Category: English

My mother called me with a single sentence. “Keep an eye on Charlotte, honey. She’s the kind of woman who builds her own house with bricks stolen from her family.” I hung up, and that very night, I listed my three properties in the Oakridge school district with my broker. Three days. All sold, cash cleared. At the family dinner, Charlotte sidled up to me, swirling her glass of wine. “So, I heard you have three townhouses in Oakridge? My little boy starts school next year, and I was thinking…” I blew gently on my tea, my eyes lifting to meet hers. “Oh, I sold them. Three days ago.” The smile on her face froze instantly. When my mother called, I was at the kitchen sink, scraping grease off dinner plates, the lemon-scented dish soap foaming over my knuckles. “Keep an eye on Charlotte,” she had said, her voice dry and steady over the static. “She’s the kind of woman who builds her own house with bricks stolen from her family.” Then she hung up. My mother never wasted breath. She didn’t offer long explanations or soft preambles. If she bothered to call, the threat wasn’t looming—it was already standing on the porch. I dried my hands on the dishtowel, standing in the silence of the kitchen for exactly three minutes. Then I unlocked my phone and dialed the broker. … “Hey, Robert, it’s me. Put those three Oakridge townhouses on the market. List them five percent below market value. I want them gone fast.” There was a brief pause on the other end. “All three? But those are gold mines, especially with the school district lines shifting. The market right now is—” “I know the market, Robert. I need speed.” After I hung up, I leaned against the refrigerator, letting the cold metal press into my back while I cataloged the last four years. Charlotte had married a man who worked the line at an assembly plant in the next county over. They lived a tight, gray life, always on the edge of a deficit. But she never visited her mother empty-handed—meaning she never arrived empty-handed, and she never left empty-handed. During my first year of marriage, she borrowed ten thousand dollars from my mother-in-law, Diana, claiming it was for her son’s medical bills. Diana emptied her savings account, leaving barely enough for groceries. To this day, not a single dollar of that loan had been repaid. The second year, Charlotte claimed her husband’s hours had been cut and they couldn’t afford heating. Diana handed over her retirement debit card to “tide them over.” When Charlotte finally returned it six months later, five thousand dollars had vanished from the account. By the third year, she had set her sights on Diana’s craftsman house downtown. She spent the entire summer dropping heavy hints. When Diana didn’t budge, Charlotte sat at the Sunday dinner table and wept. She lamented her hard life, her useless husband, and claimed that if her own blood wouldn’t throw her a lifeline, she didn’t know why she bothered living at all. My husband, Luke, sat beside her during that dinner, staring down at his plate, pushing peas around with his fork. He didn’t say a word. In this family, Luke’s silence was always a quiet surrender. I was a newlywed back then, naive to the silent transactions of the household. But my mother had seen through it immediately. “That sister-in-law of yours,” she had warned me over a glass of wine, “has eyes that live in other people’s pockets.” I hadn’t taken it seriously then. I did now. At last month’s family dinner, Charlotte had squeezed my hand, smiling like we were sisters. “So, I heard you have three rentals in Oakridge?” The hairs on my neck had stood up. I had only mentioned buying those properties to Luke. How did she find out? The math was simple: Luke told Diana, Diana told Charlotte. Once the pipeline was clear, her play was obvious. My mother’s phone call was the final piece of the puzzle. By Tuesday morning, Robert was bringing buyers. First townhouse: a cash buyer, signed by Tuesday afternoon. Second townhouse: full price, fast close on Wednesday. Third townhouse: closed Thursday morning. Three properties. Three days. The wire transfers hit my account like clockwork. When Luke came home from work and saw the three signed deeds on the dining table, his face went gray. “Are you insane? You sold all three?” I set my mug down. “When you told your mother about my assets, did you think to consult me first?” His mouth opened, then clicked shut. “You didn’t ask,” I said. “So neither did I.” He stood in the center of the living room, his car keys slipping from his fingers and clattering onto the hardwood. He didn’t even bend down to pick them up. I ignored him, locked the contracts in my desk drawer, and turned away. The net payout was 1.5 million dollars. I split the funds into three separate bank accounts, all under my maiden name. One card went into the safe at home, one stayed locked in my office drawer, and the third went to my mother’s safe deposit box. Luke spent the next few days in a sullen, heavy silence. But he didn’t bring it up again. Sullenness I could handle. Sullenness didn’t cost me 1.5 million dollars. On Friday evening, Diana called. “Dinner this Sunday. Your sister Charlotte is coming down. It’s been too long since the family sat together.” “Sure,” I said. When I hung up, Luke stepped out of the bedroom. “Don’t mention the houses at my mom’s.” I poured myself a glass of water. “I won’t have to. Charlotte will.” “If she asks, just say you’re still holding onto them.” I looked at him, feeling the cold weight of his cowardice. “You want me to lie?” “Not lie. Just… don’t make a scene.” “I didn’t start the fire, Luke. I just cleared out the dry wood.” He slammed the bedroom door behind him. Sunday came. Charlotte was already in Diana’s kitchen, wearing an apron, stirring a pot, laughing with her mother. When she saw me, she wiped her hands on her apron and rushed over. “Oh, you’re here! Sit, sit. I made that garlic-herb roasted chicken you love.” I smiled politely. We had been married four years, and last Thanksgiving she called me by Luke’s ex-girlfriend’s name. Now she suddenly knew my favorite dish? The table was packed. Diana sat at the head, Charlotte to her right, Luke and I opposite them. Charlotte’s husband was “working overtime,” and her son was “studying.” She had come alone, unburdened, ready for business. Midway through the meal, Charlotte set her fork down and raised her wine glass. “I want to propose a toast to my wonderful sister-in-law.” I raised my water glass. “I don’t drink, Charlotte. But thank you.” She took a sip, set the glass down, and leaned in. “Actually, I wanted to ask you for a small favor.” Here it was. I took a bite of my salad and didn’t look up. “Go ahead.” “My boy starts middle school next year. You know how terrible our local district is. I was thinking…” She paused, looking at Diana. Diana nodded encouragingly, picking up the cue. “Your sister’s had a rough patch. Education is everything for a young boy. Since you have those empty rentals in Oakridge, we figured you could register his name at one of the addresses. It won’t cost you a thing.” “Register.” What a polite word for fraud. I dabbed my mouth with a napkin and set it down. “Oh, I sold them. Three days ago.” The dining room fell into a suffocating silence. Charlotte’s glass hovered in midair. Diana’s fork stopped inches from her plate. Luke stared straight down at his mashed potatoes, chewing slowly. The sweet, sisterly smile on Charlotte’s face drained away, pixel by pixel. “Sold them? All three?” “Yes.” “When? Why didn’t you say anything to the family?” “They were in my name. What I do with my assets is my business.” Charlotte snapped her head toward Luke. “Luke, did you know about this?” Luke didn’t raise his head. “Yes.” Charlotte turned to Diana. Diana slammed her hand on the table. “You sell property without so much as a word to us? Is this how you treat your family? Do you have no respect for the people in this house?” I took a slow sip of water. “Diana, those townhouses were bought before I married Luke, using my own inheritance. My name is the only one on the deeds. I don’t need anyone’s permission to manage my own life.” Diana’s face flushed a deep, angry crimson. Charlotte began to dab at her dry eyes with a tissue. “I wasn’t trying to take them from you,” Charlotte sobbed. “I just wanted my son to have a chance at a good future. I can’t believe you’d…” I stood up, pulling my coat over my arm. “Thank you for the chicken, Charlotte. It was lovely.” I walked out. Luke called my name from the dining room, but I didn’t stop. I took an Uber home. The silence in the back seat was the cleanest thing I’d felt in months. I called my mother as soon as I walked through my front door. “Mom, how did you know she was going after the Oakridge properties?” My mother let out a dry chuckle. “Diana called me last week. Started babbling about how ‘we’re all one