirty-day reinforcement window is incredibly tight. Without the funds, the suppliers are refusing to release the steel rods!” “The dam could fail at any minute! Wire the money now! People’s lives are on the line!!” The voice was raw, frantic, on the verge of tears. But Gigi only made a face of deep disgust. She held the phone away from her ear, yelling back: “Why are you screaming? You’re hurting Gigi’s ears!” “What dam? What steel? It’s just a few thousand dollars, stop nagging! Wait until our stock bounces back!” “Don’t call back, you’re so annoying! Bye-bye!” Click. Without a shred of hesitation, she hung up. Then, with a few quick swipes, she added the emergency command center’s number to her block list. Finally, she held the phone by its edges with two manicured fingers, grimacing. “Ugh, this phone smells like dirt and mud. It’s covered in gross germs!” Right next to her sat a massive, ornate saltwater aquarium filled with exotic fish. She flicked her wrist. Splash! The phone plunged straight to the bottom of the tank, the screen flickering out as water seeped into the casing. Todd didn’t even blink. Instead, he pulled a silk pocket square from his suit and tenderly wiped Gigi’s fingers. “You did the right thing, sweetie. Those vultures from the site don’t know when to shut up.” I watched them both, feeling as though I were looking at two ghosts. “The man you just hung up on,” I said, my voice eerily calm, “is the Chief Emergency Engineer of the state.” Todd scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Keep acting, Gwen.” “I’m the director of this project. So what if the funds are delayed by a couple of days? Is the dam made of cardboard? The flood season isn’t supposed to start until next month. You’re always crying wolf.” “Keep pushing me, and I won’t approve a single dime of their budget.” Right at that moment, the heavy glass doors of the VIP suite were violently kicked open. The branch manager, drenched in cold sweat, practically crawled into the room on his hands and knees. His eyes locked onto the computer monitor, where the crashed stock was displayed. Thud. His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the carpet, shaking violently. “Who did this? Oh my god, who did this?!” “That was a hundred million dollars of protected state emergency funds! You absolute lunatics!!” The manager lunged at the keyboard like a rabid animal, desperate to reverse the trade. But the clearing system had already locked. The funds were gone. No one could save them now. Gigi jumped back, letting out a dramatic shriek. “Ah! Mr. Manager, what is wrong with you? You scared Gigi!” Todd flared up, pointing an angry finger at the manager’s face. “It’s just a hundred million! Whatever we lost, I’ll write a check for it! Do you think the Caldwell family is short on cash?” The manager slumped to the floor, clutching his head and sobbing hysterically. “That was life-saving money for the steel supports! If we don’t have those, the dam will not hold!” Gigi frowned at the sight of the weeping man. She walked over, looking down at him with immense superiority. “Gigi is a princess. Princesses don’t make mistakes. It’s just a little stock market trade, why are you making such a big deal out of it?” The manager didn’t even hear her; he was tearing at his hair in pure despair. I looked at the digital calendar on the wall. The money was trapped in a dead stock. Retrieving even a fraction of it would take a miracle. The workers at the dam had already lost their window to reinforce the structure. And these two fools were still living in their delusion of absolute power. 3 The manager was dragged out of the VIP room by security. The doors clicked shut. Gigi sank into the velvet sofa, crossing her arms and pouting. “I was just trying to help, and everyone is being so mean to Gigi!” Her eyes lit up, and she quickly dug her personal phone out of her bag. “No, Gigi is the victim here. I need my internet family to set things straight!” Gigi was a mid-tier influencer with a couple hundred thousand followers. Her entire brand relied on acting like a helpless, infantile baby to milk donations from lonely men online. She went live on her streaming app. Within seconds, thousands of viewers flooded the stream. Gigi instantly put on her signature tearful face, big watery eyes blinking at the camera. “Hi guys… Gigi is having a really, really bad day. I’m being bullied so hard right now.” The live chat went wild: Who dared to make our princess cry?! Give us names! Don’t cry, baby girl! We’re here for you! Gigi sniffled, turning the camera to point directly at me, her voice dripping with artificial sorrow. “It’s my brother’s mean girlfriend… and a scary old man from the bank.” “Gigi was just trying to help her with some investing, using some leftover money that was just sitting around. I wanted to make her a little extra pocket money.” “But she screamed at me! And the old man tried to hit Gigi!” “They’re ganging up on me… Gigi’s heart hurts so bad…” The comment section exploded with vile, vitriolic abuse targeted at me. Who is this bitch? She looks like a total nightmare. Gigi tried to make her rich and she gets mad? What an ungrateful snake! Dox her! Destroy her life! Seeing the support, Todd stepped into the camera frame. He wrapped his arm around Gigi’s shoulder, adopting the posture of a protective, wealthy CEO. “Hey everyone, I’m the lead director of the regional infrastructure project here.” “I can personally assure you all that Gigi is the sweetest, most innocent girl in the world.” With Todd’s endorsement, the chat went into a frenzy. Gift donations started filling the screen, users spending hundreds of dollars to show their support. Gigi smirked at me, tilting her chin up in triumph. “Hear that, Gwen? The world knows who the bad guy is.” “You need to apologize to Gigi right now, or my fans will ruin you.” I sat quietly in my chair, watching her perform like a cheap circus animal. “Apologize?” I let out a soft laugh. “Gigi, why don’t you tell your fans exactly what kind of ‘leftover money’ you used to buy those stocks?” Gigi rolled her eyes, scoffing directly into the camera. “It was just that stupid hundred-million-dollar flood fund!” “It was just sitting in an account collecting dust anyway! Gigi bought some stocks to double it, and once we make the profit, we’ll build them an even bigger dam! They should be thanking me on their knees!” The chat froze for a split second. Then, the comments began to scroll at a dizzying pace. One hundred million? Flood funds?! Holy shit, you can’t touch that! Wait, what stock did Gigi buy? Gigi proudly turned the camera to face the monitor. “Look! GreenTerra Solutions! See how pretty the green is?” The financially literate users in the stream immediately lost their minds: Is she fucking insane?! That stock is getting delisted today! It’s flatlining! Embezzling $100M of public emergency money into a dead stock? That is federal prison territory! Call the police! This girl is literally brain-dead! The tide turned in an instant. The adoration evaporated, replaced by a wall of sheer panic and disgust. Gigi stared at the screen, her face pale as comments like “felon,” “idiot,” and “enjoy prison” flashed by. “You’re lying! Gigi didn’t do anything wrong! Gigi is a princess!” She abruptly shut down the stream and slammed the phone onto the sofa. “Todd! They’re all bullying me! Do something!” Todd’s face had gone pale, but his arrogance kept him from admitting defeat. He glared at me, his eyes filled with a sudden, vicious malice. “Gwen! You set us up!” “You’re going to write a statement for the press right now. You’ll tell them you forced Gigi to buy those shares. You’re the mastermind behind this!” It was almost laughable. The ship was sinking, and he was still trying to play the heroic protector. 4 Todd’s face was contorted with desperation as he snatched a notepad from the desk. He scribbled a confession in frantic, messy handwriting and slammed it down in front of me. “Sign it! Now!” I sat back, not even glancing at the paper. Instead, I pointed to the four corners of the room. The tiny, blinking red lights of the security cameras glared back at us. “Todd, you are the director of this project.” “The cameras recorded who stole the security keys, who clicked the mouse, who tore up the authorization documents, and who hung up on the emergency line.” “Everything is backed up to the cloud in real-time.” “Even your little attempt to blackmail me just now is fully recorded. You want me to take the fall? In your dreams.” Todd’s hand froze. His face drained of color, beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead. Hearing the word “cameras,” Gigi panicked. She looked up, tracing my gaze to the blinking red dot in the corner. True to her destructive nature, her hands moved before her brain did. “Stop filming Gigi!” With a shrill scream, she broke away from Todd, grabbed a heavy metal stapler from the counter, and hurled it at the camera lens. Smash! The camera shattered, plastic and glass raining down. Gigi clapped her hands, looking incredibly pleased with herself. “Yay! No more evidence! Nobody can catch Gigi now!” I checked my watch. “Go ahead, break them all. It doesn’t matter.” “Even if you deny it, the money is gone.” The terror Todd had been suppressing finally broke through. He was shaking, but he kept trying to save face. “Don’t play mind games with me!” “Dams don’t just collapse! The floods aren’t due for weeks!” “Even if this money is frozen, my family has billions. I’ll have my dad transfer a hundred million this afternoon to plug the hole.” “And once this is sorted, Gwen, I will destroy you.” The words had barely left his mouth when the massive TV screen on the wall flickered violently. Every major broadcast was interrupted by a national emergency alert. The anchor’s face was bloodless, her voice trembling: “We have an emergency update from the State Weather Service. Due to unprecedented, catastrophic rainfall upstream, the projected flood crest has arrived early!” “The Canyon Lake Dam is showing severe structural failure!” “An evacuation order is now in effect for all downstream residents! Leave your homes immediately!” Boom. Todd’s world shattered. The flood was here… early? The dam was failing. His legs gave out, and he fell to his knees on the cold floor. Even Gigi’s permanent mask of childish innocence finally cracked, revealing a deep, hollow terror.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476194”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

Late at night. The exhausted voice of my wife, Deborah, drifted from the bathroom. “Babe? Have you seen my old phone anywhere?” I sat on the sofa, paralyzed. My fingers trembled as I stared down at the screen of that very phone in my hands. It had lit up, displaying the recent query history of her AI assistant app. “A three-year-old accidentally eats cashews and goes into anaphylactic shock. What is the emergency treatment besides an EpiPen?” “What are the admission requirements for Beacon Hill Academy?” “How do I securely transfer marital assets without my husband knowing?” Staring at the glowing screen, my blood ran cold. The air felt sucked out of the room, and a sharp, blinding pain pierced my chest, making it hard to draw a breath. We had been married for five years. Deborah was the one who had insisted on us being child-free. I still remembered her wrapping her hands around mine, looking at me with eyes full of tenderness. “Elliot, giving birth is so painful. I’m terrified of it. If we don’t have kids, I can give all my love to you. We’ll be closer that way, just the two of us.” Back then, I was so deeply moved, believing I had found the one woman who loved me unconditionally. Until I saw these search queries. … Just then, the bathroom door clicked open. Deborah walked out, towel-drying her hair, heading toward me. “Babe? What are you staring at?” I swiftly flipped the phone face-down on the coffee table. “Nothing,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady and natural. “Your phone’s right here on the table.” Deborah walked over and picked it up. “Why do you look so pale?” She reached out to touch my forehead. “Didn’t sleep well last night?” I subtly leaned back, evading her touch. “Maybe a bit of low blood sugar.” I looked into her eyes. “How late were you working last night?” Her hand paused on the towel. “Around three, I think.” She sighed, her shoulders slumping with fatigue. “The tech department is full of idiots. They couldn’t get the server patch to deploy, so I had to stay and oversee it myself. I’m absolutely exhausted.” “Is that so?” I stood up. “But when I got up in the middle of the night, I thought I heard you on the phone. Something about… anaphylactic shock?” Deborah let out a forced, dry chuckle. “You must have been dreaming.” “I said the servers went into shock—crashed. Anaphylactic? Elliot, you’re definitely hallucinating.” She slipped her old phone into her pocket and turned toward the walk-in closet. “I need to change. I have an early meeting this morning.” Watching her retreat, my stomach churned with a sudden wave of nausea. The second her car pulled out of the driveway, I opened my laptop. I logged into her car’s toll-tag account. Last night at eleven, she hadn’t gone anywhere near her downtown office. Her Mercedes had taken the outer loop, heading straight for Riverwood Estates—a luxury gated community in the eastern hills. Over the past six months, her car had entered Riverwood Estates at least five nights a month, only leaving the following morning. That night, sleep evaded me entirely. Around two in the morning, unable to bear the tossing and turning, I slipped out to the bathroom. When I returned, I noticed a glass of warm water on my nightstand. Next to it was a blister pack of ibuprofen. I froze. Deborah rolled over, her voice thick with sleep. “Babe… is your ulcer acting up again? You looked so pale today. I left some medicine out just in case…” She drifted back to sleep before she could finish. I stood by the bed, staring at the pills in my hand. My throat tightened, a sudden, burning ache rising behind my eyes. She remembered. She remembered my stomach ulcers, a chronic pain I often forgot to manage myself. Could those search history queries really just be a bizarre coincidence? I crawled back under the covers. Deborah instinctively nestled into my chest, her forehead resting against my chin. “Don’t overthink things,” she mumbled. “Your wife’s got you.” I closed my eyes, letting a silent tear slip into the pillow. The next morning, the bed beside me was cold. A sticky note was pasted onto the nightstand. “Babe, breakfast is warming in the oven. I made your favorite cinnamon apple oatmeal. Don’t go into the office today; I called in sick for you. I’ll come home early tonight to keep you company. — Love, Deborah.” I held the note, sitting on the edge of the bed in a daze for a long time. In the kitchen, a bowl of warm oatmeal, a small plate of berries, and a peeled hard-boiled egg were waiting for me. As I took one slow bite after another, a quiet, desperate voice in my head grew louder: What if she really didn’t do anything? What if I’m just being paranoid? Right then, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Deborah, accompanied by a photo. She was in a sleek boardroom, surrounded by thick binders, her brow furrowed in exhaustion. The caption read: “Meetings all morning, pounding headache. Wish you were here to rub my temples. Miss you.” Staring at the photo, a heavy wave of guilt washed over me. She was working so hard, and here I was, digging through her toll records… I clenched my jaw, deciding to test her one last time. I dialed her number. “Hey, babe. About that phone call last night… I swear I heard you say ‘anaphylactic shock.’ Was I really just dreaming?” The line went quiet for a beat. Then, she laughed, her voice melting into its usual warmth. “Oh, honey. You are definitely working too hard. Remember when Diane brought her kid over last week while you were home?” “The little girl has a severe peanut allergy and accidentally ate a peanut butter cracker. Her face swelled up instantly.” “I was terrified, so I looked up emergency first aid. Why? Did you think I had some secret love child?” Her tone was teasing, tinged with a playful pout. My heart squeezed. “Diane’s kid?” I managed to ask. “Yeah! When we had Diane and her husband over for dinner last Friday. The chubby little girl, remember?” Deborah’s tone was incredibly natural. “Sweetie, are you under too much pressure at work lately? How about I take you away for a weekend retreat?” My mouth opened, but no words came out. Diane and her family had come over last week. The little girl was chubby. I hadn’t noticed if she had an allergic reaction… “Maybe I just overanalyzed it,” I murmured. “Of course you did. But it just shows how much you care about me.” Deborah chuckled. “Anyway, I have to run. See you tonight. Love you.” The line went dead. I leaned against the kitchen counter, my phone slipping from my fingers onto the floor. So the search history was because of Diane’s kid? But what about the toll records? Why was she at Riverwood Estates in the middle of the night? At seven that evening, Deborah walked through the door right on time. She was carrying a bag from a high-end designer toy boutique I loved. “Babe! Look what I got you. The limited-edition designer figures you wanted.” She kicked off her heels, walked over, and pressed a kiss to my cheek. “Have a good day at home?” Looking at her bright smile, the guilt in my chest deepened. She cooked dinner herself. A three-course meal, entirely composed of my favorites: braised short ribs, garlic sautéed greens, and a creamy potato leek soup. There was even a small jar of homemade dill pickles on the side. “When did you learn to make these pickles?” I asked, genuinely surprised as I sat down. “Last month, when you kept complaining about how much you missed your mom’s recipe. I snuck around and learned how to do it.” Deborah ladled some soup into my bowl. “Try it. Does it taste like home?” I took a bite of the pickle. A lump immediately formed in my throat. It was exactly the way my mother used to make them. “Deborah…” I put my fork down, my voice thick. “What’s wrong?” She looked up, her eyes wide with concern. “You’re so good to me.” She reached across the table, gently ruffling my hair. “Silly. You’re my husband. If I’m not good to you, who else would I be good to?” After dinner, she cleared the table and drew a warm bath for me. As I soaked in the tub, the hot water easing the tension in my shoulders, my resolve began to melt. Maybe I really was just being too sensitive. I got out, wrapped a towel around my waist, and walked into the bedroom. Deborah was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a small velvet box. “Come here, babe.” She patted the spot next to her. I walked over and sat down. She opened the box. Inside lay a car key. “You stood outside the dealership and stared at this Jeep three times.” She took the key out, leaning in close to press it into my palm. “The first time was on our anniversary. You said it was too expensive and impractical.” “The second time was when you got promoted. You said you’d save up your bonus first.” “The third time was last month. You stood on the sidewalk for a solid two minutes, just looking at it.” I stared down at the key, my vision blurring. “Deborah… I… sometimes I get paranoid. I doubt you… I haven’t been a good husband,” I choked out, a sob catching in my throat. Deborah wrapped herself around me, burying her face in my shoulder. “Don’t talk nonsense,” she whispered, kissing my cheek. “Marrying you was the best decision of my life. Once the company goes public, everything I have is yours anyway. If you keep doubting yourself, I’m going to get mad.” Resting my forehead against her shoulder, the last remnants of my suspicion dissolved. How could I have doubted her? How could I be so ungrateful? That night, she held me close as we slept. But right before we drifted off, her phone rang. She slipped out to the balcony, her voice hushed. “I already transferred the funds. Make sure the paperwork is finalized first… Yes, we’ll talk next week.” When she came back inside, she offered a quick explanation. “Work stuff. We’re acquiring a small boutique studio, and the administrative hurdles are endless.” I nodded, pushing any lingering doubts aside. On Saturday, Deborah had to go in for an emergency weekend shift, leaving early in the morning. I decided to tidy up her study to surprise her, organizing the loose files she usually left scattered around. Her heavy winter coat was hanging on the rack, and I decided to take it to the dry cleaners. As I checked the pockets, my fingers brushed against a piece of stiff cardstock. I pulled it out. It was a tour reservation confirmation for Beacon Hill Academy. The date on it was yesterday. Registered name: Deborah Jeffrey. Accompanying family: Two adults, one child. My hands began to shake. Yesterday, she told me she was stuck in meetings at her office all day. I pulled out my phone, opened the toll-tag app, and typed in her license plate. Yesterday at 2:00 PM, her car left her office. By 3:00 PM, it was parked near Beacon Hill Academy. It left at 4:00 PM, and she was back at her desk by 4:40 PM. A two-hour round trip. I stared at the screen, my ears ringing. Why would Diane’s child need Deborah to tour an elite preschool? That evening, Deborah took me to our favorite high-end sushi spot. She ordered the expensive toro sashimi and opened a bottle of premium Stag’s Leap Cabernet. “What’s got you in such a celebratory mood?” I asked, trying to sound casual as I picked up a piece of salmon. “We landed a massive client today.” Deborah raised her glass. “To our future.” I clinked my glass against hers. The wine tasted like ash. When we got home, she took a shower, and we lay in bed together. “Babe, do you know why I work myself to the bone?” she asked, her hand gently tracing patterns on my back. “Why?” “Because I want to give you the best life possible.” Her voice was soft, laced with affection. “Once this crazy launch season is over, let’s fly out to Maui. Just the two of us.” I didn’t say a word. I just buried my face in her shoulder and closed my eyes. In the dead of night, a soft rustling woke me. Deborah was talking in her sleep. She rolled over, draping her arm over my chest, mumbling incoherently. I held my breath, leaning my ear closer to her lips. “…Don’t worry, sweetie… Mommy’s here…” I froze under the weight of her arm. She wasn’t talking to me. In five years of marriage, she had never called me “sweetie” in her sleep. The next morning, I got into a cab and drove to a destination I had hoped I would never have to visit.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476193”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