big family’ and asked if we could ‘help out’ with the boy’s schooling. Diana doesn’t have the brains to coordinate a scheme like that. Someone was whispering in her ear.” She sighed. “Diana isn’t malicious, she’s just weak. Charlotte cries a little, and Diana hands over whatever she has. But she can’t hand over what isn’t hers.” “I sold them all, Mom.” “Good. Money in your own bank account is the only thing that doesn’t lie to you.” “Luke is giving me the silent treatment.” “Let him pout. You don’t live your life to keep him warm. If he has a brain, he’ll figure it out. If he doesn’t…” My mother paused. “Well, then you’ll know where you stand.” I hung up and left the phone on the coffee table. Luke came home at ten. He didn’t say a word. He took a shower, went straight to the bedroom, and turned his back to me. I watched TV until eleven, then came in and climbed into bed, turning off the lamp. In the dark, his voice was sharp. “You humiliated my mother today.” “Where was this protective energy when your mother and sister tried to corner me for my property?” He rolled over to face me. “That’s my mother.” “And I’m your wife. Your family plotted to take my property, you sat there like a statue, and now you want to lecture me about respect?” A long, heavy silence. “Charlotte isn’t like that. You don’t understand her.” “Don’t I? Let’s do some math, Luke. In the four years we’ve been married, how much has she taken from your mother? The ten-thousand-dollar loan? The five thousand from the retirement card? The holiday ‘handouts’? Have you ever seen a single dollar returned?” He didn’t answer. “You can’t even count it, can you? It’s easily forty thousand dollars. Divide that by your monthly salary, Luke. Tell me how many months you have to work just to fund her lifestyle.” He sat up, his shadow dark against the headboard. “Do you have to reduce everything in this family to a transaction?” “It stopped being a family the moment your sister started treating my bank account like her personal ATM.” He stared at me, then lay back down, pulling the covers up. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” “You mean you can’t talk to me when you have no defense.” Neither of us spoke for the rest of the night. Monday afternoon, my phone buzzed with a voice note from Diana. “Luke’s wife, your sister came home crying her eyes out. She asked for a simple favor and you treated her like a criminal in front of everyone. You’re young, so I’ll overlook your lack of manners, but you owe Charlotte an apology. She is your elder, and you will respect her.” I listened to it, put the phone down, and went back to my spreadsheets. At two, Charlotte’s text arrived. “Hey, I don’t hold Sunday against you. Maybe I didn’t explain myself well and caused a misunderstanding. I honestly just want the best for my son. If it’s too much of a burden, I understand. But your attitude really hurt me. We’re family, we should be able to talk about these things, right?” I took a screenshot, saved it to a hidden folder, and replied with four words: “You’re absolutely right.” No apology. No explanation. She didn’t reply. I flipped my phone face down. But I knew Charlotte. Women like her don’t take a loss and walk away. They retreat, regroup, and look for a bigger hammer. On my drive home, my phone rang. It was Uncle Henry. “Hey, kiddo. I heard about what happened with Charlotte. Look, we’re family. Don’t let things get too bitter. Charlotte’s just a mother trying to do right by her kid. You understand that, don’t you?” I gripped the steering wheel, waiting for the light to turn green. “I hear you, Uncle Henry. I’ve got it handled.” “Good, good. She’s got a big mouth, but her heart’s in the right place.” I hung up and took a deep breath. The machinery was moving. Diana, Henry… who was next? Aunt Bridget? The whole family group chat? It was her classic play: play the victim, cry to the elders, and let the family guilt-trip you into submission until you hand over whatever she wanted just to make the noise stop. But this time, she wasn’t asking for a quick loan. She wanted a house. Actually, she wanted something much bigger. I parked the car in our driveway, sat in the quiet of the cabin for a long time, and then texted my mother. “Mom, I need you to find out something for me.”

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When I caught my husband—a rising Major General—in bed with the underprivileged student I had personally sponsored, I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. Instead, I quietly packed a single suitcase and caught the first flight to Geneva to complete my medical residency. I changed my number, cut ties, and severed every connection to the Capital Command. After graduating, my dedication and surgical precision propelled me to the top of my field. My career skyrocketed. By thirty, I was a chief trauma surgeon at the military’s premier regional hospital. I thought Ryan Henderson was a closed chapter in my life, a ghost from a past I had outgrown. But on my very first day back, my first scheduled emergency case was a thoracotomy on his son. Ryan stared at the name tag pinned to my white coat, completely frozen. I opened the medical chart, my voice flat and professional as I ran through the surgical risks. After he signed the consent form, he lingered, gripping the pen with white knuckles. His eyes were a storm of conflicting emotions, his voice gravelly when he spoke. “I remember when you couldn’t stand the sight of blood.” I snapped the folder shut, keeping my tone perfectly polite, perfectly detached. “You get used to it when you see enough of it.” … 1 “Juliette, please! I’m begging you, save my son!” Chelsea somehow broke free from the two military guards. She threw herself onto her knees in front of me, her joints hitting the linoleum with a sickening thud. Ryan’s brow furrowed slightly as he bent down to pull her up by the arm. “Chelsea, get up. Dr. Ross is reviewing the chart.” His voice was gentle, soothing—the picture-perfect portrait of a responsible, emotionally stable, protective husband. Chelsea grabbed the hem of Ryan’s crisp dress uniform, her face contorted with tears. “Ryan, please, beg her! She was so good to me back then. She’ll save Toby, won’t she?” I ignored her, flicking through the chest CT scans on my tablet. My eyes paused on the patient’s age: four and a half. Four and a half years old. Ryan and I had been divorced for exactly five years and two months. The math was brutally simple. Even the universe, it seemed, was keeping score of their betrayal. “The patient has an acute tension pneumothorax. The right lung is ninety percent collapsed. We need to perform an exploratory thoracotomy immediately.” I slotted the film into the lightbox, my voice entirely level. “General Henderson has already signed the consent form. Now, go settle the intake paperwork and prepare the pre-op blood match.” Chelsea snapped her head up. Beneath the terror in her tear-streaked eyes, I saw a flicker of disbelief. She had likely expected me to use this moment to humiliate her, or to find some bureaucratic excuse to refuse the surgery. Ryan was taken aback too. Letting go of Chelsea, he stepped closer to me. “Juliette, thank you.” He looked at me, his eyes filled with a self-righteous tenderness that made my skin crawl. “I know you’re angry with me. But the boy is innocent. Name your price. Anything you want, it’s yours, as long as you perform the surgery.” I looked up at him. He stood tall in his tailored dress uniform, a luxury tactical watch gleaming on his wrist. That wrist—the same one he had once sliced open in a bloody, dramatic spectacle to force my hand—was now seamlessly concealed beneath the expensive leather strap and pressed cuffs. “General Henderson,” I said, my pen flying across the chart as I scribbled the pre-op orders. “I am the chief trauma surgeon at this hospital. I am on shift tonight. You brought in a patient, and I am doing my job. There are no ‘conditions,’ and there is no personal history here. It’s just medicine.” I slid the order sheet toward him. “Go pay the fee. We’re on a clock.” Ryan didn’t take the paper. Instead, he pulled a stainless steel thermos from his bag, unscrewed the lid, and pushed it gently toward me. “You’ve been pulling back-to-back shifts. Your stomach must be acting up again. I ran down to the cafe across the street and had them make you hot water with honey and lemon. You always lived on it when you stayed up late.” I looked at the steaming liquid, two thinly sliced lemons floating on the surface. A dull ache throbbed in my midsection, but it wasn’t from an ulcer. I didn’t have stomach ulcers. Chelsea did. Years ago, when Chelsea lived under our roof as our scholarship recipient, she would stay up late watching dramas and complain of stomach pain. Ryan would crawl out of bed in the middle of the night to brew her hot honey lemon water. He had done it so often that it had become muscle memory. He had done it so often that, in his revisionist memory, he had projected her favorite things onto me. “I don’t drink citrus,” I said, sliding the thermos back. The metal base scraped against the laminate desk with a harsh, screeching sound. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, General, I need to scrub in.” Ryan’s hand froze in midair. Suddenly, Chelsea shrieked. “Juliette! Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing! You’re going to use this to get back at me, aren’t you? I swear to God, if anything happens to my son on that table, I’ll destroy you!” Heads turned in the crowded triage corridor. Nurses and military families stared. I stood up calmly, smoothing down my white coat. “Mrs. Henderson, if you continue to make a scene, I will have military police escort you from the building. Furthermore, your son’s oxygen saturation is dropping. Every minute you spend screaming is a minute he loses.” Chelsea’s face drained of color, her lips trembling. Ryan grabbed her arm, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “That’s enough, Chelsea. Stop it.” He turned back to me, his eyes carrying a familiar, subtle sting of blame. “Juliette, she’s just terrified for our son. She’s not thinking straight. You’re a chief surgeon now. Can’t you show some grace instead of holding a grudge?” He delivered the most deeply biased words in the gentlest tone imaginable, successfully painting me as the cold-hearted aggressor while they played the tragic, helpless victims. I didn’t bother looking at him. I walked past them toward the scrub sink. “The intake forms are on the desk. See you in the OR in ten minutes.” Cold water rushed over my hands. I looked up, meeting my own gaze in the mirror, and let out a soft, humorless laugh. Droplets of water dripped from my chin into the stainless-steel sink, clean and sharp. 2 The surgery lasted four hours. The pediatric patient’s right lung had sustained severe lacerations, with over three hundred milliliters of blood pooling in the thoracic cavity. Under the glare of the shadowless surgical lamps, my movements were purely mechanical—clamp, ligate, suture. The monitor beeped rhythmically. The scrub nurse seamlessly handed me the forceps. No thoughts of Ryan or Chelsea entered my mind. On the operating table, I see only organs and anatomy, never the people they belong to. At three in the morning, the surgery concluded successfully. I stripped off my blood-spattered scrubs, threw on my white coat, and stepped out. Ryan was sitting alone on the corridor bench. Chelsea was nowhere to be seen—likely sent away to rest. Hearing my footsteps, he looked up, his eyes bloodshot. “The surgery was a success. His vitals are stable, and he’s been moved to the ICU for observation,” I delivered the update in my standard clinical tone, preparing to head back to the on-call room. “Juliette.” Ryan stood up, blocking my path. The empty hallway hummed under the dim fluorescent lights. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a sleek black debit card, holding it out to me. “There’s fifty thousand dollars on this,” he said, his voice quiet, carrying that familiar air of condescending charity. “The PIN is your birthday.” I looked down at the black plastic. “What is this?” “You left so quickly back then. You didn’t take a dime.” Ryan sighed, a look of unearned pity washing over his face. “I know these past five years haven’t been easy for you. A woman, fighting her way from a lowly resident to a chief surgeon… you must have suffered. Take the money. Buy yourself a decent car. Stop driving that beat-up sedan with the old military plates.” He paused, adding, “Consider it a peace offering from Chelsea. She was young and foolish back then.” Young and foolish. Three small words to erase how she bit the hand that fed her, how she crawled into her benefactor’s husband’s bed. Three words to wash away his own infidelity, and the night he sliced his own wrist to blackmail me into signing the divorce papers without a single asset. I looked at his handsome, composed face, and a sudden urge to laugh washed over me. He was so utterly convinced that I had been miserable. He was convinced I was still scraping by, harboring bitter resentment over the past. He wanted to use this fifty thousand dollars to buy his way out of his own guilt. “General Henderson,” I said, making no move to take the card. My eyes met his, cold and clear. “Five years ago, I gave Chelsea a ten-thousand-dollar scholarship to finish her degree. Even with the highest interest rate, the principal and interest today would barely reach fifteen thousand. Is the remaining thirty-five thousand hush money for your cheating?” Ryan’s expression tightened. He clearly hadn’t expected me to lay it bare so ruthlessly. “Juliette, is it really necessary to be this bitter?” He frowned, a flash of annoyance crossing his features. “I’m trying to look out for you. You never used to be so clinical about money.” Clinical. When I turned down a prestigious fellowship at the Walter Reed headquarters to follow him to a dusty, wind-swept border post for two years, he didn’t think I was “clinical.” Now that he had climbed the ranks and wanted to throw money at his problems, suddenly my pragmatism was a character flaw. I reached out, pinched the black card between two fingers, and slipped it from his grasp. “Is that so? Well, if General Henderson wants to buy his peace of mind, far be it from me to stop him.” A faint smile played on my lips. “After all, I earned this.” What I had earned wasn’t the fifty thousand dollars. It was the hard-won realization that I should have started putting myself first a long time ago. Years ago, I wore faded, thrifted clothes and ate the cheapest meals in the hospital cafeteria just to save every extra dollar to help fund his networking dinners and pave his way to promotion. He praised me for being “sensible,” “supportive,” and “not like other materialistic women.” I had felt proud back then, foolishly believing I was his unique soulmate. Now I understood: that wasn’t being noble. That was just being cheap. He had used a few worthless compliments to systematically exploit my youth and my future. Seeing me take the card, Ryan’s shoulders relaxed. A wave of relief washed over him, accompanied by a faint, almost imperceptible smirk of triumph. He had successfully reduced his betrayal into a transaction he could settle and forget. “I’m glad you’re seeing reason,” he said, adjusting the cuffs of his uniform as he regained his polished, respectable composure. “Chelsea has a temper. Now that we’re at the same base, try to be patient with her. I owe you one.” I slipped the card into my pocket and turned back toward the on-call room. “Rest easy, General. My job is to treat patients, not to raise your wife.” The window at the end of the hall was cracked open. The night breeze filtered in, carrying the sharp, cold scent of antiseptic—piercing and entirely sobering. 3 During ward rounds the next morning, a crowd had gathered outside the ICU. Chelsea was sitting on the floor, her hair disheveled, screaming at a young nurse. “Is this how you run a hospital? My son just had major chest surgery yesterday, and now he has a fever! Did you give him the wrong medication?” The young nurse’s eyes were rimmed with red as she stammered, “Mrs. Henderson, a post-operative absorption fever is perfectly normal. We’ve already started non-pharmacological cooling protocols…” “Don’t try to hide behind your medical jargon!” Chelsea lunged to her feet, shoving the nurse back. “Get the chief of surgery! Get Juliette out here! She’s still bitter about what happened five years ago. She did something to my boy on purpose!” I walked through the crowd, clipboard in hand. “Mrs. Henderson, this is the Intensive Care Unit. Keep your voice down.” The moment Chelsea saw me, her eyes flared. She charged at me. “Juliette! You finally showed your face! What did you do to my son?” She raised her hand to slap me, but the military guards intercepted her just in time. Ryan came rushing down the corridor. He pulled Chelsea into his arms, shielding her behind him. “What’s going on here?” He looked between Chelsea and me, his forehead creasing. The trembling nurse quickly explained the situation. After listening, Ryan turned his gaze to me. “Juliette, Chelsea is just frantic about the baby. Couldn’t you have just explained it to her calmly? Did you have to let it escalate like this?” There it was again—his trademark neutrality. Always playing the mediator, always shielding his precious Chelsea under the guise of reason. “General Henderson,” I said, shutting the chart. “During our pre-op consultation, I explicitly informed you of the risks of post-operative fever and infection. Your signature is on that consent form. If your wife has doubts about our treatment, she is welcome