For five years, I spent every major holiday visiting my mother’s killer in prison. Year after year, I showed up. I brought him the chicken sandwich he loved, and I even sneaked in a bottle of fine Macallan whiskey. I treated him better than my own father. Watching him shovel the food into his mouth like a starving animal, I quietly slid a photo album across the cold metal table. “I still looked after your mother,” I told him, my voice flat. “She stayed in that old house on Elm Street, waiting for you. She never touched a dime of the money you gave her. The cancer… they couldn’t cure it. She passed away last month.” He stopped chewing. Then, he broke. Tears spilled over his calloused cheeks, and bits of food tumbled from his mouth as he sobbed with a raw, agonizing regret. “I’m sorry,” he choked out, his voice cracking. “I’m so sorry… Your mother, she died of an asthma attack. But I had already let her go by then. A nurse—she had already arrived. She took the rescue inhaler right out of my hands. I only took her for the money…” I already knew the rest of the story. My mother’s death had been ruled an accidental acute asthma episode. He had been charged with involuntary manslaughter and grand larceny. I quietly slid another photograph from the album. The woman in the picture was my mother’s best friend. My godmother. And now, my stepmother—the woman my father cherished above all else. Lydia. “The nurse,” I whispered, holding his gaze. “It was her, wasn’t it?” He nodded. … Listening to his tearful confession through the scratched plexiglass, my own tears finally spilled over. I hated him. Of course I did. He played a hand in my mother’s death, and he was serving fifteen years for it. But I hated the woman who had actually killed her even more. Because she had paid absolutely no price. Ever since my mother died, Lydia had wrapped herself in the armor of severe depression, claiming her mind was fragile, shattered by grief. She played the guilt-stricken victim perfectly. “I could have saved her,” she would sob, her voice trembling with theatrical remorse. “If only I had run a little faster.” She even went as far as self-harming to prove her agony. And so, my father banned the subject entirely. He couldn’t bear to see his beloved Lydia triggered by the past. He paid off the kidnapper’s associates, securing their silence about Lydia ever being at the scene, and fabricated a false alibi for her. All to spare her from police interrogation. I was just a teenager then, unable to comprehend his betrayal. “Are we just going to sweep Mom’s death under the rug?” I had screamed at him. My father looked down, a flicker of shame crossing his eyes before he hardened his gaze. “The living matter more, Maeve. Your mother wouldn’t want to see her best friend suffer like this.” On the night of my mother’s funeral, during the final, quiet moments of the service, my father slipped away. Because Lydia was having another hysterical episode, threatening to end her life. So, it was just me, holding my weeping grandmother as we watched my mother’s casket lower into the cold earth. I never believed Lydia’s story. Because right before the end, Mom had texted me. The moment the kidnapper grabbed her, her chest had tightened. She was having an attack. She needed her inhaler, and the kidnapper used that to terrify my father into paying quickly, warning him not to call the cops. My father agreed immediately. After relentless begging, Mom convinced them to let her send a text so I wouldn’t panic. Maeve, sweetheart, I’m okay. Tell Nana not to worry. I just saw your godmother running toward us. They only want money. We’ll be home soon. I remember the wave of relief that washed over me. I sat in the kitchen with Nana, cooking Mom’s favorite dinner. I had even laid out my latest report card, eager to show her my straight A’s, hoping she’d surprise me with the plush toy she’d promised. Nana and I waited. We watched the clock. But Mom never came home. Instead, she ended up on a metal slab in the morgue. My father claimed that by the time Lydia reached her, Mom was already gone. But the timeline didn’t make sense. There was a thirty-minute gap between Mom’s text and Lydia’s alleged arrival. It shouldn’t have taken more than two minutes to cross that distance. In the visiting room, the kidnapper bowed his head, his shoulders shaking. “Please… please help bury my mother. I was wrong to go down that path, but I swear to God, I didn’t want your mother to die. She was breathing when I left her.” I nodded slowly. “I’ll take care of her.” For five years, I had kept my promise, looking after his frail mother. She refused to believe her son was a cold-blooded killer and apologized to me every time she saw me. As I stepped out of the prison gates, my phone began to vibrate. It was my father. A contact I barely touched these days. I pressed accept, but it was Lydia’s soft, sweet voice that drifted through the speaker. “Maeve, sweetheart, come home for dinner tonight.” She loved playing the doting mother on holidays. It was her favorite performance. This time, I let out a soft laugh. “Sure. I’ll be there.” After Mom died, I rarely set foot in my father’s house. I wanted the truth. We fought about it constantly. “Have you lost your mind?” my father would roar, his face turning red. “Lydia went there to save your mother! The guilt of failing is eating her alive, and you want to drag her through the mud? Do you want to destroy everyone who’s left?” I had stared at him, holding up my phone with the archived text messages. “But look at the timing—” Slap. A heavy hand struck my cheek, leaving my ears ringing. “Stop this madness!” he barked. Over the years, he tried to patch things up. I ignored him. When I reached the front door of my childhood home, I tried typing the security code. Access Denied. I tried again. Nothing. It seemed that in my absence, even the locks had been changed. The door clicked open from the inside. Lydia stood there, beaming with warmth, gesturing for me to come in. “Maeve! You’re finally home. I made all your favorites.” She used to be so genuinely kind. I used to cling to her side, calling her Auntie Lydia with absolute devotion. How sickeningly ironic that she was now my stepmother. My father had married her under the guise of “taking better care of her.” I could never understand how a woman could crawl into the bed of her dead best friend’s husband. I sidestepped her reaching hand and walked into the house. At the dining table, my father placed a piece of roasted chicken onto my plate. I left it untouched. “About Mom…” I began. Before I could finish, my father slammed his fork down. The atmosphere instantly turned ice-cold. After Mom died, my father established a strict set of rules. The golden rule: Never mention Mom. Because it would trigger Lydia. Every trace of my mother had been systematically erased from this house. The nanny who had raised me was fired. My mother’s hand-designed interior decor was torn down. Everything had to be brand new. I remember throwing myself in front of the workers, screaming, “No! You can’t do this! This is Mom’s work!” But my father had pried my fingers away, one by one. “Keeping these things only prolongs the pain, Maeve,” he had said, his voice dripping with practical cruelty. “We have to move forward. We are all grieving, but drowning in the past won’t bring her back.” He always had a rationalization. The house became a pristine, sterile gallery of their new life. If it weren’t for Nana and me, my mother would have been completely wiped from this world. He claimed he was in pain, that he spent sleepless nights wondering if he could have driven faster that day. Yet, his solution to grief was erasure. The living mattered; the dead were just ghosts to be exorcised. They even threw away the baby clothes. My mother had been pregnant with my little sister when she died. We had spent months dreaming of her arrival. My father and I had even hand-painted a crib together—a welcome gift for the baby. All of it, gone. Are the dead meant to be forgotten so easily? I couldn’t do it. Looking at him now, a sudden, dark thought crossed my mind. Maybe it was better this way. He didn’t deserve to keep her memory. He didn’t deserve a single piece of her. Seeing the tense silence stretching across the table, Lydia stepped in to play the peacemaker. “It’s alright, Robert. Let Maeve speak. I’ve worked hard to heal, and I can officially accept my sister’s passing. It was simply her time. Fate is fate.” I looked at her and let out a slow, deliberate smile. Five years. She truly believed she had covered her tracks. I was going to burn her world to the ground. When my father found out I had visited the prison, his face turned livid. “You just won’t let this go, will you?” he hissed. “It’s been five years! What are you trying to pull? Your mother wanted you to have a normal life, not turn into some obsessed psychopath. Do you want me to put you back in that facility?” I shrugged, completely unfazed. “Go ahead. Try.” It wouldn’t be the first time. Back when I was a teenager, after I intentionally triggered Lydia into a hysterical fit, my father had committed me to a psychiatric hospital. I wasn’t even eighteen yet. But the doctors found nothing wrong with me and discharged me. My father had then threatened to send me to one of those strict, abusive behavioral modification camps for “troubled teens.” He believed Lydia blindly, refusing to look at Mom’s final text, refusing to see the gaping holes in the story. He chose to be her accomplice. In the end, it was Nana who had intervened, standing like a shield between me and his madness. “Nobody is taking my granddaughter to a place like that!” she had roared. The memory faded, leaving only the quiet hum of the dining room. The dinner was ruined. I stood up and left, heading straight to Nana’s house. Nana was fragile now, blind in one eye. She was a survivor of too much tragedy, having raised my mother alone, only to outlive her. What made our grief unbearable was the knowledge that Mom didn’t have to die. The kidnapper hadn’t wanted her dead. She had her rescue inhaler with her. If someone hadn’t deliberately taken it away, she would have saved herself. The kidnapper had sworn he gave it back to her. Lost in my thoughts, I unlocked Nana’s front door, only to find her collapsed on the living room floor. Panic seized me. I rushed her to the hospital, my chest tightening with a suffocating terror. Fear and grief tangled in my throat, making my entire body shake. I stayed by her bedside all night. When she finally opened her eyes the next afternoon, she gave me a weak, reassuring smile. “I’m alright, sweet girl. Just a little dizzy.” My tears broke. “Nana, please don’t scare me like that.” Later that afternoon, my father actually showed up at the hospital. “Mom, are you hurt? How are you feeling?” he asked, his voice laced with superficial concern. Nana remained silent, refusing to look at him. She had never forgiven him for his choices. Not wanting him to stress her further, I nudged him toward the quiet hallway outside. “I’ll keep you updated. She needs to rest right now.” My father hesitated, shifting his weight. “Maeve… it’s about your mother’s grave. Lydia and I were talking, and we think we should relocate her. The energy at that cemetery isn’t right. It’s… bad luck.” My jaw clenched so hard it ached. I stared at him, utterly disgusted. Was he even human? Before I could voice my fury, a sharp scream echoed from Nana’s room. I bolted back inside. Nana was clutching her chest, gasping for air, her face pale as she pointed a trembling finger at Lydia. Tears streamed down her wrinkled cheeks. Lydia stood nearby, looking like a wounded lamb. “Mrs. Hayden, I only wanted to pour you some water. I’m the child you watched grow up… I’m so sorry. I only asked Robert to take care of me because…” Nana couldn’t breathe. Ignoring Lydia entirely, I screamed for the nurses. The room erupted into chaos, and Nana was rushed into the emergency operating room. Standing in the sterile hallway, I stared at Lydia’s tear-streaked face. The anger that had simmered for five years boiled over. I stepped forward and slapped her across the face. “What did you say to her? Who gave you permission to come here?” A second later, a heavy blow struck my own face, sending me stumbling back. “Maeve! What is wrong with you?” my father roared, stepping between us. “She came here out of respect! How dare you lay a hand on her?” I glared at him through a haze of pain. Nana wasn’t just his mother-in-law; she was his mentor. When he was a broke college student, Nana had paid his tuition out of her own pocket, launching his entire career. And this was how he repaid her. “I am going to find out the truth,” I whispered, my voice trembling with a cold, absolute certainty. “For everything.” Lydia sobbed, burying her face in my father’s chest. “Maeve, I only wanted to see if she was okay. I was just trying to help her drink some water. I don’t know why she reacted like that… I understand you hate me, but I hate myself too. I wish I could have saved her.” I didn’t even bother responding. If she truly felt a shred of remorse, she wouldn’t have crawled into my mother’s bed. I turned on my heel and walked straight to the hospital security office to demand the surveillance footage. My father grabbed my wrist, pulling me back. “Maeve, stop. It’s been five years. Let it go. You’re destroying yourself.” I wrenched my arm free. “I will never let it go.” My mother and my unborn sister deserved justice. I wasn’t going to let a fake diagnosis of depression protect a killer. In the security room, we watched the tape. Lydia was clever. She had positioned her body perfectly to block the camera’s view of Nana’s bed. And because the camera was mounted far down the hall, there was no audio. Lydia let her head drop, looking meek and vindicated. My father sighed, as if he had just won an argument. “See? You always jump to conclusions. Lydia has carried this guilt for years. She was terrified to see Nana, but she came anyway because she cared.” “Now, apologize to her.” “No,” I said flatly. Lydia gently touched my father’s arm. “It’s fine, Robert. It’s my fault.” Her martyrdom only fueled his anger toward me. But as she leaned against him, I saw it—the briefest, coldest flash of triumph in her eyes. A chill ran down my spine. The image of Nana in the operating room, of my mother dying alone in the dirt, flashed in my mind. I lunged forward, grabbing Lydia by the collar. “What did you do to her, Lydia? My mother loved you like a sister! How could you do this to her?” My father tried to pull me off, but I was no longer a helpless child. I had the strength of five years of fury. I yanked her hair, forcing her to look at me. She shrieked, terrified by the sheer violence of my rage. My father finally managed to tear me away, shoving me back hard. “Maeve, you’ve completely lost your mind!” he screamed. My back slammed against a heavy metal cart, a sharp pain radiating through my spine. He turned to help Lydia up, guiding her toward the exit. “Nana is still in surgery,” I called out, my voice cracking. “You’re going to leave her here, in critical condition, because of a scratch on Lydia?” I didn’t need his help. I just wanted to see him make the choice. He knew how much Nana meant to my mother. If he had a shred of love left for his late wife, he would stay. My father hesitated, looking back at me, then at Lydia’s tear-stained face. “I’m taking Lydia to get bandaged. I’ll be right back.” I bit my lip until I tasted blood. “If you walk out that door, you are dead to me.” He didn’t stop. As I watched his retreating back, the last remaining piece of my childhood died. But before they could reach the elevators, two plainclothes officers stepped out, blocking their path. They flashed their badges. “Lydia Hayden? You’re under arrest in connection with the homicide of Isabel Hayden. Please come with us.” I let out a slow, cold breath, a bitter smile touching my lips. The wheels of justice were finally turning. The kidnapper’s new testimony had been officially processed. The case was reopened.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476192”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

My nervous system has always lived on a time delay. If someone yelled at me, I just nodded and said, “Okay.” If someone shoved me to the ground, I still just said, “Okay.” When my parents abandoned me in the foster system, I accepted it. When the other kids held my head down in the gritty water of the playground, I accepted that, too. My world existed in a vacuum, completely devoid of immediate pain. Until I met Mia and Dean. One was my fiercely protective best friend; the other was my devoted boyfriend, a boy who looked at me like I hung the moon. Mia used to poke me right between the eyebrows, letting out a dramatic, exasperated sigh. “You little slowpoke. If someone ever came along and snatched Dean right out from under you, would you just stand there and say ‘Okay’?” I would just give her my usual, delayed, dopey smile. “That won’t happen. No one could ever snatch Dean away.” I believed that. Right up until the week before the spring semester of my sophomore year, when I came back to the dorms early and found the two of them tangled together in the shadows of the stairwell. Through the dim light, I saw Mia crying, slapping him hard across the chest. “Dean, how can we do this to Grace? How can we?” She choked on a sob. “I’ll go to a clinic. I’ll get rid of the baby. We just… we have to pretend this never happened.” Dean’s eyes were rimmed with red. He pulled her fiercely against his chest, burying his face in her hair. “No, Mia, don’t! I’ll talk to Grace. I’ll end it. I’m going to take responsibility for our baby!” I stood out in the freezing hallway draft, watching the two most important people in my entire world. For the very first time in my life, I realized that my sensory delay didn’t make me immune. It just meant that when the pain finally hit, it was going to tear me apart. … 1 I looked down at my phone, my thumb hovering over the screen, and finally sent the text to him. I’ll go with you. To Europe. For the treatments. A reply flashed across the screen almost instantly: Good. I’ll come pick you up in three days. I wanted to laugh, but the tears fell first, hot and heavy, blurring the glowing letters on my screen until they were nothing but jagged streaks of light. I rubbed the heels of my hands roughly against my eyes, shoved the phone deep into my coat pocket, and drew in a long, shuddering breath. Then, pretending the world hadn’t just shattered at my feet, I shuffled forward at my usual, sluggish pace. “Dean. Mia.” I smiled, my voice carrying its typical slow cadence. They jumped apart like they’d been burned. All the color drained from Mia’s face, leaving her chalky and terrified, while Dean’s jaw tightened in sheer panic. But when they turned and saw my face—my perpetually blank, a-beat-too-late expression—the collective exhale between them was almost audible. I had a processing delay. They were absolutely certain I hadn’t noticed a thing. In a matter of seconds, they rearranged their features, expertly slipping on masks of casual surprise, acting as if they’d merely bumped into each other in the lobby. But the smell of his cologne on her skin, the heavy, guilty gravity between them—that couldn’t be faked. “What are you guys… doing back on campus so early?” I asked softly. Instinctively, Dean stepped toward me. It was muscle memory; he always closed the distance between us, always reached for my hand. But half a step in, he caught the flash of wounded jealousy in Mia’s eyes. He froze. His foot retreated. He stepped back, aligning his shoulders squarely with Mia’s. I stared at the toes of their sneakers, perfectly parallel, and a microscopic needle of acid pierced the lining of my stomach. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. To cover the awkwardness, Mia suddenly lunged forward, grabbing the handle of my oversized, battered suitcase. “Wow, this looks heavy! Let me get it for you, slowpoke!” she chirped. Her voice was too loud. Too bright. Too hollow. I blinked, staring at her, terrified that if I closed my eyes, a tear would slip. I was even more terrified that if I blinked, the memory of the eighteen-year-old Mia I had loved so much would vanish forever. Freshman year. Move-in day. I hadn’t met Dean yet. While all the other kids had parents renting U-Hauls, carrying boxes, and making their beds, I had arrived alone, lugging a ridiculously heavy trunk up a three-story walk-up. The kids behind me in the stairwell were rolling their eyes, groaning at my agonizingly slow pace. I was dripping with sweat, paralyzed by the sensory overload. That was when a girl with a radiant, sunflower smile came bounding down the stairs. She grabbed the other end of my trunk without asking. “You alone? Come on, I got you!” She had hauled my entire life up to our dorm room. From that day on, Mia was my roommate, my fierce protector, my sister. “Put that down!” A sharp reprimand snapped me out of the past. Dean strode forward and aggressively batted Mia’s hand off the suitcase handle. He pulled Mia behind him, shielding her with his body, and glared at me with a coldness I had never seen before. “Grace, Mia has… she hasn’t been feeling well lately! Why on earth are you making her carry your luggage?” I stood frozen. I didn’t know what my face was supposed to do. My condition meant everything was slow. My reflexes, my speech, my feelings. Dean knew this better than anyone on the planet. He used to laugh that gentle, adoring laugh, plucking grocery bags and heavy textbooks from my hands before I even realized they were heavy. But now, his voice was coated in frost. “Mia is your best friend, Grace. Not your maid.” His eyes darkened with self-righteous anger. “Can you stop hiding behind her for once? You have a neurological delay, Grace, not a princess complex!” The blood drained from my face. My lips parted, but no sound came out. Mia’s expression fractured. With red-rimmed eyes, she shoved Dean hard in the back. “Shut up, Dean! What I do is my own business! Back off!” Ignoring his panicked, hovering hands, she turned and grabbed my wrist. “Come on, slowpoke. Ignore him. Let’s go upstairs.” I let her pull me forward like a lifeless ragdoll. As we walked through the dim, concrete corridor, that infinitesimally slow needle finally pushed all the way through my heart. It was the first time I realized that tenderness wasn’t permanent. It could be transferred. 2 That evening, the three of us went to our favorite off-campus seafood diner to break the afternoon’s icy tension. Dean specifically ordered the whole roasted branzino, my absolute favorite. Usually, when we ordered fish, he would spend the first ten minutes meticulously dissecting the filet, pulling out every single microscopic pin bone before sliding the pristine meat onto my plate. He did the same today. Head bowed, brow furrowed in concentration, picking the bones clean. I sat with my fork resting in my hand, waiting quietly. But mid-air, his fork took a detour. The most tender, perfectly cooked piece of fish landed gently on Mia’s plate. “You’re too thin,” he murmured, his voice thick with an uncontrollable, naked ache. “Eat up.” Mia stiffened. Her head snapped up, her eyes darting to me, wide with a sickening cocktail of guilt and sheer panic. Dean seemed to wake up. He went pale, hurriedly stabbing another piece of fish, clumsily scraping the bones away, and dropping it onto my plate. “You eat too, Gracie.” He cleared his throat, a pathetic attempt to cover his tracks. “Mia’s just… her stomach’s been off lately. I’m just looking out for her.” I looked down at the mangled piece of fish on my plate. I gave a slow, empty nod. “Okay.” I lifted the fish to my mouth and chewed, methodically. It tasted like ash. It was so bitter I could barely force my throat to swallow. Suddenly, Mia clapped a hand over her mouth. Her face turned the color of parchment. She shot up from the booth, knocking her knees against the table, and sprinted toward the restrooms. Dean shot out of his seat like a loaded spring. He stood in the aisle, his eyes agonizingly fixed on the hallway leading to the women’s room. His feet twitched. He wanted to go to her. He was fighting every primitive, biological instinct in his body to run to the woman carrying his child. His fists were clenched white at his sides. I forced down the bitter bite of fish. I looked up at him, offering that same, slow, dopey smile I always gave. “Go check on her, Dean. She seems really sick.” The permission was a pardon. Relief washed over his face, so intense it was almost grotesque. “Stay right here, Grace. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.” He didn’t wait for my answer. He sprinted toward the bathroom. I sat alone in the clattering, noisy diner. I watched the broad line of his back as he desperately banged on the bathroom door, pleading with her through the wood. I pulled my phone out and looked at the calendar. Two more days. The next morning, Mia smothered me with affection. She bought me a slice of the absurdly expensive strawberry shortcake from the artisanal bakery downtown. She held both of my hands, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. “Slowpoke,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “No matter what happens in this life, we are best friends forever. Right? Promise me.” She stared at me, begging for absolution from a crime she thought I didn’t know about. I looked at her. I thought of that bright, beaming girl carrying my trunk up the stairs. I gave a slow, heavy nod. “Yeah.” Mia let out a sob of relief and threw her arms around my neck, burying her face in my shoulder. I didn’t hug her back. My arms hung dead at my sides, my fingers curling, inch by inch, into fists. 3 The day I was scheduled to leave, the sky opened up. It was a miserable, freezing rain. Mia had insisted we walk to a specific pastry shop off-campus to get my favorite chestnut tarts. She claimed sugar always fixed a gloomy mood. Dean walked beside us, holding the large black umbrella. By default, he kept the center of the canopy hovering directly over Mia’s head. My outer shoulder was entirely exposed to the downpour, completely soaked through to my skin. I didn’t say a word. That was the convenience of my condition; they assumed the cold rain hadn’t registered with my nerves yet. What used to be an inseparable, lively trio was now a suffocating graveyard of unspoken words. Mia kept her head down. Dean cleared his throat, his voice tight and raspy with nerves. “Grace… there’s something I need to come clean about…” He leaned forward slightly over the wet pavement, finally preparing to vomit up the secret he had been hiding for months. At that exact second, we stepped off the curb into a crosswalk. A delivery guy on a motorized scooter, swerving wildly to avoid a massive pothole, lost control. The heavy bike hydroplaned, careening straight toward us at terrifying speed. Time seemed to warp. I saw the bike coming for the outside edge—Mia’s side. My brain fired the command to push her out of the way, but my body, as always, lagged. I stumbled clumsily, my feet tangling as I pitched toward Mia. Dean’s face twisted in absolute terror. He threw his hands out and violently shoved me backward. “Mia!” The sheer force of his shove launched my already unbalanced body directly into the path of the skidding scooter. CRACK. The impact launched me into the air. I hit the rough, degraded asphalt, rolling violently across the pavement until I came to a stop in a filthy puddle against the curb. Dean had wrapped himself entirely around Mia, shielding her. Still trembling with adrenaline, he whipped his head around and screamed at me. “Grace, what the hell is wrong with you?! Were you trying to push Mia into the bike?!” His words hung in the air. Then, he finally met my gaze. He froze. I was lying in the murky water, thick, dark blood pouring from a gash on my forehead, running over my eyes and staining the puddle a sickening crimson. Dean’s arms loosened around Mia. He took a mechanical half-step toward me. “Grace… I…” A faint, breathy gasp came from his chest. Mia’s eyes fluttered shut, and she went entirely limp, fainting dead away in his arms. Dean stopped dead in his tracks. “Mia! Oh my god, Mia, wake up!” I lay flat on the pavement, watching it all. The freezing rain hammered against my open wounds, and an agonizing, piercing fire shot through my limbs. For the first time in my life, my sensory delay failed me. The pain was instantaneous. I forced my head up a fraction of an inch, looking at the boy I had loved for two years, standing merely feet away from me. My lips moved in a pathetic, trembling whisper. “Dean… it hurts…” But the rain was deafening. He didn’t hear me. He couldn’t see anything but the unconscious woman in his arms. I don’t know how long I lay there before the wail of sirens cut through the storm. Paramedics leaped out, pulling stretchers through the rain. I forced my eyes open as a shadow moved over me. I thought it was Dean. But the frantic, scrambling footsteps weren’t running to me. They were running away. He scooped Mia up in his arms and sprinted to the first ambulance, shoving his way past the EMTs. A medic grabbed his shoulder. “Sir, you need to back up! The girl in the street took the impact—she’s bleeding out!” Dean clung to Mia like a madman, his voice raw and hysterical as it sliced through the rain. “She only has scratches! Grace can wait! She has a neurological delay, she doesn’t even feel pain! She can take the second ambulance!” he roared. “But Mia can’t wait! She’s pregnant! She passed out from the blood! She can’t wait!” His words echoed against the concrete buildings, raining down on me like shrapnel, tearing whatever was left of my heart into a thousand bloody pieces. 4 By the time the second ambulance rushed me into the ER trauma bay, my body was turning to ice. It felt like someone had shattered glass inside my chest; every panicked gasp I took bubbled up with pink foam. A doctor sprinted over, holding up a fresh scan, his face grim. “Ruptured spleen! Massive internal hemorrhaging. We need her in the OR, five minutes ago!” He looked at the nurses. “Patient has no next of kin on file. Who is her emergency contact? Get them on the phone for consent, now. If we don’t open her up, we lose her.” A nurse rummaged through my wet belongings, pulled out my phone, and tapped the number pinned to the top. It rang. And rang. Finally, the line clicked open. In the background, I could hear the muffled, pathetic sound of Mia sobbing. “Yeah?” Dean’s voice was laced with utter exhaustion and deep irritation. “Sir, are you Grace’s emergency contact?” the nurse demanded, practically shouting. “She has severe internal bleeding. We need to perform an emergency laparotomy right now. I need you down in the ER lobby to sign the consent forms!” The line went dead silent for a fraction of a second. Then, Mia’s wails amplified. “Dean, my stomach is cramping… is our baby okay… I’m so scared…” Dean’s tone instantly shifted into a frantic, soothing purr. “Shh, I’m right here, baby. I’m not going anywhere.” Then, the phone shifted. His voice returned, cold and utterly devoid of humanity. “Look, don’t let her play you,” he told the nurse. “She has a processing delay. She doesn’t even know what pain is. She’s just jealous that I’m taking care of Mia, so she’s putting on a show to pull the doctors away and force me to leave Mia’s side.” The nurse’s eyes widened in horror. “Sir! I am telling you, this patient is in critical condition! She will die if you don’t sign these papers!” I heard him let out a long, disappointed sigh. “Tell Grace that Mia is carrying my child,” he said, his voice flat. “And since she can’t feel pain anyway, she can lie on a gurney in the hallway and think about what she did today. When Mia is stabilized, I’ll come down and discharge her.” Click. The line went dead. The nurse stood frozen, the phone still pressed to her ear, staring at the screen in disbelief. She looked down at me, her eyes brimming with a profound, helpless pity. I lay there, staring blindly at the blinding white fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Tears finally breached my eyelashes, rolling hot and fast down my temples, mixing with the blood in my hair, soaking into the sterile white paper of the stretcher. And in that exact moment—it hit. Eighteen years of delayed pain, hoarding itself up for a lifetime, crashed over me like a premeditated tsunami. It swallowed me whole. The agonizing twist of a ruptured spleen. The jagged, breathless stabbing of broken ribs. The dull, sickening throb of torn skin. It all detonated at the exact same second. But none of it hurt as much as my chest. I opened my mouth, gasping like a fish thrown onto the dock, trying to suck in air, but only managing to choke up mouthfuls of bloody froth. “She’s crashing! Hang on, honey, hang on!” Doctors and nurses swarmed me. I bit down on my bloodless bottom lip until I tasted copper. Just as the doctor turned, shouting at a nurse to call hospital administration for a legal bypass on the consent, a hand reached out. Long, elegant fingers plucked the clipboard and pen smoothly from the doctor’s hand. A voice, low, steady, and achingly familiar, rang out above the chaos. “I am her fiancé. I’ll sign.” The moment that deeply anchoring voice registered in my brain, the darkness finally pulled me under.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476191”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

The “blindfold test.” That was what the bridesmaids called it. Just a little pre-wedding game to liven up the bridal suite before the ceremony. The rule was simple: the groom had to identify his bride blindfolded. Only then could he take her to the altar. In the first round, he had to recognize me by touch alone. Wyatt closed his eyes, his hands sliding over mine. He gripped my fingers for a split second, then let go. Without a single beat of hesitation, he pointed to Cassidy. For the second round, Cassidy and I lay side by side on the bed, buried under a heavy duvet, leaving only our feet exposed. I purposefully wiggled my toes, a playful hint. But when the blanket was pulled back, the room erupted into laughter. The bridesmaids teased Wyatt for losing again. He had pointed straight at Cassidy’s feet. Cassidy laughed, a little sheepish. “Your luck is seriously tragic, Wyatt. How did you manage to pick me twice?” Wyatt let out a soft sigh, a teasing smile playing on his lips. “Getting stuck with you twice—I’m the one who’s cursed here.” I looked down at my right hand. The pinky finger was missing half its nail, a jagged scar cutting through the skin. Then I looked at my shoes. They were the custom heels Wyatt had spent weeks picking out for me. My gaze drifted to the two of them, lost in their shared laughter. And then, with a slow, crushing delay, the truth finally sank in. He didn’t want to marry me. 1 The bridal suite was loud, filled with the clinking of champagne flutes and bright chatter. I stood in the corner, fading into the wallpaper. I listened to Wyatt and Cassidy fall into their usual rhythm, bickering back and forth like they always did. Suddenly, Cassidy seemed to remember I was there. She walked over to me, her expression a mix of guilt and playful exasperation. “Rachel, seriously, Wyatt’s intuition is absolute garbage. He had two chances and blew both of them. You’re not mad, are you?” I didn’t say anything. Cassidy patted my shoulder, her tone gentle. “Today is your big day. Don’t let a stupid game ruin your mood.” She sounded so comforting, so rational. But I didn’t miss the split-second shadow of sadness and longing that crossed her face. My throat felt incredibly dry, like it was lined with sand. I couldn’t squeeze out a single word. Wyatt let out a dry laugh from across the room, his eyes fixed on her. “You think Rachel is like you, Cassidy? Throwing a three-day tantrum over nothing?” The blood drained from my face. Whenever Wyatt and I fought, he would apologize for maybe a day or two. If I didn’t let it go by then, he would simply leave me alone until I quieted down on my own. I never knew he spent three days coaxing Cassidy. Cassidy noticed how rigid I had become. She pressed her lips into a thin line, shooting a warning look at Wyatt. The rest of the room picked up on the sudden shift in temperature. The laughter died down, leaving an awkward, heavy silence. Fortunately, one of the groomsmen stepped in with a quick joke, and the suffocating tension slowly dissipated. Cassidy’s face returned to its usual bright expression, and the small hiccup was swept under the rug. Taking advantage of a moment when the others were distracted, Wyatt slid closer to me. “Are you actually mad?” he murmured. I remained silent. I didn’t miss the way his eyes instinctively darted toward Cassidy, who was now huddled with the other bridesmaids. It was a fleeting glance, but I saw it. He leaned in, lowering his voice. “Give me a hint for the next round. I swear I won’t get it wrong this time.” My hand subconsciously traced the scarred, half-nail of my pinky. The shoes I wore were completely different from the bridesmaids’ heels. Not to mention, I had literally wiggled my feet to guide him. What other hint did he possibly need? Cassidy and the girls finished whispering. I sat there quietly, waiting for the third round. Cassidy had slipped into an identical white veil and a matching dress, her silhouette nearly indistinguishable from mine. This round was about identifying me by posture and frame. Someone laughed. “Alright, we’re making this easy. No way the groom messes up now, right?” Cassidy was slightly taller than me. Even with the veil covering her face, anyone who paid attention could easily tell us apart. Yet, Wyatt stepped forward, paused, and reached out. He chose Cassidy. Again. The tiny, pathetic shred of hope I had been clinging to shattered completely. The room went dead silent. “Wyatt, man, what are you doing?” a groomsman asked, his voice laced with genuine confusion. “It’s so obvious. Stop messing around and pick your actual bride.” “Seriously, do it over.” The festive, playful energy of the room had vanished, replaced by a cold, clinical dread. Cassidy looked furious. “Wyatt, what the hell are you doing? Why are you picking me?” Wyatt simply shrugged, his expression blank. “I just got confused. My mistake.” I felt numb, as if my ears had been stuffed with cotton. Slowly, I reached up and pulled off my veil. I looked at Wyatt and forced a small smile. We had been together for seven years. We knew the contours of each other’s bodies better than anyone. And yet, he dismissed it all as a simple “mistake.” Cassidy rushed over, her face pale. “Rachel, listen to me—” I didn’t look at her. My eyes stayed locked on Wyatt. “Let’s call it off,” I said, my voice steady. “We’re not getting married today.” 