to file for a formal medical review. But if she continues to disrupt this ward and disturb other recovering patients, I will have security remove her.” Chelsea glared at me from behind Ryan’s shoulder, her teeth gritted. “Go ahead, call them! You think I’m scared of you? I saw my husband hand you that fifty-thousand-dollar card last night! Stop acting so righteous, Juliette. You blackmailed my husband using our son’s life!” The corridor fell dead silent. Every eye in the hallway locked onto me. The young nurse gasped, her mouth hanging open. Ryan’s face went completely pale. He whipped around, glaring at Chelsea. “What the hell are you talking about? Shut up!” But Chelsea thought she had won. Her expression turned smug. “Me, lying? Juliette is a shameless thief! She used her position as chief surgeon to solicit a massive bribe from a patient’s family! I’m going to report you to the board! I will ruin your career!” Ryan grabbed Chelsea’s arm with a bruising grip, trying to drag her away. He looked back at me, his eyes pleading, filled with silent desperation. “Juliette, go back to your office. I’ll handle this.” He expected me to panic, to scramble to defend myself. But I just stood there, quietly watching their little domestic drama. “Sure,” I said. I pulled out my phone and dialed the hospital’s internal ethics committee line. “Director Collins, please come up to the ICU. I have a family member here making a formal accusation of bribery against me.” The sharp dial tone echoed loudly down the silent hallway. 4 Inside the ethics committee office, the tension was suffocating. Director Collins sat behind his desk, his brow furrowed in a deep, troubled line. Ryan sat on the leather sofa, hands clasped, his expression grim and heavy. Chelsea sat beside him, wearing a triumphant, vindictive smirk. I stood by the window, watching the neat rows of military vehicles parked in the courtyard below. “Dr. Ross, Mrs. Henderson has filed a complaint stating that you accepted a debit card containing fifty thousand dollars from General Henderson last night,” Director Collins said, tapping his fingers on the desk. “Do you have an explanation for this?” I turned around, but before I could speak, Ryan cut in. “Director Collins, this is all a misunderstanding.” He stood up and stepped closer to my side, his voice dripping with earnest sincerity. “The fifty thousand was something I offered to Dr. Ross voluntarily. We have… history. I knew she might be facing some financial difficulties lately, and I simply wanted to help an old friend. She did not solicit a bribe.” I stared at Ryan’s hypocritical face, completely unmoved. On the surface, he was trying to shield me. In reality, every single word he spoke was designed to cement the narrative that I had taken his money. If I fell in line with his story and admitted I was struggling financially, I would be admitting to the transaction. I would become the desperate, mercenary woman Chelsea accused me of being, forever forced to look down in shame before them. “Ryan,” I said softly, calling him by his first name. “Are you absolutely sure you gave me that money of your own free will?” Ryan looked at me, a flash of warning in his eyes. He leaned in, lowering his voice so only I could hear. “Juliette, don’t be stubborn. Just apologize to Chelsea, say the money was a personal loan, and I’ll clear things up with Collins. You worked too hard to get to where you are. Don’t ruin your career over pride.” He was so sure I would break. Just like five years ago, when he was convinced that the sight of his bleeding wrist would make me sign the divorce papers without a fight. He had always believed he held the remote control to my life. I looked at him, a faint, mocking smile touching my lips. “General Henderson, do you honestly believe I’m still the same naive girl you manipulated so easily?” Ryan’s brow furrowed deeper. “I’m trying to help you.” At that moment, the office door was pushed open. The Chief of Medicine walked in, flanked by several high-ranking officers in military dress uniforms.

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On Thanksgiving Day, my fiancé vanished from our engagement dinner, leaving me alone to pick up the pieces. I’d spent the entire day running around, and the moment I finally sat down to catch my breath, I saw Victoria’s post on Instagram. “Eight years in the making. Today, we made it official.” The groom was Zack. The man I had loved for twelve years. My hands shook as I opened the comments, ready to demand an explanation, only to see my brother Larry’s comment at the top: “She’s all yours now, Zack. You’re family. If you ever hurt my little sister, I’ll break your legs.” My breath caught in my throat. Shaking, I called Larry. But his voice on the line was completely casual, almost bored. “Zack and Victoria have been together for eight years, Hannah. Mom and Dad knew about it too.” “We weren’t trying to hurt you. We just know how volatile you can get. We didn’t want you causing a scene and ruining it for Victoria.” “Let me make this clear: Victoria is my sister. I won’t let anyone ruin her happiness. Not even you. Especially not you.” A violent spasm hit my stomach. I leaned against the kitchen counter, dry-heaving, but nothing came out. Eight years ago, Zack held my hand on a train to New York, promising to help me find the biological parents who had lost me. But he had already fallen for Victoria that very same year. My parents knew. My brother knew. And they had all lied to my face. … My parents’ Instagram feeds had been updated, too. A family photo at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan. They looked radiant, warm, and so utterly complete that they didn’t even need a caption. I stared at the picture, a sharp ache catching in my throat like a bone. Today was supposed to be my engagement dinner. I had begged my parents and Larry to be there, to witness the only milestone that felt like it belonged to me. But they had all excused themselves. “Hannah, sweetie, the firm is just swamped right now. We really can’t make it.” “It’s just an engagement dinner, not the wedding itself. You’re so independent and capable, we know you can handle it.” Now I knew the truth. They weren’t busy with the firm. They were too busy celebrating Victoria and Zack’s marriage license to bother with my sham of an engagement. They knew my long-awaited night would end in humiliation, and not one of them had the decency to warn me. They had left me in the dark. For eight years. The restaurant’s location tag was active on my mom’s post. I ordered an Uber and drove straight there. By the time I arrived, the dinner was winding down. When I walked into the private dining room, the laughter died instantly. Larry was the first to move, stepping protectively in front of Victoria and grabbing my arm to pull me out. “We’ll talk tomorrow, Hannah. Today is Victoria’s night. Don’t ruin this for her.” I gripped the doorframe, refusing to budge. But Larry’s grip was like iron. He shoved me back, hard. I flew backward, my back slamming violently against the hallway wall. For a second, the world went black. I collapsed to the hardwood floor, a searing pain radiating through my spine, leaving me unable to stand. A flicker of panic finally crossed my parents’ and Zack’s faces. “Hannah, are you okay?” I fought through the pain, pushing away their hands. Their touch felt toxic. I looked up and choked out a bitter laugh. “Mom, Dad… are you going to explain this? Why is my fiancé married to Victoria?” My parents exchanged uncomfortable glances, silent. Zack knelt beside me, his hands reaching out to lift me onto his back. “Don’t worry about that right now, Hannah. Let me get you to a hospital. Your health comes first. I’ll explain everything later, I promise…” But then Victoria let out a soft, trembling sob. Zack froze. He immediately let go of me, turning to wrap Victoria in his arms. “Tori, hey, it’s okay. I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here with you.” My mother sighed, her worry for me instantly evaporating into irritation. “Hannah, do you always have to make everything about yourself?” “Victoria was our only daughter. Your sudden return already took away half of her life, half of our affection. Now that she’s finally found the love of her life, do you have to try and steal that from her too?” I bit my lip so hard the metallic taste of blood filled my mouth. Zack and I had been together since high school. Twelve years. How long had Victoria even known him? She was the one who had stolen my life, my parents, and now my partner. How was I the thief in their eyes? The sheer injustice of it burned in my chest. Tears blurred my vision as I screamed at them. “I was with Zack first! Who stole from whom?!” “Mom, Dad, even if Victoria is the daughter of the woman who kidnapped me, how can you let her be a home-wrecker? How can you