2 Wyatt didn’t want to marry me. He was good at pretending, but a person’s instinctive reactions don’t lie. Cassidy’s eyes welled with tears, her voice trembling. “Rachel, please. Whatever is wrong, can we talk about it after the ceremony? You’ve been waiting for this wedding for so long. Please don’t do this.” Wyatt frowned, looking at me with a mixture of shock and annoyance. He didn’t argue. In fact, I caught the split-second flash of profound relief in his eyes before he masked it. Cassidy grabbed my hands, her grip tight and pleading. “Rachel, we’re going to be late. Let’s just go to the venue first.” I quietly pulled my hands from her grasp. “Would you really want that, Cassidy?” I asked softly. “Do you really want Wyatt to marry me?” Every word I spoke felt like a needle, thin and sharp. She flinched, the color completely draining from her cheeks. Wyatt stepped in front of her, his gaze turning accusatory. “Rachel, I’m the one who made a mistake. There’s no need to take it out on her. This has nothing to do with her.” Bitter? Well, the truth usually sounds bitter. “It’s not her fault,” Wyatt added. If it wasn’t Cassidy’s fault, then whose was it? Mine? Cassidy and I had grown up in the state foster care system. We were all each other had, surviving on a bond that felt thicker than blood. She was the outgoing one, always throwing herself in front of me to shield my timid self from the world. When our high school graduation rolled around, she told me she didn’t get into college. She insisted that I go, promising she would work to support me. My tuition, my rent, my food—she paid for all of it. “I’m not cut out for school anyway,” she used to say with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’d rather start earning money early.” To keep me from feeling guilty, she’d laugh it off. “You can just pay me back after you graduate and get rich.” Years later, I found out she had been accepted to a decent state college. She just chose not to go so I could. If she had only told me she loved Wyatt… I would have stepped aside. I would have let him go. I would have walked away with my dignity intact. Instead, they chose to humiliate me on the day of my wedding. Three rounds. Three opportunities. And Wyatt chose Cassidy every single time. Everyone in that room saw what was happening. Everyone except the groom. My scarred pinky finger suddenly began to throb with a sharp, phantom pain. My voice shook. “Wyatt, do you think I’m an idiot?” His jaw tightened into a rigid line. He said nothing. After seven years, I knew him too well. He didn’t want to explain himself. Or perhaps, he had been waiting for a moment like this to force a confrontation he was too cowardly to start. Cassidy grabbed my arm again. “Rachel, I never wanted to take anything from you. I swear. I’m begging you, let’s just go to the church.” I let out a cold, hollow laugh, staring at her tear-stained face. “No, Cassidy. I’m giving him to you. You two should get married.” I pushed past her and walked out of the room. The bridesmaids and groomsmen stood frozen, staring at each other in stunned silence. The sudden cancellation of the wedding left them entirely blindsided. I walked out of the hotel and hailed a cab. Cassidy called my phone repeatedly. I rejected every call. Wyatt called next. I ignored him too. Eventually, I turned my phone off entirely. Looking out the window at the passing city lights, I realized my vision had gone completely blurry. I blinked, and a heavy tear rolled down my cheek, landing on the back of my hand. I looked down at my right pinky. The jagged, half-missing nail looked ugly and out of place next to the others. I had crushed it in a heavy metal door years ago, protecting Cassidy from a group of neighborhood bullies. I had screamed and cried from the pain back then. It had been so long since I thought about that scar. But sitting in the back of that cab, the pain returned, sharper than ever. 3 The wedding was a disaster. With hundreds of guests already seated at the venue, the families couldn’t simply call it off. So, Cassidy did exactly what I told her to do. She stepped into my place, put on the ring, and married Wyatt. When I woke up the next morning, I walked into my living room to find Cassidy sitting on the sofa, looking utterly hollowed out. She had the keycode to my apartment. I had even designed a bedroom specifically for her. When I made my first real commission in the city, the very first thing I did was buy this small condo. I wanted to make sure Cassidy and I would never have to drift from place to place again. I wanted us to have a home. My eyes were swollen and sore. No matter how coldly I had walked away the day before, the grief was a physical weight crushing my chest. The moment I got back to the empty apartment last night, I had broken down, sobbing until my ribs ached. My best friend—the sister of my soul—was in love with my fiancé. And they loved each other. Behind my back, they had built a quiet, secret universe. Cassidy scrambled to her feet, her expression frantic. “Rachel… I’m so sorry. I swear, I never meant to steal Wyatt from you.” Her eyes were bloodshot. “I never wanted this. I never wanted to ruin your wedding.” But the wedding was ruined anyway. Last night, Wyatt’s mother had sent me a barrage of furious texts, accusing me of being selfish and disrespectful. Wyatt’s parents had always looked down on me because I was an orphan. They treated me like a social climber. But they had tolerated me because Wyatt loved me—loved me enough to fight his family for years. People used to say Wyatt was completely under my spell, that he would never look at another woman. Back then, hearing those rumors made me angry, but a small, foolish part of me felt cherished. Now, I knew the truth. I looked at Cassidy, my voice dry and raspy. “When did it start?” Wyatt and I had started dating during my freshman year of college. I had introduced him to Cassidy shortly after. Initially, Cassidy claimed she couldn’t stand him. She complained that a rich, pampered guy like Wyatt wasn’t good enough for me. “Three years ago,” Cassidy whispered, her eyes dropped to the floor. “The time you asked him to check on me…” My mind went blank for a second. Then, the memory slotted into place. It was during my first year of corporate work. I was away on an intense business trip and couldn’t get ahold of Cassidy for hours. Fearing the worst, I swallowed my pride and texted Wyatt, asking him to check her apartment. Cassidy had collapsed from a severe, neglected stomach ulcer. Because I was miles away, Wyatt stayed at the hospital, managing her admission and keeping her company. “Rachel, I tried to fight it,” she sobbed, her voice laced with agony. “I didn’t want to feel this way. I hated myself because of what it would do to you.” “But Wyatt confessed to me on Christmas Eve.” “Rachel… he loved me.” A loud ringing echoed in my ears, drowning out her voice. A sudden wave of nausea hit me so hard I had to press a hand to my stomach to keep from gagging. “So that’s what it was,” I murmured. “No wonder he told me he had to work late that Christmas Eve. He was with you.” I let out a soft, bitter laugh. I had been so incredibly stupid. I had lived in the dark for years, celebrating when Cassidy finally stopped complaining about Wyatt, thinking they were finally getting along for my sake. They had spent years flirting and bickering right in front of me, and I had smiled through it all. “Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked, staring at her. My chest felt like it was being crushed by a vice. Cassidy looked up, a miserable, broken smile on her lips. “And what would you have done, Rachel?” “Would you have just handed him over to me?” 4 By the time Wyatt arrived, Cassidy was sitting numbly on one end of the sofa, and I was on the other. We hadn’t spoken another word. Wyatt stormed into the apartment, but the name on his lips wasn’t mine. “Cassidy…” She looked up, her eyes instinctively darting to me in fear. The raw worry in Wyatt’s eyes was unmistakable. He immediately stepped between us, shielding Cassidy from me. His tone turned cold and defensive. “Rachel, if you’re angry, take it out on me. She didn’t do anything wrong.” Watching him play the protective hero to my sister-soulmate made me want to laugh. It was pathetic. I had believed Wyatt’s warmth was reserved solely for me. I had believed I was his exception. It turned out he was fully capable of shielding someone else. When I didn’t reply, Wyatt softened his tone slightly, though his posture remained rigid. “Rachel, I’ll make this up to you. Ask for anything—financial support, the apartment, whatever you want. Just… not the marriage.” We ended up standing on the small balcony alone. He remained silent for a long time, staring out at the city skyline. “I never wanted to break up with you,” he finally said, his voice barely above a whisper. “And I never wanted to betray you.” “But I couldn’t control my feelings.” “Rachel, you mean everything to Cassidy. She didn’t want to hurt you, so she tried to keep her distance. I was the one who kept pushing. If you want to blame someone, blame me.” I stared at him, feeling a sudden, terrifying sense of detachment. He looked like a complete stranger. “I’m sorry, Rachel,” he repeated, looking down at me. “I’ll compensate you.” The corners of my mouth twitched. Compensate. How do you compensate for seven years of devotion? How do you pay someone back for the prime of their youth? “Wyatt, the name on your marriage license is still mine,” I said quietly. “It’s not Cassidy’s.” His face darkened instantly. “Rachel!” I ignored him, turning on my heel and walking back inside. As soon as I crossed the threshold, a violent fit of coughing seized me. It felt like my lungs were trying to tear themselves out of my chest. Tears pricked my eyes as I gasped for air. Cassidy immediately rushed over, pulling tissues from her bag to wipe my face. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I’m so, so sorry,” she wept, her hands shaking violently. Her eyes were filled with a deep, suffocating guilt. I remembered when she was eighteen, working at a brutal distribution warehouse because she had no degree. It was backbreaking, exhausting labor, and she was constantly bullied by the older shift managers. But she never complained. Every time she got paid, she kept barely enough to buy cheap ramen and sent every remaining dollar to my student account. I had visited her once without telling her. I watched her running across the concrete floor, being yelled at by a supervisor, nodding and smiling through the humiliation. On that day, I promised myself I would spend the rest of my life making things easy for her. Whatever she wanted, I would give her. Cassidy’s eyes were red and swollen. “Aside from you, no one had ever been good to me. Wyatt was the first person who ever looked out for me.” She looked up at me, her voice trembling. “Rachel… since you don’t want him anymore…” “Can you let me have him? Please?” A terrible, cold peace washed over me. I smiled. “Sure.” “Cassidy, consider this my final payment to you. We’re officially even.” Before Wyatt took her away, he hesitated at the door. “If you need anything, Rachel… you can still call me.” I didn’t bother to look up. The very next day, they registered their marriage and posted the certificate on social media. I scrolled through my feed and liked the post. Then, I left a comment: Congratulations. I hope you two get exactly what you deserve.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476190”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

The golden boy failed his college placement exams again, and I got dragged right back into the loop. As a mere background extra in this universe, this was my third time sitting through senior year. And yet, he still couldn’t score high enough to get into the same elite university as the female lead. The moment I blinked open my eyes back in the homeroom, I marched straight over to his desk and smacked him across the face. “It’s C! The answer to number fourteen is C! How do you miss a correct option that’s staring you right in the face?” 01 The entire classroom went dead silent. You could have heard a pin drop. I shoved the practice sheet in front of his face, practically vibrating with rage. “We’ve done this exact same paper. Even Pavlov’s dog would have learned to salivate by the fourth run. Why are you still bubbling in B? You look like a B. You’re a walking, talking, capital B!” The brave kids kept staring; the smart ones looked away. After all, everyone at our high school knew my reputation: Naomi West—quick-tempered, sharp-tongued, and more than willing to take a guy down if he pushed me. But no one expected the resident bad boy, Wyatt, to react the way he did. Normally, he’d scowl and kick a desk. Instead, his eyes welled up. “Wait… you too?” He reached out, grabbing my hand like a lifeline. “It’s too hard. High school is too hard. I can’t do this anymore!” 02 From the first moment I saw Wyatt, I knew he was special. Mostly because I have zero tolerance for stupidity, and he was a very special breed of stupid. He still got the same math formulas wrong after the teacher explained them three times. He couldn’t memorize a simple stanza of poetry to save his life. He even managed to leave his English listening comprehension sheet completely blank. He was lazy. He was useless. And yet, half the girls in school had an absolute crisis over him. The school’s anonymous confession page was basically a daily shrine to his name, and they’d even voted him Homecoming King. I’m a sapiosexual. I have zero interest in anyone with an IQ lower than mine, so for three years, I never spoke a single word to him. When graduation finally came the first time, I got a perfect score on my exams. I was the state’s top scholar. But before my acceptance letter to Yale could even get warm in my hands, I blinked and woke up back in this classroom. It took me a while to figure out what was happening. Eventually, I realized I was trapped in a young adult romance novel. The male lead was Wyatt—the wealthy, failing rebel. The female lead was Becca Collins—the pristine, straight-A transfer student. According to the original plot, Wyatt was supposed to fall in love with her at first sight after she transferred, pursue her relentlessly, and after enough dramatic angst, they would end up together. But because high school romances face strict censorship regulations nowadays, the author had hastily changed the setting to a college campus right before publishing. That meant they couldn’t meet until university. The adjustment made sense on paper. The only problem? Wyatt was an academic disaster. He couldn’t get into college, which meant he could never meet her. 03 Behind the school, in the courtyard garden. Wyatt sat on a stone bench, crying so hard he was practically hyperventilating. “We just finished. And now we’re back. Four times. Four goddamn times.” He looked on the verge of a total breakdown. “I’m a trust-fund kid! I was supposed to barely graduate, take over my dad’s packaging plant, and sit in my custom gaming chair all day. My dad even put the chair in my new office, and I haven’t even gotten to sit in the damn thing yet!” I stared at him, exhausted. “Did you even try to find a solution?” Like hiring a tutor, perhaps. Mentioning this only made Wyatt angrier. “Of course I tried! I memorized last year’s exam answers, but the state changed the entire test curriculum the next year! I tried to get my dad to send me to a boarding school in Switzerland, but the moment I stepped onto the plane, I woke up right back in homeroom. Nobody stays seventeen forever, Naomi. I’ve been seventeen for three years. Is that fair?!” I suspected the universe was forcing the plot because he was the protagonist. Before I could ask anything else, a flashlight beam cut through the darkness. “Who’s out there?” It was the campus security guard. The administration had been cracking down on public displays of affection lately, threatening to suspend anyone caught. Before I could even process the light, Wyatt bolted like a rabbit. “I’m the dumb one, I’m out!” He kicked up gravel, leaving nothing but a blur in the night. Seriously. How did this guy get cast as a male lead? That evening, right after my study session, I received a friend request on social media. Avatar: A golden retriever. Username: An Old Dog. Message: It’s Wyatt accept me now. He was loud even in text. The moment I accepted, his messages started flooding in. Hey, genius. What are you doing? Honestly, if I weren’t desperate to escape this endless loop of senior year, I wouldn’t have bothered. Reading. An Old Dog: (Surprised cat meme) An Old Dog: You’ve been the state’s top student three times and you’re still reading? I didn’t want to reply to something so obvious. He kept typing: Did the guard catch you tonight? No. Good thing I run fast. Otherwise, we’d have been caught together and everyone would think we’re dating. He seemed incredibly proud of himself. I didn’t bother reminding him that even if the dean caught us together, they would assume Wyatt was extorting my lunch money. No one would ever suspect us of dating. I was the school’s star pupil, heavily protected by the faculty. Apparently tired of typing, he initiated a video call. I hesitated for a second before tapping the green button. Instantly, his ridiculously handsome face filled my screen. I spared him a flat look before returning my eyes to my AP calculus sheet. “What do you want, Wyatt?” “I’ve been analyzing the situation, and I have a major breakthrough.” I raised an eyebrow, letting him continue. “Is there a chance this loop is actually your fault?” He sounded entirely convinced of his own theory. “In these kinds of books, the female lead is always the brilliant valedictorian. But you keep taking that spot. Maybe her character arc is broken because you keep winning. What if you bomb the next exam on purpose?” “Absolutely not.” I would rather rot in this loop than let anyone else take my spot. “Why don’t you try failing your way into community college with her?” I countered dryly. “You can date there. Why does it have to be an Ivy League?” “That actually makes sense!” He started contemplating the idea seriously. I rolled my eyes and hung up on him. I had to admit, when I first realized I was just a nameless extra in someone else’s story, I went through a bit of a dark phase. I couldn’t accept that someone like me—the hardest worker, the smartest girl—was just background noise. Eventually, I made peace with it by looking at Wyatt. He wasn’t worthy of me anyway. But my number-one spot? No one was taking that from me. 04 I had my suspicions about who the real female lead was. Wyatt was too busy failing to notice the class rankings, but I monitored them obsessively. I always tracked the margin between myself and second place. During the first loop, I beat the runner-up by thirty points. The second loop, the gap closed to twenty. The third loop was terrifying; the margin shrank to a mere thirteen points. That was when I memorized her name: Becca Collins, from Oakridge High. Could she really be the one? 05 On Monday, the results of our first mock exam were posted. Unsurprisingly, I was first. Our homeroom teacher’s voice practically trembled with excitement as she stood at the podium. “This was a statewide assessment, and our Naomi West didn’t just place first in our school—she placed first in the entire state, ten points ahead of second place!” The classroom erupted into scattered applause, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile. Ten points. The gap was shrinking again. The female lead was a fast learner; I had to give her credit. After the results came our seat reassignment. Students got to choose their desks and partners based on their rank. As I prepared to take my usual spot in the center of the front row, my phone buzzed. It was Wyatt, standing at the very back of the line. When it’s your turn, choose me as your partner. Why would I do that? Seeing my lack of response, he typed furiously. We are the only two self-aware characters in this paper world. Are you really going to ignore your only ally? Shouldn’t we work together to figure out how to break the curse and get out of here? I had briefly considered tutoring him to get him into college just to end the loop, but the thought evaporated quickly. I hated wasting time on losing battles. Helping Wyatt would only slow down my own studies. And if I lost my top ranking because I was busy hand-holding him, it would be a disaster. His next message popped up immediately. I have a premium university library card. You can borrow whatever you want, and use their online databases. My dad’s empty office at the plant? You can use it as your private study lounge. All year. No distractions. That actually got my attention. My mother had remarried after her divorce and had a three-year-old son. He was at the age where he was constantly screaming and throwing toys. I could only study in peace after he went to sleep, and weekends were a nightmare. My stepfather was a long-haul truck driver, and our finances were tight. Beyond basic school supplies, I rarely asked my parents for extra test prep materials. I typed back: Deal. The second I sent it, I heard a loud whistle from the back of the room. The teacher snapped instantly. “Wyatt! Do you find placing dead last amusing? Come up here to the front so everyone can see you.” Wyatt, completely shameless, strolled to the front of the room and stood right next to me. His friends started snickering from the back. “First and last make a perfect pair, Mrs. Gilbert. Why don’t you just let them sit together?” Mrs. Gilbert’s face flushed with anger, but before she could yell, Wyatt grinned. “Honestly, I’m down.” I gave it a brief thought and nodded. “I don’t mind.” The entire room stared at us in shock. 06 Within days, two major rumors took over the senior class. First, the school rebel had been slapped by the star student. Second, they were now desk partners. The school’s online forum went wild. Who even is Naomi West? Why is she getting close to Wyatt? I didn’t even know she existed before this. That slap was definitely a cry for attention. She knew she was plain, so she used a cheap trick to get him to sit with her. I looked up Naomi’s record. She’s actually insane. She was the top student in the district in middle school, and she’s literally never lost her first-place rank. It’s weird. I never really noticed her before, but honestly, Wyatt might be the one punching above his weight here. I stared at the phone screen Wyatt kept shoving in front of my face, completely unfazed. Of course they hadn’t noticed me before; this world wasn’t written for me. The main characters drew everyone’s attention simply by existing. The only reason people were looking at me now was because I was standing next to Wyatt. Wyatt grinned, scrolling through the thread. “I leaked your academic record to the board. Who do these people think they are, saying a state scholar isn’t good enough for me? Idiots.” As he spoke, a new comment appeared on the thread. I refreshed the page. It was a brand-new account. Just an NPC trying to act like a main character. Do you honestly think cheap effort can beat natural talent? A side character will never compare to the real female lead. 07 “Who is this? They’re trash-talking on my turf,” Wyatt muttered, cracking his knuckles. “I’m a moderator on this forum. I’m banning them right now.” He paused, staring at the screen. “Wait. They said ‘NPC’ and ‘female lead’… Could it be…?” I had already told him my theory about Becca Collins. We looked at each other, the same realization dawning on us.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476189”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

At seven years old, I shoved my childhood sweetheart out of the path of a speeding car. The impact shattered my skull, and when I finally woke up, the bright, quick-witted girl I used to be was gone. I was simple. But Wesley didn’t abandon me. He stayed. He laughed at my nonsensical jokes, played make-believe with me, and the moment we turned twenty-two, he made me his wife. But after the wedding, everything changed. Wesley claimed he had developed a severe case of sensory aversion—a hyper-sensitivity to order and germs. If I touched a dish on the table, he deemed it contaminated. He would throw the entire meal into the trash and go to bed hungry rather than eat it. If I drank from a cup, it went straight into the garbage. Even in sleep, if my arm accidentally brushed against his, he would bolt upright in the dead of night, rush to the bathroom, and scrub his skin with a coarse sponge until it was raw and angry red. I didn’t understand the medical jargon of his condition, but I hated seeing him in pain. So, I quietly ordered a bulk box of latex gloves. I wore them to bed. I wore them to cook. When I handed him a glass of water, I kept my bare hands tucked away, letting only the cold, blue rubber touch the glass. Then came the afternoon my mother asked me to bring him lunch at his office. Mallory, his new assistant, intercepted me in the lobby. She took the warm thermos from my hands, and with her other hand, she casually offered Wesley her half-finished iced latte. Without a moment’s hesitation, Wesley took it. He wrapped his lips around the straw she had just used and took several deep, contented sips. I stood frozen, my mind struggling to process the scene. Was his condition gone? Had he been cured? Mallory looked over her shoulder at me, a slow, knowing smirk pulling at her lips. Then, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Only a simpleton like you would believe a grown man has a “sensory aversion” disorder. He isn’t sick, Daisy. He’s just physically repulsed by your broken brain. For once, my slow mind grasped the weight of the word repulsed. My chest ached so deeply that I bit my lip until it bled, tasting copper. And then, a memory flickered. Elliot. Elliot was the neighborhood pest when we were kids—the boy who always teased me, who had spent his entire life picking fights with Wesley. Two days ago, he had sent me a text out of the blue. He had called Wesley a fraud, a parasite. He told me his research lab in Boston had made a breakthrough in neuro-reconstruction—a procedure that could fix my damaged brain. He asked me if I wanted to leave with him. At the time, I had assumed he was just being cruel, trying to mess with me like he always did. But now, looking at Wesley’s lips on Mallory’s straw, I stared at my phone and typed a single word: Yes. 1 Wesley looked up and saw me standing there, his eyes dropping to the thermos in Mallory’s hands. He stepped forward, snatched it away, and shoved it back into my chest. “I told you, I don’t eat food cooked by outsiders,” he said, his voice flat. “Take it back.” Outsiders. The word stung. Instinctively, my eyes drifted past his shoulder. Mallory had made herself comfortable on Wesley’s private leather sofa, tearing open a bag of potato chips. “It’s lunchtime,” she said with a shrug, popping a chip into her mouth. “I’m starving.” Salty crumbs spilled onto her lap, tumbling down into the deep crevices of the expensive leather. Wesley followed my gaze, but instead of the cold rage he usually reserved for messes, he simply let out a fond, helpless sigh. “Those are dry. Do you want me to grab you something to drink?” I stared at the crumbs on the sofa. My mind dragged me back to last winter, when Wesley had driven me to the clinic for my routine neurological checkup. After the blood draw, my blood sugar had plummeted. My hands were shaking so violently I could barely hold myself upright. I had taken a half-eaten bagel from my bag, desperate to stop the trembling. The moment I took a bite, Wesley slammed on the brakes. His face was entirely expressionless as he opened the passenger door. “Get out of my car. I don’t tolerate crumbs. You’re ruining the leather.” It was pouring rain that day. I had begged him, crying, promising I would be so careful, that I wouldn’t let a single speck fall. But he had pushed me out anyway, locking the doors and driving away. I couldn’t remember the way home. My geography was a jumbled mess of colors and wrong turns. By the time my mother found me shivering under a bus stop hours later, I was on the verge of passing out from hypoglycemia and burning up with a high fever. When my furious mother confronted him, I had held her back, weeping. Wesley is sick, Mom. He didn’t mean to. His illness makes him do it. But now, watching him smile at Mallory’s mess, I couldn’t make the pieces fit. I stubbornly held the thermos higher, my hands trembling. “I spent three months learning how to make this from Mom. Your stomach has been acting up, Wesley. It’s healthy. And I wore my gloves the whole time—it’s perfectly clean. No crumbs.” He didn’t reach for it. His face hardened. “How can you even compare yourself to her?” he muttered, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “You’re nothing but a burden—” He cut himself off, but the damage was done. With a sharp, impatient thrust of his hand, he shoved the thermos away. “Just go home, Daisy. Stop making a scene.” The thermos slipped from my grip, crashing onto the marble floor. The lid popped off, and the boiling hot broth splashed directly over the back of my hand. Blisters bloomed instantly across my skin, pale and agonizing. The pain was so sharp my eyes filled with tears. Around us, the office staff began to whisper, their eyes burning into me. I knelt down, my hand throbbing, and picked up the dented metal canister. A few of the blisters had already popped, leaving a raw, sticky mess against my skin. Wesley stared down at my hand, his lips parting slightly. “I’ll… I’ll take you to the ER,” he muttered, his voice suddenly sounding hollow. 2 I took a step back, cradling my burnt hand to my chest. “No,” I whispered. “I can go by myself.” He froze, a look of genuine shock crossing his face. I suppose he was used to the old Daisy—the girl who would chase after any scrap of kindness he threw her way, keeping herself happy for days on a single smile. But today, I didn’t want his kindness. I was slow, and I knew I would probably forget which bus to take, but I didn’t want to call my mother either. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. Gathering what little courage I had, I tapped the shoulder of a kind-looking woman on the street. “Excuse me,” I said, my voice shaking. “Could you tell me how to get to Cherry Creek?” The woman gave me a sympathetic look and patiently wrote down the directions. I took three wrong buses, getting lost twice in the sprawling transit system. By the time I finally reached my mother’s front door, I collapsed into her arms, sobbing. “Mom,” I wept, “how do I get a divorce?” My mother’s face drained of color. She gripped my shoulders. “Daisy, sweetie, look at me. Did Wesley hurt you? What did he do?” I thought about it carefully, trying to find the words to explain the ache in my chest. “Mom… he lets other people eat chips on his sofa. But he threw me out in the rain for eating a bagel.” My mother’s eyes brimmed with tears. She brushed a stray curl from my forehead. “My sweet girl,” she whispered. “Do you know what divorce means?” “Yes,” I said softly. “It means we don’t live together anymore. And… it means I don’t have to wear the gloves.” I pulled the blue latex gloves from my pockets and placed them on the kitchen table. “Mom, I don’t want to wear them anymore.” My mother turned her face away, her shoulders shaking as she tried to hide her tears. By the time I returned to the apartment I shared with Wesley, my phone screen lit up. If you’re coming to Boston, Elliot’s message read, how are you going to get that bastard to let you go? I checked my call history. There wasn’t a single missed call or text from Wesley. With clumsy fingers, I typed my reply: My mom said she will help me with the divorce. In a month, I’ll be free to come to Boston for the surgery. I told my mother I wanted to pack my things myself. A few sweaters, a favorite blanket… I folded them slowly, placing them one by one into a duffel bag. I was only halfway through when the front door clicked open. Mallory was supporting Wesley, who was heavily intoxicated, his face flushed a deep, sluggish red. The moment Mallory saw me, she called out sharply, “Go make him some hangover broth. You’re simple, but surely you can manage a basic soup.” She paused, lowering her voice. “And don’t tell him I told you to do it. He’ll throw it up if he knows. If it weren’t for you embarrassing him at the office today, he wouldn’t have drunk himself into this state!” She walked past me toward the hallway bathroom to grab a damp towel. She moved with an easy, practiced familiarity, as if this were her home, not mine. I found myself following her to the doorway. “How do you know where our bathroom is?” I asked quietly. She turned, a smug, pitying smile playing on her lips. “Oh, Daisy. Where do you think Wesley brings me when you’re away at your therapy sessions three days a week?” I stood frozen in the hallway. Three days a week, I spent my afternoons at the rehabilitation center. Wesley had never accompanied me. He always said he was drowning in meetings. I watched her return to the living room and gently wipe Wesley’s face. Wesley reached up, his fingers wrapping around her wrist. He pressed her hand against his cheek, nuzzling into her palm with the soft, vulnerable sigh of a cat greeting its owner. They always called me simple. But I wasn’t blind. I had watched enough movies to know what a loving husband looked like. It looked like this. It had never looked like us. I remembered a night last winter when Wesley had come down with a sudden, raging fever. He was shivering, drenched in cold sweat. I had tried to place a cool washcloth on his forehead to help him. But the moment he opened his eyes and saw my face, his expression twisted. With a burst of frantic, feverish strength, he shoved me away. “Don’t touch me!” he had screamed. I had stumbled backward, my head cracking violently against the sharp edge of the coffee table. The gash was deep; it took twelve stitches to close. Yet here he was, perfectly calm, letting Mallory touch him, a soft smile gracing his lips. A dull, heavy ache settled deep in my chest. I walked back to the bedroom and continued packing. Reaching into the back of the closet, my fingers brushed against two small, hand-painted ceramic figurines. When I first became simple after the accident, the nightmares were relentless. I would scream in my sleep, dreaming of massive black tires rolling over my chest. To soothe me, Wesley had taken a pottery class. He had molded two little figures—one of him, one of me—and painted them himself. He had told me that as long as I kept them close, he would always protect me. I had kept them on my nightstand for fifteen years. I stared at the little clay faces, my heart torn. Just then, Wesley groaned and sat up on the sofa. I walked out, hesitating, and held the figurines out to him. “Do you want these?” I asked. 3 In my rush, I had forgotten to put on my gloves. Wesley’s eyes flared with instinctual disgust. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he slapped my hand away. “I told you, don’t bring things you’ve touched near me!” The figurines flew from my hand, clattering loudly against the hardwood floor. Miraculously, they didn’t shatter. I scrambled down, desperately gathering them back into my arms, clutching them to my chest. Mallory watched my frantic movements, a cruel amusement dancing in her eyes. “Oh, those are actually so retro and cute,” she purred, turning to Wesley. “I love them.” Wesley’s expression softened instantly as he looked at her. “They’re just cheap junk,” he said carelessly. “If you want them, take them.” I squeezed the little ceramic figures tighter, their cold edges digging into my palms. They weren’t cheap junk. They were my childhood. Mallory crouched down to my level, her eyes searching mine. “Do you mind, Daisy?” I looked at the painted smiles on the little clay faces. Together forever, he had promised. But forever was over. “Sure,” I whispered. “You can have them.” Later, when Mallory went downstairs to call a cab, I walked into the kitchen to pour a glass of water. Wesley was sitting alone on the sofa. “Why are you acting so strange today?” he asked suddenly, his voice tight. I paused, holding the glass. “Wesley, what would happen if we got a divorce?” He bolted upright, his face instantly darkening with fury. “Are you doing this on purpose?” he spat, stepping toward me. “Is this a threat? Are you trying to make sure the entire town brands me as an ungrateful monster?” He stopped just inches from me, his jaw clenched, before flinching back as if my very presence made him sick. “Do you think I wanted this life?” he hissed, his voice trembling with a lifetime of buried resentment. “Who in their right mind wants to be shackled to a simpleton forever?” He froze, the words hanging heavily in the quiet room. I froze, too. Simpleton. Since the day I woke up in that hospital bed at seven years old, I had heard that word whispered behind my back a thousand times. But hearing it from Wesley’s lips felt sharper than the boiling broth that had blistered my hand. When we were children, the kids at school would circle me, clapping their hands and chanting, Daisy is a dummy! Daisy is a dummy! Wesley would throw himself into the fray, fighting them until his knuckles were bloody and his face was bruised, screaming at them that I wasn’t stupid. Now, he turned away, his voice cracking as he retreated toward the bedroom. “I wanted you to have a normal life, Daisy. But you’re just… broken.” I didn’t want to be broken. My mother always told me that before the crash, I was the brightest girl in school, my bedroom walls lined with spelling bee ribbons and science fair medals. But after my seventh birthday, all of that was erased. The next day, I went to visit Wesley’s parents. They had always treated me like their own daughter, kissing my forehead and calling me their sweet girl. Years ago, when I had accidentally caught my arm on a hot stove, his mother had even offered her own skin for my graft. Knowing I was leaving made my chest ache for them. “Dad,” I said softly, hugging his father. “Please don’t forget to take your heart medicine. Set an alarm on your phone.” “And Mom,” I turned to his mother, “is your back still hurting? Don’t lift the heavy laundry baskets anymore.” “Make sure to water the hydrangeas in the garden, or they’ll wither.” They smiled warmly, patting my hands and praising me for being so thoughtful. But that evening, after I returned to the apartment, I heard Wesley’s phone ringing through the thin walls. His parents were on speakerphone. “Are you mistreating Daisy?” his father’s voice boomed, thick with anger. “And what is this nonsense about that girl from your office?” “There is a charity gala tomorrow night,” his mother commanded. “You will bring Daisy. You will stand by her side and show everyone that she is your wife.” When the call ended, Wesley slammed his door open. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with a terrible, desperate rage. He grabbed my arm, his fingers digging so deeply into my flesh that his nails bit into my skin. “Daisy! Is this all you know how to do? Running to my parents to force my hand?” I gasped from the pain. “I didn’t tell them anything. I promise.” He let go of me, shaking, and locked himself in his study. Soon, the sound of breaking glass echoed through the door. He was drinking again. Over the two years of our marriage, he had drank more and more. I knew from the public health pamphlets that alcohol was poison. I stood in the dark hallway for a long time, listening to the muffled sounds of his despair. Finally, I took out my phone and messaged Elliot. Can we do the surgery sooner? My mom says the divorce papers are almost ready. I want to leave. That night, I slept in the guest room. In the middle of the night, a sudden, suffocating pressure seized my throat. I gasped, waking to find Wesley hovering over me in the dark. The man who had refused to touch me for two years was finally touching me—his hands wrapped tightly around my neck. His voice was a broken, ragged whisper. “I never asked you to save me.” 4 “Why do I have to spend my entire life paying for a debt I didn’t ask for? Why do I have to be ruined because of you?” Was saving his life a mistake? Was loving him a crime? I remembered when we were children, how he would hold my hand tightly on the playground and declare to anyone who would listen: “Daisy is going to be my bride. When we grow up, I’m marrying her.” He had been so happy then. I tried to claw at his hands, to breathe. But then, a hot tear fell from his cheek onto my forehead. Wesley was crying. “Do you have any idea how much I hate you?” he sobbed. His tears felt scalding, like acid against my skin. Being married to me was slowly killing him. My hands fell away from his wrists. I stopped fighting. The grip around my throat tightened, the room spinning into darkness as the air left my lungs. Just as the blackness was about to swallow me whole, he suddenly let go, stumbling backward out of the room. I lay there in the quiet dark, staring at the ceiling, my fingers gently tracing the bruises forming on my neck. On the night of the gala, Wesley still made me go. But he walked so fast, his long strides leaving me far behind in the crowded foyer. The ballroom was grand, filled with people in glittering gowns and sharp suits, holding sparkling champagne flutes. But their eyes on me were cold and sharp. “Why did he bring the simpleton?” “His parents probably threatened to cut him off if he didn’t.” “Poor Wesley. Tied to a mute anchor for the rest of his life.” A group of younger guests began to snicker, deliberately stepping in my path, pulling at the hem of my dress to make me stumble. In an instant, I was seven years old again. I remembered the kids who used to mimic my uneven walk, mocking my slurred words, locking me in the school bathroom for an entire afternoon while I cried in the dark. I had developed a crippling terror of crowds. But back then, Wesley had held back a grade just to stay in my class and protect me. He would hold my hand through the hallways, whispering: “Don’t look at them, Daisy. I’m right here.” Now, my knees shook, and my chest felt tight. I looked toward Wesley, silently begging him to save me. But he didn’t even look my way. He was guiding Mallory through the crowd, introducing her proudly to the senior partners and executives. “This is my personal assistant, Mallory,” he said, his voice warm and respectable. “She’s brilliant. Keep an eye on her.” I retreated to a dark corner of the ballroom, trembling like a ghost. Suddenly, a deafening crack echoed from the ceiling. The massive crystal chandelier groaned, its iron supports snapping as it began to plunge toward the center of the ballroom. Screams erupted. People scrambled in wild panic. Wesley stood frozen directly beneath it, paralyzed by shock. Without thinking, my legs moved. I ran toward him, desperate to push him out of the way, just like I had done when we were seven. Let this be my final gift to him. A final thank you for the boy he used to be. I lunged forward, shoving his chest with all my might. “Wesley, run!” But even in that split second of mortal danger, his physical repulsion won. “Get off me!” he snarled, shoving me back with a look of pure disgust. He reached past me, grabbing Mallory’s hand to pull her to safety. And then, the chandelier crashed. The weight of the heavy metal and glass slammed into my left leg, pinning me to the floor. A sharp, blinding pain tore through me, and the world began to pool with blood. Before the darkness took me, I caught a glimpse of Wesley’s face. He was pale as death. When I woke up, the scent of antiseptic filled my nose. My left leg was wrapped in thick layers of white gauze, throbbing with a dull, white-hot agony. My mother sat by my bedside, her face red and swollen from crying. “You’re safe, sweetie. Mom is here.” “I was so wrong,” she sobbed, pressing her forehead against my hand. “We should have never let them force him into this marriage…” So it was true. He had been forced. The door clicked open, and Wesley walked in. One side of his face was heavily bruised and swollen—my mother had clearly confronted him. But there was no remorse in his eyes. Only a wild, unhinged resentment. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you, Daisy?” he screamed, kicking a metal tray beside the bed. “You just want me to owe you forever! First you saved me as a kid, making me feel like a criminal if I didn’t marry you. Now I finally find someone I love, and my parents fire me because of you! Are you happy now?” “I never asked for your stupid sacrifices! Why didn’t you just die in that car crash fifteen years ago?” I clutched the hospital blanket tightly. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. Wesley stared at me, his chest heaving, before turning on his heel and walking out. He never came back. The doctors told my mother my leg had suffered a complex compound fracture. She cried until she had no tears left. “She did everything for him,” she wept. “How could he be so cruel?” He wasn’t there for my surgeries. He wasn’t there when the doctor told me I might walk with a permanent limp. I only found out where he was when Mallory sent me a text message. So what if they fired me? You’re stuck in a hospital bed, and Wesley is here in Vermont with me, taking care of me. 5 So, Mallory was upset, and they had gone to Vermont to clear their heads. My mother handed me a thick envelope. Inside was a set of divorce papers. Slowly, carefully, I signed my name at the bottom of the page, tracing each letter with precision. Elliot called me as soon as he heard about the accident. “Do we need to push back the surgery?” he asked, his voice uncharacteristically tense. I looked down at my cast. No, I typed back. Keep the date. It didn’t matter. My leg and my brain were two different things. If the surgery failed, at least the pain would finally end. On the day of my discharge, my mother held me close in the back of the car. “Are you absolutely sure about this surgery, Daisy? No matter what, you will always be my perfect little girl.” I wanted to cry, but I forced myself to smile. “But Mom, I want to be smart again.” Her tears spilled onto my shoulder. “But the risks… what if something goes wrong?” “I’m not afraid.” I was terrified. But I had to try. I insisted on going alone. Elliot had made it clear that the procedure carried a high mortality rate. If I didn’t make it, I wanted my mother to be spared the immediate sight of it. She held me so tightly I could barely breathe, her quiet sobs filling the car. The next day, I asked her to drop me off at the apartment one last time. I wanted to say a proper goodbye. Propping myself up on my crutches, I spent the afternoon in the kitchen. I made a simple dinner: chicken pot pie, roasted green beans, and a warm tomato soup. Simple, comforting dishes. People always said I was a useless burden, but I wanted to do one last thing for him before I left. My hands were blistered and burned from my clumsy handling of the hot pans, but I pushed through the pain. This was all I knew how to do. But Wesley had never once eaten a meal I cooked. When Wesley finally walked through the door, he stared at the spread on the table, his brow furrowing. “What is all this?” I held up my gloved hands, trying to smile. “I wanted to make you dinner. Just one bite?” He checked his watch impatiently. “Mallory is meeting a client alone. It’s not safe. I need to go.” I reached out, catching the hem of his coat. “Please don’t go. I have something to tell you.” I wanted to say I’m sorry, Thank you, and Goodbye. His expression twisted into disgust, and he violently ripped his coat from my grip. “What is wrong with you? Mallory is waiting!” “She already lost her job because of you. What more do you want?” The heavy oak door slammed shut. I stood alone in the quiet kitchen, staring at the steaming food. Slowly, I picked up the plates and scraped every single dish into the trash. I pulled off the blue latex gloves, placed them neatly in the center of the empty table, and walked out. Elliot was waiting for me outside. My parents met us at the airport. My mother held back her tears as she hugged me one last time. “Go, my darling. I’ll make sure he signs those papers if I have to drag him to court myself.” “Okay,” I whispered. The flight to Boston took several hours. As the wheels touched down on the tarmac, I realized I would never see Wesley again. The realization didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. But the moment I turned my phone back on, a flood of desperate messages from Wesley began to pour in, lighting up the screen like a dying star.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476188”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

On my wedding day, my husband killed himself. Before he cut his own throat, he left two letters on the vanity of our bridal suite. The first accused me of murder—specifically, of orchestrating the car crash that had wiped out the Cross family years ago. The second was a love letter, a confession of his undying devotion to Mallory Cross. In it, he claimed that I had been so desperate to marry him that I staged the accident to get Mallory out of the picture. Though Mallory had survived, she was left with severe psychological trauma and was currently receiving treatment at a private facility in Europe. Galen wrote that he couldn’t live with the weight of this ugly truth anymore. His suicide was an act of penance. As amends, he left his entire estate to charity, hoping the law would finally find me and make me pay. The scandal tore through the media like wildfire. Yet, I didn’t panic. Because a ten-years-older version of Galen had just crossed the boundaries of time to tell me the truth. 1. When I walked into the bedroom, Galen was already gone. He was still dressed in his tailored, pristine wedding tuxedo, but the dark crimson from his carotid artery had sprayed across the cream-colored ceiling, dripping slowly onto the white rug. Within minutes, the soft, romantic acoustic melody playing in the courtyard was drowned out by the shrill wail of police sirens. The police cordoned off the estate. Every guest was detained for questioning. But as the prime suspect, I was locked alone in the library. The heavy oak windows were bolted shut. Any object sharp enough to cause harm had been cleared from the room. I was left in the stifling silence of that massive room, left to drown in the sheer absurdity of the day. Then, the heavy door clicked open. Framed in the doorway was the very face I had been mourning. “Galen?” I took a step forward, my hands trembling, my chest tight. “But… you’re dead. I saw you.” My mind was spinning. The man I loved had accused me of killing a family, killed himself to escape me, and now… here he was. I pinched the soft skin of my thigh, hard enough to bruise, to make sure I wasn’t trapped in some sleep-deprived nightmare. But the urgency on his face was entirely real. He scanned the room, his eyes turning bloodshot. “I’m too late,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Iris, I don’t have much time. You have to listen to me. Every single word.” He closed the distance between us, grabbing my shoulders. “I am from ten years in the future. Today… this whole wedding, this suicide—it’s a trap. A carefully orchestrated scam.” “I didn’t die. I’ve been having an affair with Mallory for years, but I was too much of a coward to break our engagement.” “So we faked my death. The plan was for me to slip out of the country and start a new life with her in Europe. The charity donation? It was just a legal loophole to transfer our marital assets out of your reach so we could live comfortably abroad.” I stood frozen, the breath knocked out of me. Years ago, my father had died in a tragic accident while saving Galen’s life. After that, the Barrett family took me in. Galen’s father, Uncle Hector, knew about our feelings and happily arranged our engagement. To ensure I would always be secure, he wrote a clause into his will: Galen would only inherit the family fortune if he married me. This entire performance—the blood, the letters, the grief—was nothing but a grand exit strategy to bypass his father’s will. I stumbled back, my boots heavy on the hardwood floor. The man in front of me had Galen’s face, his tall frame, the faint scent of sandalwood and rain that I had loved for a decade. But the words coming out of his mouth were monstrous. “That’s impossible,” I stammered, shaking my head. “Galen loves me. He would never do this to me.” Galen’s eyes welled with tears. He grabbed my hands, his grip tight and desperate. “I am so sorry, Iris. I regretted it. I spent a decade drowning in remorse, and I built this machine to stop it. You have no idea what happens to you over the next ten years.” 2. Galen checked the glowing watch on his wrist and pulled me down onto the leather sofa. He took a ragged breath, steeling himself. “In the first year after I left, you were ruthlessly doxed. The internet tore you apart. You lost your job at the firm, and under the immense stress, you miscarried.” My heart stopped. A baby. My hand instinctively drifted to my lower stomach. My father’s final wish before he died was to see me married, happy, and holding a child of my own. But my health had always been fragile, and the doctors told me the chances of conceiving were slim. The Barrett relatives had whispered behind my back, but Galen had always shielded me. He had stood by me through every painful injection, every fertility clinic visit, holding my hand and whispering promises when the tests came back negative. I thought we would never have a child. To find out I was pregnant now, amidst this horror, felt like a cruel joke from a sadistic god. “And my job?” I managed to ask, my voice barely a whisper. “How did they find out?” Galen lowered his gaze, unable to meet my eyes. “I didn’t think the firestorm would grow so big,” he muttered. “But Mallory and I… we knew you. We knew how smart you were, and I was terrified you’d find a crack in our story and track us down. So I hired online PR firms to keep you distracted. It was only supposed to keep you busy for a few weeks. But it spiraled out of control. You lost your career… and my mother disowned you.” “Your mother?” My eyes widened. But then the pieces clicked. Mallory had a degree in mass communications and investigative journalism; she knew exactly how to manufacture a villain. If she wanted to destroy someone, she didn’t just ruin their reputation—she erased their humanity. My mother, a proud, highly respected academic, could never bear the shame of having a daughter branded as a cold-blooded killer. A sharp pain bloomed in my chest. I could almost see her face—pale, cold, turning away from me in disgust as she signed the papers to cut me out of her life. “Galen, how could you?” I shoved him away, the tears finally spilling over. “Have you forgotten? When my father died, you knelt by his headstone and swore to God that you would protect my mother and me. If you wanted to hurt me, fine! But why did you have to drag her into your hell?” Galen reached for me, his expression frantic. “I didn’t mean for it to go that far! I swear, Iris, I didn’t.” “Once the news took off, I tried to check on you. But Mallory got pregnant with our first child. We were high-risk, and I had to focus on her. By the time things settled, I received the news that your mother had locked herself in her apartment and lit a charcoal grill. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning. And you… in your grief, you lost the baby. The complications were so severe they had to perform an emergency hysterectomy.” His voice was soft, but every word felt like a serrated blade sawing through my ribs. I closed my eyes, forcing down the violent, black tide of rage rising in my throat. “And then?” “You had nothing left,” he whispered. “No family, no career, no money—because I took it all with me. In your desperation, you took a job at a high-end lounge downtown, hosting wealthy clients. But because of the murder accusations, the other girls targeted you. You were treated like dirt.” 3. I fought for breath, trying to keep myself from unraveling in front of him. “When you saw what I had become, did you ever think to come forward? All it would have taken was one phone call. If you showed your face, the murder charge would have vanished. Did you do anything?” Galen hesitated, his fingers twitching. “I wanted to. I swear I did.” “But?” “But Mallory was running for a seat on the board of a major international human rights foundation. Her public image had to be spotless. If the truth came out about me, she would have been ruined.” “So… you let me rot.” I stared at him, the tears drying on my cheeks. “Did you forget that working for an international foundation was my dream? That was the career I went to school for.” Galen looked away. “I know. But I didn’t have a choice.” I cut off his excuses with a cold laugh. “Galen, I know myself. No matter how low I fell, I wouldn’t have stayed in the mud forever. What else did you do to make you build a time machine just to beg for my forgiveness?” If I had simply ended up a broken hostess, the Galen I knew would have felt a momentary pang of guilt and moved on. There had to be something more. Galen remained silent for a long moment, a heavy sigh escaping his lips. “You didn’t give up,” he admitted. “You studied during the day and worked the night shifts. You got accepted into a prestigious graduate program in London. And because the police never found any physical evidence linking you to the Cross accident, they finally dropped the investigation. You were on the verge of starting over.” “But?” Galen’s lip trembled. “The campus you got into… it was only twenty minutes from our estate in Hampstead. I was terrified you’d run into us, that you’d see me. So I forged a whistleblower letter. I used my connections on the board of trustees to pressure the university. They revoked your admission and blacklisted you from every major academic institution in Europe.” “You took the last piece of hope I had left.” Looking at him, I felt a deep, chilling hollow open in my chest. The girl I would have been… staying up under the dim yellow light of a cramped apartment, memorizing foreign policy terms, pushing through the shame and the physical exhaustion just to prove she was still worth something. And with a single stroke of his pen, Galen had wiped her out. “You are a monster, Galen,” I whispered, shaking my head. “A literal monster.” Galen reached out, trying to steady my shoulders, his own eyes brimming with tears. “Iris, please, hear me out. I realized I was wrong. The guilt was eating me alive, so I came back to find you. I left an envelope of cash at your apartment so you’d at least be financially secure. But Mallory found out. She thought I was still in love with you, and in a fit of rage, she tipped off the police. The old wedding ring I had left behind in the safe—the one they found near the ‘suicide’ scene—was suddenly tied to a forensic match. They convicted you. You were sentenced to three years in a state penitentiary. While you were inside, some of the inmates… they broke your leg.” He didn’t need to finish the story. I could piece together the rest. A disfigured, crippled ex-con, unable to find even a decent cleaning job, let alone host at a lounge. Left to rot in a damp, cheap rental on the edge of the city. I closed my eyes, grieving for the woman I would have been. “I regretted it, Iris. I truly did,” Galen pleaded, his voice breaking into a sob. “My life with Mallory wasn’t a fairy tale. She is demanding, ruthless, and entirely self-serving. To her, I was just a step on the ladder. Our marriage was constant warfare. She didn’t have your warmth. She didn’t support my dreams. She didn’t wake up to make me coffee, and she didn’t even remember that I’m deathly allergic to peanut butter.” “I missed you so much. I wanted to fix it. But by the time I finally swallowed my pride and went to look for you… you were already dead. You died alone in a basement apartment. Your body was so badly decomposed that the neighbors only noticed because of the smell.” “That image… it haunted me. I divorced Mallory, poured every dime of my inheritance into quantum research, just for a chance to see you again. To hear your voice.” I looked at the faint lines around his eyes, the deep fatigue etched into his face. “So,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “You want me to forgive you? You want us to play house and pretend you didn’t systematically destroy my life?” “Why on earth do you think I would ever give you another chance?” 4. Galen broke down, weeping openly, his face buried in his hands. “I know I don’t deserve it. I know I have no right to ask. But every single day after you died, I lived in a living hell of my own making. I just want to stop this from happening. We can have the life we were supposed to have.” Growing up, everyone said Galen and I were written in the stars. Until Mallory Cross moved in next door. She was loud, vibrant, and possessed an old-money confidence that drew Galen in. I watched him shift from cold indifference to quiet hesitation whenever her name was mentioned. I had my doubts back then. But I chose to trust him. I chose to trust the boy who had knelt at my father’s grave and promised to love me forever. That trust had cost me everything in another lifetime. “Galen,” I asked, my voice flat. “When did it start? Before or after we got engaged?” Galen took a ragged breath. “Before. She was my first love, Iris. She always held this idealized space in my mind. When she first came back to the States, I wanted to break things off with you, but then her family had that accident, and she vanished before I could say anything. When she returned years later, we ran into each other… and it just happened.” He looked up, desperate. “But I was wrong. The nostalgia blinded me. She isn’t the angel I thought she was. You… you were the one I should have cherished.” He choked on his words, his chest heaving. “I saw the autopsy report from your future self, Iris. Your body… it was covered in old, poorly healed fractures. Your fingers were misshapen. You had blunt force trauma to the back of your skull. I can’t bear the thought of what you went through.” He reached out to grab my hand again. “I’ll go to the police. I’ll tell them I faked my death. Just… please, give me a chance to make it right.” This was the first time in our lives I had ever seen Galen look so small, so utterly broken. It was the first time he had ever begged me for anything. He expected me to soften. He expected the good, gentle Iris to wrap her arms around him and offer absolution. But he didn’t know me at all. I reached out, gently wiping a tear from his cheek, and leaned in close. “Thank you for the story, Galen. It was very illuminating.” I leaned closer, my voice a quiet, freezing whisper. “But there’s one thing you got wrong.” “The car crash that killed the Cross family? I actually did it.”