support this?!” “Shut up!” A sharp crack echoed through the hallway. Larry’s hand connected violently with my cheek. My face burned, but he wasn’t done. He glared down at me, disgusted. “Victoria and Zack have a legal marriage certificate. They are husband and wife. Who the hell are you to call her a home-wrecker? You’re the one acting like an obsessed mistress.” My parents didn’t reprimand Larry for hitting me. Instead, my father chimed in, his voice cold. “Victoria is the daughter we raised for twenty-four years. How dare you call her a fake? On paper, she is our only legal daughter, just as she is Zack’s only legal wife. When are you ever going to grow up, Hannah?” I opened my mouth to fight, but the words died in my throat. I had no strength left. My parents had always claimed that updating the family trust and legal documents was “too complicated” and “unnecessary paperwork.” My name was never legally added to the Whitmore family registry. Legally, only Larry and Victoria were the Whitmore children. Victoria was the real daughter. Victoria was the real wife. What did I have to fight with? I closed my eyes, dragging my bruised, aching body toward the exit. Outside, the rain was coming down in sheets. It was just like the night Zack and I had first arrived in New York eight years ago. Back then, I had just discovered that the woman who raised me wasn’t my biological mother. Loretta had stolen me from a hospital cradle so her own daughter, Victoria, could live a life of luxury. No wonder she made me work the fields, denied me an education, and beat me for the slightest mistake. She had even sabotaged my college applications, forcing me to attend a tuition-free community college in the middle of nowhere despite my high test scores. It was Zack who spent every penny of his savings to buy two train tickets so we could escape. He held me through the long, freezing ride to New York. He stood by me through the DNA tests, the police reports, and the endless cold shoulders from my biological family. When my parents finally took me in, there was no joy in their eyes. Only awkwardness. “Well, at least Victoria has an older sister to look after her now,” my mother had said. They knew Loretta had stolen me. But they still loved the thief’s daughter more than the biological child who had suffered in her place. I remember crying in Zack’s arms back then, asking him if I was just too broken for my family to love. Zack had held me so tight I could barely breathe. “In my eyes, Hannah, you are perfect,” he had whispered, kissing my forehead. “Even if the whole world turns its back on you, I will always choose you. Let’s just endure this for a bit. Once I make enough money, I’ll build us our own home. We’ll leave them behind, and they’ll regret the day they cast you aside.” How could I have known? The man who swore eternal loyalty to me had fallen for someone else in less than a year. He was no different from everyone else in my life. For Victoria, he betrayed me. The rain grew heavier. I was bruised, soaked, and unable to hail a cab. With no other choice, I pulled my purse over my head and tried to run. The sidewalk was slick. My foot slipped, and I fell hard into a muddy puddle. I tried to push myself up, but a sharp, agonizing twist in my ankle pinned me to the wet concrete. As the despair began to drown me, a black umbrella appeared overhead, blocking out the cold downpour. I knew that umbrella. It was the one I had bought for Zack years ago. He knelt in the rain, holding the umbrella over me with one hand while his other gently cupped my injured ankle. He looked into my eyes, his face incredibly earnest. “Hannah… do you still love me?” “What?” Before I could process his words, a sharp crack echoed, and the blinding pain in my ankle subsided. He had reset the joint. He helped me stand up, letting out a soft sigh. “I saw it was pouring. I couldn’t stop worrying about you, so I told them I drank too much and needed some air. Come on, let me take you to the hospital.” I hadn’t cried when Larry hit me. I hadn’t cried when my parents called me selfish. But looking at Zack—at the familiar tenderness he had shown me for over a decade—the dam finally broke. “My parents forced you into this, didn’t they?” I demanded, my voice cracking. “They used their influence to force you to marry Victoria. Just tell me the truth, Zack. Please.” I desperately needed him to nod. I needed to believe that at least one person in this world hadn’t willingly abandoned me. But Zack avoided my gaze. After a long, agonizing silence, he finally spoke, his voice heavy with guilt. “Hannah… I wanted to marry Victoria. It was my choice.” “When I first met her, I hated her too. I thought she took everything from you. But the more time we spent together… she’s so gentle, Hannah. She’s innocent in all of this.” “You’re like a wildflower—resilient, making people want to protect you. But Victoria… she’s a rose. She’s vibrant, dazzling. No one can resist her light.” “I’m just a man. When you meet someone like that, it’s hard not to fall. We fell in love, Hannah. We couldn’t help ourselves…” A wave of intense nausea hit me. I slapped his hand away, knocking the umbrella into the street. I collapsed by the curb, dry-heaving violently into the gutter. Innocent? Victoria was innocent? She knew Zack was my childhood sweetheart. She knew we were planning a life together. Yet she spent eight years sleeping with him behind my back. She took my parents, my childhood, and now the only person who had ever made me feel safe. And they all called her innocent. “Hannah!” Zack, relentless as a shadow, picked up the umbrella and held it over me again. He tilted it so that I was completely dry, while the rain soaked his back. He reached out, his fingers trembling as he touched my wet cheek, his eyes glistening with tears. “Hannah, stop hurting yourself.” “Just because I married Victoria doesn’t mean I’m abandoning you. My promises to you still stand. I will still love you, care for you, and protect you just like before.” “Whatever Victoria has, you can have too. I can buy you a townhouse. We can have a life together, even a child…” I stared at him, utterly disgusted. He was far more monstrous than I could have ever imagined. Marrying Victoria wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to keep me on the side, tucked away like a dirty secret. The biological daughter who lived like a ghost. The childhood sweetheart turned into a hidden mistress. It was almost comical. “Go to hell, Zack.” I slapped him across the face with everything I had left, then turned and ran blindly into the storm. I ran until my lungs burned, completely soaked to the bone. With no home to return to, I spent the night in my office at Whitmore Enterprises. My parents had never wanted me in the family business. It was only after endless begging that they granted me an entry-level internship. They claimed they didn’t want the company to look like it ran on nepotism. So, despite the million-dollar contracts I brought in year after year, I remained a low-level team leader. Meanwhile, Victoria, who barely showed up once a month, had been appointed Vice President before her twenty-fifth birthday. I had grown numb to the unfairness, but the sting never truly went away. My phone buzzed. It was a text from Walter, the senior Vice President on the board. “The board meeting tomorrow is set to vote on the next successor of the Whitmore Group. We had a private discussion, and the board is unanimously voting for you, Hannah. Good luck.” I clutched the phone to my chest, a rare spark of warmth blooming in my cold ribs. Maybe the whole world hadn’t abandoned me. At least someone saw my hard work. I clenched my fists, a quiet resolve settling over me. I could live without love. I could live without family. But I would not let them take the company I had built with my own sweat and blood. The next morning, the boardroom doors swung open. When Larry saw me sit down, he let out a loud, mocking scoff. “Victoria is the obvious choice for successor. Why are some people still trying to play hero?” Zack sat across from me, casting a worried look in my direction. He leaned in and whispered, “Hannah, just walk away. Victoria is the rightful heir. You don’t have the backing or the bloodline connection she has. Why humiliate yourself?” I bit my lip, staying silent. I was the only biological Whitmore in this room. Why shouldn’t I fight? The secretary began handing out the physical ballots for the board to cast their votes. Just then, the heavy oak doors of the boardroom were thrown open, and a disheveled, crazed-looking woman burst inside. My blood ran cold. It was her. Loretta. My foster mother—Victoria’s biological mother. She was supposed to be serving a twelve-year sentence. How was she here? Loretta shoved past the secretary, grabbed the presentation laptop, and slammed a USB drive into the port. The projector screen flickered to life. And suddenly, my darkest nightmares were laid bare for the entire board to see. The video started playing, and the suffocating panic of my teenage years rushed back, choking me. To get money from her abusive husband, Loretta had repeatedly forced me into horrific situations. They had filmed everything to keep me quiet, threatening to ruin my life if I ever spoke up. I had wanted to die back then, unable to comprehend how a mother could do something so monstrous to her own daughter. Only later did I realize I wasn’t her daughter at all. On screen, the terrible footage played. In the room, Loretta pointed at the screen, her lips curling into a wicked, triumphant grin. “Look at her! You all think Hannah is the long-lost Whitmore heir? She’s my daughter! She’s a parasite who lied her way into this family!” “She slept with her own stepfather just for pocket money! Are you really going to hand a multi-million-dollar company over to a cheap, worthless girl like this?” I felt myself slipping into madness. “You’re lying!” I screamed, my voice cracking with desperation. “Victoria is your daughter! You’re the one who switched us at birth!” I looked at my parents, begging them with my eyes to stand up for me, to tell them the truth. But looking at the screen, my parents’ faces twisted in disgust. To them, my trauma was nothing but a stain on their pristine reputation. They immediately turned their backs on me. “Hannah, how can you accuse your sister like that?” my mother said, her voice dripping with artificial pity. “Victoria is our only daughter. We only took you in out of charity.” Larry sneered. “We don’t have room for trash like you in the Whitmore family, Hannah.” The board members began whispering, their gazes turning from admiration to cold disdain. “She’s not even a Whitmore…” “With a mother like that, and a past so vile… we can’t have her representing the brand. Get her out of here.” The uncles and mentors who had promised to vote for me began crossing out my name, writing Victoria’s instead. When the votes were tallied, it was priorly decided. Victoria was named the sole successor of the Whitmore Group. She had won. She had taken every last thing that belonged to me. I sank back into my chair, hollowed out. Victoria stood up, offering me a sweet, elegant smile. “Hannah, our parents were kind enough to harbor you, but you can’t deny your own flesh and blood forever.” “Loretta missed you. She wants to take you home.” “You should go with her. Wearing clothes that don’t belong to you is getting a bit pathetic, don’t you think?” I looked up and met Loretta’s terrifying, hollow eyes. Victoria had taken my family, my love, my future. And now, she was throwing me back into the hands of my abuser. A primal rage broke through the numbness. With a guttural scream, I lunged across the table and wrapped my hands tightly around Victoria’s throat. The room erupted into chaos. My parents, Larry, Zack, and Loretta—they all moved at once, striking me down. Zack grabbed my wrists, twisting them until my bones popped out of their sockets. My mother’s palm cracked against my face. Larry’s boot slammed violently into my stomach. And then, a cold blade slid deep into my chest. Loretta stood over me, a bloody paring knife in her hand. The warmth of my own blood began to pool on the cold tile floor. “Hannah!”

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“Ethan, I don’t think we’re working out anymore.” Chloe pushed the limited-edition bracelet back toward me. It was the exact one I had stood in line for three hours to buy, but right now, her eyes held nothing but pure, unbothered disdain. I gripped the velvet box, my knuckles turning white. She had no idea I worked overtime for an entire month just to afford this. To her, the only thing that mattered was that her best friend just got a one-carat diamond ring, while she was stuck with what she saw as a cheap piece of silver. “We’re just not a match,” she repeated, her voice dripping with a sense of relief. “I’ve met someone else. He’s just an ordinary guy, but he actually *gets* me. Being with you… I feel like I’m suffocating in a lukewarm bath.” I stared at her perfectly done makeup, catching the spark of excitement in her eyes as she imagined her brand-new life. I was silent for ten seconds. Then, I smiled. “Alright. I won’t hold you back.” That was the very last time I would ever indulge her. Because starting tomorrow, she was going to learn what real suffocation felt like.

My name is Ethan. I was with Chloe for three years, and I gave her my absolute everything. When she complained our apartment was too cramped, I stretched my budget to the limit to rent a spacious two-bedroom place in a nice neighborhood. When she complained about her long commute on the subway, I took the money I’d been saving for two years and bought her a white Toyota Corolla. When she said she wanted to apply for grad school, I paid five thousand dollars upfront for her GRE prep courses without a second thought. The entire time, she believed I was just a regular, run-of-the-mill software engineer, making a decent living but barely scraping by in this expensive city. She didn’t know that the food delivery app she ordered from every single day ran on code I wrote back in my junior year of college. She didn’t know that the core recommendation algorithm of the viral short-video app she scrolled through every night was designed by me. And she certainly didn’t know that the massive glass tech tower downtown—the one right next to her office—was entirely mine. I had only wanted to live a normal, quiet life, hoping to find someone who loved me for who I was, not my net worth. Clearly, I was being naive. The day after Chloe broke up with me, her new boyfriend came over to help her pack. I stood by the doorway, watching him. His name was Tyler. He was a DoorDash delivery driver. Apparently, they met when he delivered her boba tea one afternoon. He was six feet tall and admittedly looked more athletic and energetic than I did. “Sorry about this, man,” Tyler said with a smug, victorious grin. “But hey, you can’t force chemistry, right?” I smiled back. “Take good care of her.” Tyler blinked, caught off guard by how incredibly calm I was. He had no idea that the night before, I had already made a dozen phone calls. My first call was to our landlord: “I’m terminating the lease on the two-bedroom apartment immediately. Keep the deposit.” My second call was to a used car dealer: “Come pick up the white Toyota Corolla. Sell it at market value.” My third call was to the GRE prep center: “Cancel the enrollment for Chloe. The reason? She won’t be needing it anymore. Refund the money to my card.” My fourth call was to my personal assistant, Justin: “Look into a DoorDash driver named Tyler. Contact his regional dispatch manager. Starting tomorrow, assign him only the absolute furthest delivery routes. Make sure he’s paid the bare minimum per trip. And put a tracking monitor on all his active delivery zones.” On the other end of the line, Justin paused for a second. “Sir, how far do you want to push this?” I looked out the window. Chloe was busy loading her heavy suitcases onto the back of Tyler’s beat-up scooter. “Just enough so she can see with her own eyes exactly how much the man of her dreams actually makes in a month.” *Chloe, you thought my gifts were cheap?* *You thought he could give you the thrilling life you always wanted?* *Fine. Let’s see what your life looks like without me.*

Three days after she moved out, Chloe texted me on Snapchat. “Ethan, I left a few things at your place. When can I come by to grab them?” I didn’t reply. She texted again: “Don’t be like this. Can’t we just end things on good terms?” I still didn’t reply. Then her calls started coming in. One, two, three times. I blocked her number. She probably thought I would be the same old Ethan—the guy who softened up the moment she pouted. But she didn’t realize that this time was different. I wasn’t just angry. My heart had gone completely cold. For three long years, I had treated an ordinary girl like a literal princess. Whatever she wanted, I never said no. When she complained her salary was too low to buy designer bags, I quietly transferred money into her bank account every month. When she complained that I was too busy with work, I turned down three multi-million-dollar tech projects just to stay home with her. And what did I get in return? She ran off with a delivery guy just because he said a few sweet words of encouragement when dropping off her meals. Fine. I was going to let her experience what that “true love” really cost. On the fourth day, Chloe finally showed up at the lobby of my office building. I was sitting in the corner cafe on the ground floor, watching her wander around through the glass window. She didn’t know which floor I worked on, so she had to ask the front desk receptionists one by one. Justin tapped on my office door later that afternoon. “Sir, she’s downstairs. Do you want to see her?” “Not yet.” I watched her walk from the east entrance to the west entrance, and then to the north gate, wandering around for a solid forty minutes. The June sun was brutal. Her carefully applied makeup was beginning to melt, and her face was flushed red from the heat. Finally, I pulled out my phone and sent her a quick Snapchat message: “Look up. Left window on the second floor.” She snapped her head up, squinting through the glare. I stood by the glass, giving her a brief wave. Then I turned and walked downstairs. She was standing near the lobby entrance, her face slightly sweaty and her hair a bit messy. The moment she saw me walk out, she instinctively tried to smooth down her hair. “Ethan…” “Your stuff is in my car. Wait here.” I went down to the parking garage and brought up a cardboard box. Inside were a few pieces of her clothing, some books, and her half-empty skincare bottles. She reached out to take it, but I didn’t hand it over right away. “Is this everything?” she asked. “Everything.” She blinked, surprised by how cold and straightforward I was. “Also,” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a set of keys, letting them jingle. “Here are the keys to the apartment. I’ve officially terminated the lease.” The keys clinked loudly as they dropped into her palm. She stared down at them, her lips trembling slightly, but she didn’t say a word. I knew exactly what she was thinking. We had chosen that apartment together. She had fell in love with the bay window, the sunny balcony, and the cute coffee shop right downstairs. I had signed the lease immediately, paying six months of rent upfront without hesitation. And now, there were still over two months left on it. “I took back the security deposit,” I said calmly. “I calculated the rent daily. I’m refunding you for the exact days you actually stayed there.” “You don’t have to…” “Two hundred dollars,” I interrupted her, pulling the cash out of my wallet and tucking it into the side of the box. “Take it.” She didn’t reach for it. I looked at her hands—the hands I had held countless times—which were now tightly clutching the strap of her brand-new cheap purse. “Chloe,” I said, putting the box down. “Three years. Whatever I owed you, we are completely even now.” She snapped her head up, her eyes rimmed with red. “Ethan, what is your problem?” “Exactly what I said.” I turned around to walk back into the building. “Ethan!” she yelled behind me. “Why are you acting like this? You only make a few grand a month! You spent almost everything on me these past three years! Do you even have any savings left? You’re just…” I stopped in my tracks.

She kept going, her voice rising. “Do you honestly think I left you because you’re broke? No! I left because you have absolutely no ambition! It’s been three years, Ethan! Your college friends are already directors or starting their own tech firms, and what are you doing? You’re still just writing basic code, working for someone else, just…” “Just what?” I asked, turning slightly. “Just coasting through life!” she screamed. “Being with you, I could see the next thirty years laid out in a boring, predictable straight line! Do you know how suffocating that is? It’s hopeless!” I didn’t turn around completely. “Tyler is a delivery guy, sure. He makes barely enough to survive right now, but at least he has a dream! He told me he wants to open his own restaurant, to be his own boss! What about you? Do you even have the guts to try?” I listened. I listened to her call me lazy, unambitious, and a loser who didn’t even have a dream. When she finally ran out of breath, I turned and looked at her. Her face was flushed with anger, her eyes wide and wild. It looked like she had finally dumped out every single resentment she had kept bottled up for three years. She was practically shaking. “Are you done?” I asked. She bit her lip, glaring at me. “If you’re done, go back,” I said quietly. “Tyler is waiting for you.” I walked into the lobby, crossed the polished marble floor, and stepped into the private elevator. Right before the doors slid shut, I saw her standing there in the heat, clutching that cardboard box, completely frozen. Back in my office, I stood by the floor-to-ceiling window and looked down. She was still standing there. After a long time, she finally turned and slowly walked away. She would walk a few steps, pause, then walk a few more. I watched her figure disappear around the street corner before returning to my desk. My phone rang. It was Justin. “Sir, I have the details on Tyler,” Justin reported. “He’s thirty-two. He’s been doing deliveries for a year and a half. Before that, he worked in construction, as a mall security guard, and in used car sales. He never kept a job for more than a few months. He has a heavy mortgage on a small house in the suburbs where he lives with his mother. Oh, and he has a five-year-old daughter with his ex-wife, who has primary custody.” “A daughter?” “Yes. They’ve been divorced for two years. Does Chloe know about any of this?” I was silent for a few seconds. “She doesn’t know a thing.” I hung up and looked out at the city skyline. *Chloe, you think you found true love?* *Do you even know what it means when a thirty-two-year-old man can’t hold down a single job?* *Do you know why he’s still just delivering food after a year and a half?* *He told you he wants to open a restaurant, but did you ever ask him where he’s going to get the capital?* *Did you ever ask why his ex-wife divorced him?* *You know absolutely nothing.* *You just thought he was better than me because he knew how to talk sweet.* *Fine.* *I’ll let you see the reality.*

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I got dumped and laid off on the exact same day. The reason was absolutely ridiculous. It was all because my boyfriend, Ethan, went to a Tarot reader, and the psychic told him: “Your current girlfriend is leeching all of your good energy. I highly suggest you break up with her.” “Luckily, today is the last day of October. Cut her off today, and your good luck will manifest next month!” Honestly, the psychic was scarily accurate. The second he dumped me, he actually got promoted. **1** The layoff notice and Ethan’s breakup text hit my inbox at the exact same time. I stood in front of my office building, holding my severance package paperwork, completely numb. My phone buzzed. It was a text from Ethan: [Amber, we need to break up.] I froze, my fingers trembling as I typed back: [Why?] [I went to a spiritual Tarot advisor. She told me you have bad vibes. Your toxic energy is blocking my path to success.] [If we end things today, my luck will reset starting next month.] Staring at the screen, I typed: [Ethan, we’ve been together for five years. Are you seriously ending our entire relationship over some stupid playing cards?] [Amber, this is cosmic energy. You have to respect the universe. My latest project was stolen, and my promotion was delayed. It’s obviously your bad energy dragging me down.] [Take care of yourself. And please, don’t try to stalk or harass me.] My phone was shaking in my grip. We had been together for five years. From college to our first jobs, I lived in a damp, leaky basement with him. I ate instant ramen for three weeks straight just to save money. To buy him that designer watch he wouldn’t stop drooling over for his birthday, I secretly worked two part-time jobs until I literally got a stomach ulcer. And now, he was telling me my “vibes” were dragging him down? I took a deep breath, forcing the hot tears back. I replied: [Fine.] One word. Clean and simple. He probably didn’t expect me to agree so easily. It took him a few seconds to type back. [Then… take care of yourself.] I immediately blocked him on Snapchat, Instagram, and his phone number. Then I crouched down by the sidewalk, and the tears finally spilled over. I wasn’t crying because I missed him. I was crying because I had wasted five years of my life on a absolute dog. No job, no boyfriend. I was officially a double-loser. I wiped my face and stood up. With no money and no job, I didn’t even have the luxury to sit around and cry. My only priority now was to make money and survive. I went back to our shared apartment. We called it shared, but I paid almost all the rent and utilities. Ethan had promised me that his salary was going straight into our joint savings account so we could save up for a down payment on a house. He said he wanted to build a future with me. What a joke. I pushed the door open. The apartment was completely empty. Ethan’s things were entirely gone. I pulled out my phone to call a moving company for my own stuff when a bank notification popped up. *Dear Customer, your joint account ending in 4098 had a withdrawal of $30,000 at 3:30 PM. Current Balance: $0.00.* My brain went completely blank. That thirty thousand dollars was my hard-earned money. I had saved every single penny by skipping meals and living like a hermit. I frantically dialed Ethan’s number. “The number you are trying to reach has been restricted…” He blocked me. Not only that, I checked my desk drawer. My two high-limit credit cards were gone. I logged into my banking app. Just this afternoon, someone had used a shady point-of-sale terminal to run fraudulent cash advances totaling twenty thousand dollars! Fifty thousand dollars. My entire life savings, wiped out in a single afternoon. As I stood there shaking with pure rage, my best friend, Harper, called. “Amber! Oh my god, open Instagram right now! That piece of garbage Ethan just posted!” I opened the screenshot she sent me. Ethan had posted a photo from a fancy celebration dinner. He was standing dead center, smiling like a total jerk. His caption read: *[Shoutout to my personal lucky star! Just cut off the toxic energy in my life, and my new project got approved instantly. Upgraded to a high-frequency life! 🚀]* Looking at his smug face made me sick. The Tarot reader was right—the second he dumped me, his career took off. But then, my eyes caught a detail in the corner of the photo. A hand resting on the table, wearing a very specific pinky ring. It was a custom-made silver snake ring. I knew that ring. In college, there was a girl named Chloe who always followed me around, acting incredibly sweet and calling me her favorite mentor. She owned that exact same ring. A sickening thought crossed my mind. I immediately searched her name on Instagram. *** **2** An account with a verified blue checkmark popped up: **@Chloe_The_Mystic**. The profile picture was Chloe’s face. Her grid was filled with aesthetic photos of Tarot cards, sage, and healing crystals. Her captions were bloated with buzzwords like “energetic alignment,” “magnetic manifestation,” and “vibe shifts.” And her latest post? It was a photo of the exact same celebration dinner, taken from a slightly different angle. *[Just helped a beloved seeker cut the energetic cord with a low-vibe karmic attachment. The universe immediately unlocked his wealth portal! ✨💸]* A wave of intense nausea hit me. I almost threw up right there. So that was it. There was no miraculous psychic. There was no cosmic alignment. It was just a cheap, calculated affair. I packed my bags that night and moved into Harper’s guest room. Harper spent the next thirty minutes pacing around the living room, screaming curses. “Those absolute scumbags! Spiritual advisor? She’s just a home-wrecking, crystal-selling fraud!” “And Ethan! Using your hard-earned money to fund his side chick and calling it a ‘vibe shift’?! I can’t!” “Amber, we are calling the cops. Fifty thousand dollars is grand larceny. We can get them locked up!” I sat on the couch, sipping hot tea. “We will call the cops, but not yet,” I said coldly. “That thirty thousand was in a joint account. The law sees it as shared funds, so the police will call it a civil dispute. And the credit card advances? He can easily lie and say I authorized them as a loan. If he holds that line, the police can’t do much.” “If you want to kill a snake, you have to crush its head. I don’t want a long, annoying court mediation. I want to ruin them completely.” Harper blinked. “So what’s the plan? We just let them enjoy your money?” I smirked, spinning my laptop screen to face her. “Of course not. I’m going to destroy the spiritual empire they are so proud of.” On the screen was an analysis of Chloe’s business model that I had spent the entire night reverse-engineering. This wasn’t just a simple psychic gig. It was a massive, highly coordinated emotional scam. First, she used basic psychological tricks—the Barnum effect—to brainwash anxious young people on social media. Next, she sold them overpriced “manifestation crystals” and “banishing rituals” to drain their bank accounts. Finally, she had set up a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme, recruiting “sub-agents” to sell her courses. She was actively crossing the line into financial fraud and illegal pyramid operations. But to take her down completely, I needed a powerful platform. My eyes locked onto a hiring post in bold letters: *[Summit Capital is looking for a Senior Risk Analyst. Candidate must have deep insights into gray-market economies and emerging social media scams.]* Summit Capital was the biggest private equity firm in the city. And Julian Vance, their youngest Investment Director, was legendary for being a ruthless, cold-blooded shark. He was my ticket in. I pulled three consecutive all-nighters. I compiled every piece of evidence on how Chloe’s Tarot business used fraud, manipulated financial flows, and scammed vulnerable people into a fifty-page short-seller report. I even tracked down her “one-of-a-kind high-vibration rose quartz” crystals. They weren’t from a sacred cave in Brazil; they were bought wholesale from a supplier on AliExpress for $1.50 apiece. She sold them for $1,200. This wasn’t spirituality. This was high-margin financial crime. On the fourth morning, I stood in front of the sleek skyscraper of Summit Capital. Just as I was about to walk through the glass doors, a high-pitched, giggling voice drifted from behind me. “Oh, Ethan, look at the energy of this building! The universe is literally begging us to take their venture capital today.” I turned around. Ethan was holding Chloe’s hand, walking toward the entrance. When Chloe saw me, she gasped dramatically, covering her mouth. “Oh my gosh, Amber? Is that you? You look so… drained. Are you okay?” Ethan’s face darkened instantly. “Amber, are you seriously stalking me now?” I rolled my eyes. “Stalking you? Please. I wouldn’t waste my energy tracking a broke loser who lives off other people’s money.” *** **3** Ethan’s ego took a massive hit, and his face turned red with anger. “Watch your mouth! We are here to pitch a multi-million dollar funding round to Summit Capital!” “And you? I heard you got laid off. You’re basically a black hole of negative energy right now.” Chloe chimed in, her eyes glinting with malice. “How did security even let someone like her into the financial district? Amber, you should really leave. Your broke aura is going to ruin our pitch.” I literally laughed out loud. I stared dead at Ethan. “Low-vibe? Ethan, you bought that designer suit you’re wearing with the credit cards I worked two jobs to pay off. Aren’t you afraid my ‘broke aura’ is going to choke you to death?” Ethan flinched, but quickly straightened his collar. “That thirty thousand was joint property! And the twenty thousand was a loan you willingly gave me!” “Amber, if you ruin this deal for me today, I swear I will make your life a living hell!” “Don’t worry,” I smiled coldly. “Your hell is just getting started.” I didn’t waste another second. I spun around and stepped into the elevator, leaving Ethan and Chloe yelling at the lobby security guards behind me. Half an hour later, I was sitting across from Julian Vance. He flipped through my fifty-page report, a faint, amused smile on his face. “Amber, this report on shorting the spiritual creator economy… it reads like a hit list. You’re out for blood.” I met his gaze directly. “Mr. Vance, when you’re dealing with parasites who drain vulnerable people’s life savings, you don’t use a flyswatter. You use a scalpel.” Julian leaned back. “True. But you can’t deny their cash flow is incredible right now. If Summit was to invest, how would you handle it?” I laughed coldly. “I wouldn’t invest. I would short them.” “The biggest weakness of this entire industry is that it’s built entirely on the founder’s personal brand. The moment her reputation crumbles, the money vanishes. On top of that, her business is knee-deep in tax evasion and pyramid schemes.” He closed the file and stood up. “What a coincidence. There are two spiritual grifters sitting in my waiting room right now, claiming they can manifest millions with the power of the universe.” Julian looked at me, his eyes sharp. “Amber, you’re hired. Now, let’s go examine your first target.” I followed Julian straight into the main conference room. Chloe was in the middle of a theatrical presentation. “As you can see, Mr. Vance, our Cosmic Alignment app has an eighty percent retention rate. With a ten-million-dollar investment from Summit, we can scale this globally within six months…” Ethan, who was sitting next to her, jumped to his feet the second he saw me enter. “Amber?! How did you get in here? Security!” Julian shot him a freezing glare. “She is my newly appointed Senior Risk Analyst. She is here to audit your project. Do you have a problem with that, Ethan?” Ethan choked on his words. Chloe quickly stepped in, trying to sound sweet. “Oh, congrats on the job, Amber! But