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476187”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

On the eve of our wedding, a video of my fiancée in bed with her best male friend found its way to my phone. When I confronted her, she didn’t even flinch. “We just slept in the same bed, Gilbert. We didn’t actually do anything. Can you not be so disgusting?” Her best friend wore his indignation like a shield. “Come on, Gilbert. If Mona and I wanted to be together, do you really think you’d even be in the picture?” Seeing her friend’s wounded pride, Mona didn’t hesitate to throw down an ultimatum. “If you’re going to keep accusing us like this, then maybe we shouldn’t get married at all.” I looked at her, and suddenly, the urge to argue vanished. If that was how she felt, then fine. The wedding was off. …… “Go easy… that hurts…” The video cut off abruptly right there, but my heart had already skipped a violent beat. I watched it three times. The tiny, distinct mole right between her eyebrows was impossible to mistake. It was her. Mona, my fiancée. And the man in the frame was someone I knew all too well. Brody, her self-proclaimed “brother” and best friend. “What are you doing? Go pay the tab. This is our rehearsal dinner after-party—you aren’t seriously going to make everyone else pay, are you?” Mona’s voice drifted over my shoulder, cutting through the noise of the lounge. I locked my phone, turning slowly to face her. Meeting her slightly annoyed gaze, a part of me still struggled to accept the reality of her betrayal. We had been together for five years. Five years of building a life, or so I thought. But as I stared at her, the pieces of the past half-decade began to click into place, forming a picture I had spent years refusing to see. We had fought about Brody more times than I could count. Every single time, Mona would offer the same tired defense: “We grew up together, Gilbert. He’s like a brother to me. Trust me, I don’t see him that way, and he doesn’t see me that way. It’s purely platonic. We’re just bros.” Purely platonic. Did platonic friends wreck bedsheets together? “Do you want to explain what this is?” I turned my phone around and slid it across the marble bar toward her. I expected panic, or at least a flicker of guilt. Instead, she barely glanced at the screen before rolling her eyes. “Oh, please. We were just playing a game. What’s the big deal?” “A game?” I let out a dry, humorless laugh. “Is that what we’re calling it now?” Mona bristled at my tone, her eyes turning icy. “Gilbert, seriously, what is wrong with you? Did you hire someone to follow me? Where did you even get this? Brody and I are completely innocent. We fell asleep in the same bed—that is it. And of course, your mind immediately goes to the gutter.” She stepped closer, her voice rising in defensive anger. “You are so suffocating. Is it honestly that impossible for you to believe that men and women can just be friends?” Before I could utter a word, Brody walked out of the VIP booth. His eyes darted to the screen of my phone, and almost instantly, his face fell into an expression of wounded innocence. “Hey, Mona, don’t get upset with him,” Brody said, his voice dripping with gentle reason. “He probably just doesn’t trust me.” He turned his gaze to me, looking remarkably earnest. “Gilbert, man, I swear to you, Mona and I have nothing going on.” It was the same script they had run a hundred times before. In the past, whenever they played these roles—the misunderstood free spirit and the patient, peace-making friend—I would cave. I would apologize for my jealousy, feeling like the villain in their indie movie. But tonight, the spell was broken. Sensing my silence, Mona finally lost her patience. “Gilbert, I swear, I don’t even know who you are anymore. If you’re going to keep letting your insecurity poison us, then maybe we shouldn’t get married tomorrow. The wedding is off.” Brody looked more panicked than I was. “Mona, come on, don’t say that. Gilbert’s just acting out because he loves you so much. He didn’t mean it…” “Stop it, Brody,” Mona snapped, grabbing her coat. “Stop defending him. He just has a sick, dirty mind.” She turned on her heel and stormed out of the lounge. Brody glanced between me and the exit, letting out a heavy, theatrical sigh before jogging after her. But as he rounded the corner near the exit, he paused. He looked back at me, and the mask of worried innocence slipped away, replaced by a smug, mocking smirk. In that split second, everything became crystal clear. He was baiting me. He wanted me to see it. And I had been playing the fool for five long years. Once their shadows disappeared down the hall, I walked back toward our private lounge to grab my coat and keys, planning to leave quietly. But as I approached the heavy mahogany door, the muffled sound of laughter drifted through the crack. “Do you think Gilbert actually believes them?” a male voice asked, snickering. “Oh, he’s absolutely clueless,” one of Mona’s bridesmaids chimed in. “I mean, who else would let their fiancée hang all over another guy like that? It’s pathetic.” “And all that ‘we’re just besties’ crap… please. Did you see that video from last weekend? If my fiancé did that, I’d throw his ring in the trash.” Their words cut through the muffled bass of the lounge music, settling like lead in my chest. They all knew. Every single one of her friends knew exactly what was going on. Whenever I had expressed even a hint of discomfort at past parties, these same people would pat my shoulder, offering reassuring smiles. “Aw, Gilbert, you’re overthinking it. We’ve all been tight since college.” “Yeah, man, they’re practically siblings. Don’t ruin a good night.” It had all been a joke to them. I was the punchline. I let out a quiet, bitter laugh to myself, then pushed the door open. The laughter in the room died instantly. The silence was deafening. “Oh, hey, Gilbert,” someone said, trying to smooth over the awkwardness. “Where did Mona and Brody go?” “No idea,” I said, my voice deadpan. I grabbed my coat off the leather sofa. As I headed for the door, one of Mona’s friends stepped into my path. “Wait, Gilbert, you’re leaving? Mona invited us all out for her bachelorette send-off tonight. You’re still covering the tab, right?” I looked at him, letting a slow, empty smile spread across my face. “You should probably call Mona for that. After all, I was just a guest tonight.” The guy caught the coldness in my eyes. His smile faltered, and he awkwardly stepped aside, letting me pass without another word. Walking out of the venue, the cool night air hit my face, and for the first time in five years, I felt like I could breathe. I pulled out my phone and sent a quick text to my parents: Cancel the preparations. There won’t be a wedding tomorrow. Within seconds, my phone lit up with a barrage of texts from my mother. What do you mean? Gilbert, what happened? Then came the call. I let it ring twice before picking up. Before they could ask, I laid it all out. The video. Brody. Mona’s defense of him. The years of lies. My father’s voice boomed through the speaker, tight with fury. “Are you kidding me? After everything our family has done for the Wards?” “I knew it,” my mother breathed, her voice trembling with a mix of anger and vindication. “I never liked that girl, Gilbert. If you hadn’t been so utterly blind, I would have never let this marriage happen in the first place.” They spent the next ten minutes venting about the Ward family, letting loose years of bottled-up frustration. Listening to them, I realized how much they had swallowed their pride just to support my happiness. I felt a pang of guilt, but also a profound sense of relief. When they finally quieted down, I took a deep breath. “So, tomorrow’s ceremony… we call it off, right?” “Absolutely not,” my father said. I blinked, stunned. “What? Why would we still go through with it?” A heavy silence fell over the line, followed by my father’s calm, calculated tone. “Gilbert, how much money have you spent on Mona over the last five years?” I froze. I had never actually sat down to do the math. But Mona’s monthly allowance alone was fifty thousand dollars. On top of that, there were credit card bills, luxury vacations, designer bags, and jewelry she “just had to have.” All in all, it easily amounted to several million dollars. A multi-million-dollar betrayal. Our family wasn’t hurting for money, but that didn’t mean I was willing to let her walk away with my inheritance in her pocket. “Can we even get it back?” I asked, my chest tightening. “We can,” my father replied, his business instincts kicking in. “But we have to play this smart. If we handle this correctly, we won’t just get your money back—we’ll make the Wards pay for every single thing they’ve done to you.” “Okay,” I said. “Tell me what to do.” When it came to high-stakes leverage, my parents were seasoned professionals. They quickly outlined a plan. Mona and I had already signed our legal marriage papers at the courthouse a month ago to simplify the paperwork; tomorrow was supposed to be the public celebration. If I simply walked away now, the legal fallout would be messy and expensive. I needed to let her hand me the perfect leverage. My plan was to wait until after the ceremony to quietly discuss an amicable divorce. If she agreed to cooperate and return a reasonable portion of the assets, I was willing to let her off easy without dragging her through the mud. But Mona, in her infinite selfishness, didn’t even give me the chance to be generous. On the morning of the wedding, she stood me up. When I arrived at the Ward estate with my groomsmen, I was met not by a blushing bride, but by her deeply uncomfortable parents and a handful of whispering relatives. “Where’s the bride?” my best man whispered, glancing at the maid of honor. The maid of honor offered a tight, forced smile. “She’s… she’s still getting ready. Hair and makeup took longer than expected.” She shot a desperate, pleading look at Mona’s parents. I knew immediately that something was wrong. Stepping away from the crowd, I pulled out my phone and checked Brody’s public social media profile. Sure enough, he had been posting updates since they left the club the night before. Every single post was a direct jab at me, wrapped in the guise of friendship. One post from 3:00 AM read: Thank you for always choosing me when things get tough. The photo was a shot of a rumpled hotel bed, with Mona’s distinct designer purse sitting on the nightstand. The implication was sickeningly clear. But the final post, uploaded just ten minutes prior, was a photo of them at the beach, watching the sunrise. Brody’s caption read: Even on your wedding day, you’re by my side. That’s how I know what we have is real. They were wrapped in a blanket, holding each other tightly against the ocean breeze. If I still loved her, that image would have torn me apart. But standing there in my tuxedo, surrounded by her lying family, all I felt was a cold, hollow pity. I had already been hurt enough. The tank was empty. There was nothing left to break. I let out a soft, mocking laugh. Mona’s parents hurried over to me, their faces pale. “Gilbert, sweetheart…” her mother started, reaching out a trembling hand. “Don’t,” I said, stepping back. “Don’t call me that. I don’t think we’ll be family after today.” Their faces fell, panic flaring in their eyes. They tried to steer me toward a private study, desperate to keep the peace and hide the scandal from their guests. But I wasn’t going to help them protect their reputation. “Excuse me, everyone,” I called out, my voice ringing clear through the crowded foyer. “I’m afraid there won’t be a celebration today.” I walked over to the large media screen in the living room, connected my phone via AirPlay, and cast Brody’s social media page directly onto the display. The photos of Mona and Brody embracing at the beach filled the screen. The room erupted into gasps and furious whispers. Right on cue, my phone buzzed. It was a message from the private investigator my father had hired the night before. He had delivered. It wasn’t just last night. The files showed that Mona and Brody had been sleeping together for months. The folder was filled with dated timestamps, hotel check-ins, and photos of them entering and leaving his apartment in the dead of night. Looking at the sheer volume of evidence, a tremor of residual anger ran through my body. But I took a deep breath and channeled that heat into resolve. I forwarded the entire file to my family’s attorney, instructing him to file for divorce immediately. Five minutes later, my attorney replied: Understood, Gilbert. With this level of documented infidelity and marital misconduct, we have more than enough leverage to ensure she leaves with absolutely nothing. Do it, I texted back. When I saw his thumbs-up emoji, a genuine smile touched my lips. For the first time in years, the crushing weight on my shoulders lifted. I was finally free of her games. “Gilbert, what the hell is this? Are you trying to humiliate me?” Mona’s voice cut through the murmuring crowd as she marched through the front door. But she wasn’t wearing her wedding dress. She was dressed in a casual oversized knit sweater and leggings. And standing right beside her was Brody, wearing a matching casual outfit. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were the ones who had just returned from a cozy honeymoon. I let out a cold laugh. “Do you honestly think a wedding is still happening today, Mona?” I had originally planned to play along just long enough to secure my assets, but seeing her stand before me with her lover, completely devoid of shame, I realized I didn’t need to play nice. She had never respected me. Not for a single second. And now, I was going to strip away everything she took for granted. Instead of showing any remorse, Mona crossed her arms and glared at me. “Oh, I get it. Now that we’ve signed the papers and you think you ‘have’ me, you think you can treat me like garbage? Is that it?” “Do you honestly think I won’t just walk away from you, Gilbert?” There it was again. The same empty threats she had used to keep me in line for years. She knew how desperately I loved her, so she had weaponized my affection, taking more and more while giving nothing in return. She hadn’t just spent my money on herself; she had used my accounts to fund Brody’s lavish lifestyle and finance their little circle of wealthy enablers. I used to let it slide because I thought that was the price of keeping her happy. But the tab was closed. I looked at her and smiled, a chill settling over my expression. Mona mistook my smile for capitulation. She tossed her hair back and looked at my groomsmen with an arrogant smirk. “Well? Are you guys here to escort me to the venue or what?” The guys remained silent, keeping their anger in check as they looked to me for a cue. I didn’t say a word. I wanted to see exactly how far her delusion would go. Mona scanned the room, then took a step toward me, holding out her hand palm-up. “Fifty thousand dollars,” she said casually. “And I’ll go put on the dress.” “Another fifty thousand to get into the limo, and fifty thousand more to actually walk down the aisle.” She was shaking me down at our own wedding. She was asking for nearly a quarter-million dollars just to show up to her own ceremony. “Well?” she asked, her patience wearing thin when I didn’t immediately reach for my checkbook. Within a minute, her expression soured. “Come on, Gilbert. It’s not like you don’t have the cash.” “Oh, I have the money,” I replied, my voice remarkably calm. “I’m just wondering why on earth I would give it to you.” Mona blinked, completely thrown off by my defiance. It took her a moment to find her footing. “Why? Because we’re married, Gilbert. My security is your responsibility.” “Oh, so you do remember we’re married,” I said, tilting my head toward the large TV screen behind her. Mona and Brody finally turned to look at the screen, realization slowly dawning on them as the slideshow of their intimate photos continued to loop. Brody’s face twisted in righteous indignation. “Gilbert, are you out of your mind? Turn that off! Do you have any idea how much this could ruin our reputations?” He turned to Mona, his eyes welling up with tears that looked practiced. “Mona… I don’t think I can do this anymore. I can’t be in your life if it causes this much trouble.” “Goodbye, Mona.” He turned to walk out, but Mona panicked. She lunged forward, throwing her arms around his waist to pull him back. “No! Brody, don’t leave me!” “If you go, what am I supposed to do?” “You are the most important person in my life, Brody. Please don’t do this…” Her desperate confession clearly fed Brody’s ego, but he kept up his tragic act, shaking his head and looking down at her. “Mona, you’re a married woman now. If we keep staying this close, your husband…” He trailed off, cutting his eyes toward me with a look of manufactured fear. Mona whipped her head around to glare at me, her eyes filled with absolute venom. “Gilbert, did you threaten him? Is that what this is?” “How many times do I have to tell you to leave Brody alone? Are you deaf?” Before I could even process her words, she stepped forward and slapped me across the face. The blow stung, ringing in my ears. She had put her entire weight into it. She stood there, chest heaving, expecting me to shrink back, to apologize, to beg for her forgiveness just like I always did. But as the stinging in my cheek faded, so did the very last trace of warmth I had ever held for her. I slowly turned my head back, looking her dead in the eye, and rolled my eyes. “Mona, do you honestly think that just because I loved you, I was blind?” Mona let out a mocking, incredulous laugh. “Aren’t you? How many times have I told you how things work, and when have you ever actually listened?” She turned her gaze back to Brody, her expression softening into a look of pure devotion. “I have told you a thousand times that Brody is my best friend. But you just have to drag everyone through the mud, don’t you?” She looked back at me, her face hardening into familiar contempt. My groomsmen had finally had enough. Before Mona and I got engaged, my closest friends had tried to warn me. “There’s something incredibly fake about her, Gilbert,” they’d said. “She’s a user.” But I had been blinded by infatuation, determined to make things work with her. Because my friends weren’t the type to gossip behind people’s backs, once they saw how committed I was, they stopped bringing it up. They even supported me through the rough patches when I was losing sleep over her relationship with Brody. Real friends protect you; users just drain you. “Seriously, Gilbert, are you kidding me?” my best man, Luke, stepped forward. “Why are you still standing here listening to this garbage? A guy with your credentials could have anyone he wanted.” “Exactly,” another friend chimed in. “Mona, you are completely out of line. This is disgusting.” They stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me, their voices steady and firm. Mona’s relatives immediately bristled, trying to defend her. “Excuse me? Marriage is between two people. You can’t just lay all the blame on Mona!” “Exactly! Gilbert is hardly innocent here. He’s always been incredibly insecure.” “A girl shouldn’t have to cut off her childhood best friend just because she got married!” They parroted the exact excuses Mona had been feeding them for years. The room dissolved into a tense standoff between our two camps. All the while, Mona’s parents kept their eyes locked on my face. I knew exactly what they were doing—they were calculating. If I showed signs of giving in, they would step in to play peacemakers. If I stayed quiet, they would let their daughter continue to walk all over me. That was how they had always handled our conflicts. Mona pulled Brody close, her heart seemingly breaking for his distress. “Fine,” she said, nodding slowly. “So you really don’t want this wedding. Good. Message received.” I ignored her, pulled out my phone, and called the police, putting them on speaker so the entire room could hear me request an dispatch unit to the address for grand larceny. When I hung up, Mona finally tried to de-escalate, changing her strategy to play the victim. “Gilbert, I’ve given up so much for you over the years,” she said, her eyes glistening with tears. “I’ve changed so much of who I am just to make you comfortable. I thought you’d at least appreciate that, but I guess I was wrong.” I let out a dry laugh. “Changed? What exactly did you change, Mona?” “Before I met you, Brody and I hung out every single day,” she said, as if presenting a crown of thorns she had worn for me. “Because of your constant jealousy, I cut it down to once a week. Do you have any idea how hard that was for me? That was a massive compromise.” “And by ‘hanging out once a week,’ you mean checking into five-star hotels and sharing a bed?” I asked, laying the truth bare before everyone. Her face paled. “What are you talking about?” “Am I lying?” I asked, pulling up the investigator’s logs on the screen. When she didn’t answer, I began reading the dates aloud. “May 1st, dinner at Monsieur Benjamin. May 2nd, lunch at the Ritz. May 3rd…” “Stop it!” Mona screamed. I looked at her, my expression completely blank. “So, that was your ‘once a week’ schedule?” I tapped the screen, playing the surveillance footage from the boutique hotel downtown dated May 8th. “Is this the compromise you were talking about?” A deep part of me was incredibly grateful that I had already stopped caring. Watching those videos again still stung my pride, but it no longer broke my heart. Mona’s face went from pale to a deep, burning crimson. “Enough, Gilbert!” Brody shouted, stepping in front of Mona. “We only went to those hotels because we had business to discuss. You’re just using this as an excuse to back out of the wedding. How can you be so incredibly petty?” He rallied his friends, and soon the room was filled with voices condemning me for “ruining what should have been the happiest day of Mona’s life.” I stood there in silence, listening to the noise, thinking about how I had let things get to this point. In a way, this was a monster of my own making. My endless patience and constant forgiveness had convinced them that I would tolerate anything. Finally, Mona’s parents decided to end their silence. Her father cleared his throat and stepped forward, adjusting his tie. “Gilbert, look, the guests are already arriving at the venue. Why don’t you just wire Mona the money she asked for so we can get this ceremony started? We can sort out these little misunderstandings later.” They wanted me to pay them. The sheer audacity of it broke something inside me. I started to laugh. It started as a chuckle, but soon turned into full, roaring laughter until tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. “Forget it, Dad,” Mona snapped, crossing her arms. “I’m not marrying him anyway. Since he clearly—” “Fine,” I interrupted, cutting her off. “Let’s not get married.” It was the very first time in five years I had ever agreed to her threats of breaking up. In the past, whenever she threw that ultimatum in my face, I would panic, apologize, and do whatever it took to keep her. Later on, I had learned to just stay silent, which she took as a quiet surrender. She had spent our entire relationship holding the threat of leaving over my head because she knew how desperately I wanted to build a family with her. But I was done being handled. “What did you say?” Mona whispered, her jaw dropping. “Say that again.” I wiped a tear of laughter from my eye. The joke was finally over. “I said, you have your wish. The wedding is off.” “You… you…” Mona stammered, her hands shaking with rage. Her parents panicked, trying to salvage the situation. “Gilbert, please, think about what you’re saying! This isn’t something you can just call off on a whim!” “Maybe I should just leave,” Brody murmured, his eyes red as he took a step backward. “I don’t want to be the reason your wedding gets ruined.” This time, nobody stopped him. Mona’s eyes were locked onto mine. “Gilbert, did you plan this? Did you set this whole thing up just to humiliate me?” “Mona, don’t be mad at him,” Brody said, still lingering by the door. “He’s probably just acting out because he’s insecure. Don’t let him get to you.” His voice was smooth, but his eyes were gleaming with triumph. “Stop making excuses for him, Brody,” Mona hissed, glare burning into me. “Men like him don’t deserve real love anyway.” “Excuse me, did someone call the police?” The heavy oak front door opened, and several police officers walked in, accompanied by my attorney. I turned to them, a calm smile on my face. “Yes, officers. I called. I’d like to report a theft of personal property totaling over half a million dollars.”

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476186”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

When Wright—my childhood sweetheart and secret partner of five years—suddenly announced his wedding to my best friend, I didn’t cry. I didn’t make a scene. I simply signed my military discharge papers, changed my name, and headed down South. I settled in a coastal town and opened a quiet little flower shop. One afternoon, the bell above my door chimed, and an old buddy from my army days walked in. He froze, staring at me in absolute shock. “Charlie? You’re alive? Why the hell didn’t you look for Wright? Do you have any idea what you did to him? He literally ran away from his own wedding looking for you. He’s still single.” I only smiled faintly, letting the simple gold band on my left ring finger catch the light. “But I’m already married.” The moment the words left my mouth, the air in the shop turned freezing. My old friend began gesturing frantically with his eyes, desperately hinting at something behind me. I turned around slowly. Wright was standing near the display of hydrangeas, staring at me with a face twisted in silent fury. But looking at him, I felt nothing but a dull, hollow confusion. For five years, Wright and I had kept our relationship entirely secret. Throughout all that time, he had consistently refused to come home with me to meet my parents. It wasn’t until my mother’s fiftieth birthday that I finally went home alone. But when I walked into her living room, my eyes fell on a thick, cream-colored invitation sitting on the coffee table. Groom: Wright Collins. Bride: Chelsea Davis. My mind went completely blank. Just as my trembling fingers found my phone to call him, his voice drifted in from the front door. “Martha, do me a favor and don’t tell Charlie about the wedding just yet. She’s been attached to my hip since we were kids. If she finds out I’m getting married, she’ll make a massive scene…” He froze mid-sentence when he saw me standing in the living room. The easy smile on his face vanished. My mother, completely oblivious to the sudden drop in temperature, walked out of the kitchen with a warm smile. “Charlie, you’re back! Look, Wright is getting married to Chelsea. By the way, sweetie, when are you finally going to bring that boyfriend of yours home for us to meet?” A bitter, cold laugh bubbled up in my chest. I stared straight at Wright. “He’s dead.” “He died yesterday.” … My mother gasped, dropping her dish towel. “What? So suddenly? But when you got home yesterday, you said his unit was called out on a last-minute deployment, and that’s why he couldn’t make it. He even sent that beautiful birthday gift!” A sharp, familiar ache bloomed in my chest. My mother had known I had a boyfriend for years, but she didn’t know his name. Every holiday, every birthday, she prayed I would bring him home so we could finally make things official. But Wright always refused. He always insisted it wasn’t the right time. To spare my mother the worry and the embarrassment, I bought the gifts myself every year. I spent my own savings, wrote the cards in a generic masculine hand, and pretended they were from the loving boyfriend who was “just too busy with special ops.” Wright never knew about any of this. And he had never cared enough to ask. Now, standing in my mother’s living room, Wright merely raised an eyebrow. While my mother hurried back to the kitchen, shaking her head in grief, he stepped closer to me, his voice dropping to a low whisper. “Chelsea’s dad was severely injured in a training exercise. They’re drowning in medical debt. I wanted to just give her the money, but you know how stubborn she is. She has too much pride to take a handout. This wedding… it’s just a legal formality. It’s the only way I can give her the money as a dowry without crushing her self-respect.” “Don’t speak like that,” he added, a flicker of irritation crossing his face. “If Martha ever finds out about what we were… she’d be devastated.” “She won’t find out,” I said quietly. She would never know. Not about the late nights, the stolen kisses behind the barracks, or the five years I had spent building a future in my head with a man who was now standing in her house, planning to marry someone else. A complicated emotion flickered in Wright’s eyes. “Suit yourself. But Chelsea and I are getting married next week. She wants everything to be perfect, and since you’re her best friend, I know you’ll help her out. Right?” He looked at me with that same easy, charming smile he always used. As if we hadn’t spent the last five years tangled in each other’s arms. As if he hadn’t held me close in the dark after lights-out, whispering breathless promises of forever into my collarbone. “Charlie! Wright!” Chelsea’s bright voice echoed from the porch. She walked in, looking radiant and completely untroubled, and immediately slipped her arm through mine. “My mom cooked a massive dinner with all our favorite dishes. She sent me over to make sure you guys come over to eat with us!” Our families had lived next door to each other for decades. We grew up sharing barbecues, Thanksgiving dinners, and scraped knees. To me, Chelsea wasn’t just a friend; she was the sister I never had. Looking at her now, her eyes seemed as bright and innocent as ever. But if I looked close enough, I could see the faint, guarded tremor of guilt lurking beneath the surface. “You knew I loved him,” I whispered, leaning in just enough so my mother wouldn’t hear. My voice was a fragile, trembling thread. “You knew he was the boy I cried over, the boyfriend I couldn’t talk about openly. Chelsea, how could you do this to me?” The night before we shipped out for basic training, she had stayed over at my house. She’d found my journal tucked under my mattress and read my secret, messy confessions about Wright. She had rolled around on my bed, laughing hysterically, before teasing me. “If you love him so much, why don’t you just tell him, you coward? If you’re too scared, I’ll do it for you! When you guys finally get married, I expect to be at the head table!” But now, there was no laughter. Her beautiful eyes held no remorse, only a calculated softness. She bit her lower lip and whispered back, “Charlie, I love him. And he chose me. When you guys were together, I truly wished the best for you. But things changed. I’m the one marrying him now. You’re my sister-in-arms and my best friend. I know you’ll find it in your heart to be happy for us.” The sheer absurdity of her words washed over me, closely followed by a wave of crushing, suffocating betrayal. It felt like the ground had been pulled out from under my feet, leaving me free-falling into a cold, dark void. My eyes burned, and my limbs felt heavy, drained of all strength. Sensing the sudden tension, my mother stepped in, gently placing a hand on my shoulder. “You know what, Chelsea? Charlie is actually feeling a bit under the weather from her trip. We won’t keep you two. Let’s save the big family dinner for my actual birthday next week.” Wright gave me a long, unreadable look. Without another word, he took Chelsea’s hand and led her out the door. Once the door clicked shut, my mother turned to me, her eyes brimming with maternal worry, still believing my fake boyfriend had tragically died. “Oh, sweetheart,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around me. “You’re so young, and you have so much life ahead of you. If he couldn’t stay to marry you, then it was his loss. I promise you, the right man is out there.” Looking at her kind, anxious face, I managed to force a tight, painful smile. “I know, Mom. I’m okay. I’m just really tired from the drive. I think I’m going to lie down.” I dragged my suitcase into my old bedroom and shut the door. On the wall opposite my bed hung a framed piece of hand-drawn calligraphy. It was a quote Wright had penned for me: Meet Me at the Summit. During my first year in the special ops training program, the grueling physical demand had nearly broken me. I had cried myself to sleep, ready to pack my bags and quit a thousand times. Wright, who hated writing more than anything, had stayed up all night drafting a comprehensive, step-by-step training manual tailored just for me. “If you read this and still fail your physicals, don’t bother coming back to me, Charlie,” he’d told me, his voice gruff but his eyes warm. “I have a reputation as an instructor to uphold.” Along with the manual, he’d given me that framed quote. A promise of a shared future at the top of our careers. And I had done it. I had pushed through the sweat and blood, eventually earning a transfer to his elite special tactical unit. But remembering his words today, the memory soured. I walked over, took the frame off the wall, pulled out the parchment, and ripped it down the middle. I tossed it into the trash can without a second thought. Next was the framed photo on my desk. It was a picture of the three of us taken on a weekend leave right after basic training. I was standing in the middle, laughing, while Wright and Chelsea leaned in close. I still remembered that day vividly. Chelsea had deliberately nudged me closer to Wright, whispering in my ear, “This is your chance to stand next to your man, Charlie. Don’t waste it. There are too many gorgeous girls in uniform; if you don’t mark your territory, someone else will steal him.” My expression hardened. I swept the frame off the desk and dropped it into the wastebasket. If they could so easily throw away our years of friendship and love, why should I cling to the wreckage? I spent the next hour purging my room. I gathered everything connected to them: Chelsea’s old military magazines, the birthday gifts Wright had given me over the years, and a stack of unsent love letters I had written to him since I was eighteen. After dinner, I carried the heavy black trash bags down to the dumpsters behind our building. “That looks heavy. Why didn’t you call me to help?” A familiar, low voice drifted from the shadows. I turned. Wright was leaning against a lamppost in a casual gray hoodie, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, looking effortlessly handsome. I used to hate taking out the trash. Whenever my mother asked me to do it, I would text Wright, and he would always jog over to do it for me. During our five years together, it had become an unspoken routine. “Still giving me the silent treatment?” He smiled slightly, stepping closer to take my hand. I took a deliberate step back, keeping my hands inside my coat pockets. Wright froze, a flicker of confusion crossing his face before his brows knit together. I didn’t look away. “Everyone in this neighborhood knows you’re getting married next week, Wright. It’s not appropriate for us to be seen together like this. Let’s not contact each other anymore.” He let out a soft, dismissive scoff. “Charlie, come on. I told you, marrying Chelsea is just a favor. We’ll get a quiet divorce in a year or two. The neighbors don’t know the truth, but you do. Why are you acting like this is real?” Just yesterday, before we boarded the train back to our hometown, I had asked him three times if we should finally tell our parents the truth about us. He had looked down at me with his usual lazy grin. “Are you really that desperate to marry me, Charlie? I didn’t know you were such a hopeless romantic.” I had swatted his chest in mock anger, and he’d wrapped his arms around me, pulling me against his chest and kissing the top of my head. “Okay, okay, I’m teasing. Soon. I promise, when the time is right, we’ll tell them.” For five years, I had lived on those crumbs. I had spent every single day dreaming of the moment he would hold my hand in public, wanting the whole world to know that I was his and he was mine. I wasn’t raising my voice now because I didn’t care. I was quiet because I refused to beg. I refused to let my mother and me become the laughingstock of our close-knit military community. “Wright! There you are!” Chelsea appeared at the entrance of the courtyard, holding a small purse. Her mother was standing nearby. “My mom’s stomach is acting up again and she needs me to pick up her prescription, but I don’t know which pharmacy has it on file. Can you come with me?” She smiled warmly, addressing Wright’s mother with a natural, familial affection that made my stomach churn. She sounded like she had been calling her “Mom” for years. Wright pressed his lips into a thin line, shooting me a lingering look before turning to follow her out of the courtyard. Watching their retreating figures, my mother sighed softly. “You know, Charlie, for years I secretly hoped you and Wright would end up together. I’m glad I never pushed it. It would have been so awkward now that he’s marrying Chelsea.” I kept my mouth shut, staring at the gravel. “You should take a page out of Chelsea’s book when you look for a husband,” my mother continued, adjusting her cardigan. “No matter how busy Wright is at the base, he always finds a way to take leave whenever Chelsea’s family needs him. But look at your late boyfriend… I swear, every time I invited him for a holiday dinner, he always had some ‘urgent deployment.’ I don’t even know what you saw in him…” My mother’s voice faded into a dull static. The world around me went completely cold and quiet. Every holiday, every long weekend, I had begged Wright to come home with me. And every single time, he had looked at me with those earnest eyes and said, “Charlie, baby, I just got promoted to Major. Things are crazy at the unit right now. Once things settle down, I promise I’ll go back with you.” He told me there were drills, unexpected briefings, red-flag exercises. And I, like a fool, had believed him without question. But the truth was much simpler. Every time he told me he was too busy, he was actually taking leave to be with Chelsea. “Mom,” I said, my voice barely a whisper through the tightness in my throat. “Do they… do they come back here often?” “Oh, all the time,” she replied. “Just last month, on your birthday actually, Chelsea’s mom slipped on the porch stairs. Wright rushed straight down here. He coordinated with the best orthopedic surgeons at the military hospital and stayed at their house for days to help take care of her.” My chest felt like it was caving in. Last month. On my birthday. We had been sitting in my apartment near the base, about to blow out the candles on my cake, when his phone rang. He had hung up, tossed a hastily wrapped jewelry box onto the counter, and grabbed his keys. “An emergency popped up at the base, Charlie. I have to go supervise. I’ll be gone for a few days. Don’t be mad, okay? I’ll make it up to you when I get back.” Before he walked out, I had blocked the door, tears welling in my eyes. I had asked him, “Is your job really more important than me? Just this once?” He had sighed, looking at me with a cold, disappointing stare. “Charlie, we’re both soldiers. Don’t ask such childish questions.” I had felt so guilty. I had spent the rest of my birthday feeling like an unsupportive, selfish partner. I thought his only choices were duty and me. I never realized there was always a third option. Chelsea. My mother noticed the hollow look on my face and sighed deeply, pulling me close. “Charlie, listen to me,” she said gently. “A man who lies to you, who avoids responsibility and runs away when things get tough… he isn’t worth a single tear. When you look for a partner next time, keep your eyes wide open. Don’t let yourself get fooled again.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and whispered, “I won’t, Mom.” Over the next few days, Wright and Chelsea were consumed by wedding preparations—picking out floral arrangements, organizing invitations, and finalizing the reception venue. I kept myself busy helping my mother plan her birthday dinner, trying my best to ignore their existence. But they wouldn’t let me. “Charlie, we always promised we’d be each other’s maid of honor,” Chelsea said, cornering me in our shared driveway one afternoon, her voice soft and pleading. “Now that it’s finally happening, please say you’ll stand up there with me.” Before I could even open my mouth to refuse, Wright stepped up behind her. “Your dress has already been tailored,” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. “The boutique is delivering it this afternoon. My mom saw it and said it looks perfect on you.” I didn’t care about the dress. My eyes were locked onto their left hands. They were already wearing matching bands. Simple, brushed white-gold bands. But I knew exactly what was engraved on the inside—their initials, intertwined in a specific, custom script. It was a design I had sketched when I was twenty. I had shown it to Chelsea late one night in our dorm room, telling her, “One day, when I marry the love of my life, we’re going to wear these. I want to design them myself.” And now, they were wearing them. “I’ll take your silence as a yes! Thank you, Charlie,” Chelsea said, taking my cold hands in hers. She flashed a warm smile, but her eyes were cold, calculating. “Our parents will be there, and so many officers and commanders from the base. Everyone just wants a beautiful, peaceful ceremony. I know you want that too, Charlie.” The underlying threat was clear. She knew my mother’s pride. She knew I would never cause a scene that would turn my family into a subject of military gossip. I gently pulled my hands back, forcing a polite, empty smile. “Of course. I hope you get exactly what you deserve.” Wright wasn’t paying attention to our exchange. His eyes were wandering around my mother’s living room. He stopped when he noticed the coffee table—the framed photo of us had been replaced by a portrait of my mother and me. As they turned to leave, Wright lingered for a second, catching my arm. “Chelsea’s right, Charlie. Don’t take it to heart. When you and I finally have our wedding, she’ll be your maid of honor. Just think of this as a dress rehearsal for our future.” I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing out loud. What made him think I would ever wait for him? What made him think I would want another woman’s hand-me-down? The days blurred together, and soon, the wedding morning arrived. Throughout the ceremony, both Wright and Chelsea kept casting nervous glances my way, clearly terrified I would ruin their perfect day. But they had nothing to worry about. I kept a polite, seamless smile pinned to my face, smoothly handling any minor hiccups behind the scenes. By the time the reception started, they finally let their guards down. But just as the DJ announced their grand entrance and they walked hand-in-hand toward the stage, a furious roar shattered the applause. “Wright! You absolute piece of trash!” A tall, muscular figure in dress whites marched into the center of the ballroom. It was Declan Burke, Wright’s rival from the academy and a fellow captain in our division. His face was flushed with pure rage. “You stood in my face and told me Charlie was your girlfriend, warning me to stay away from her!” Declan yelled, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings. “And now you’re marrying someone else while forcing her to stand there as your maid of honor? Are you trying to humiliate her?”

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “476185”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel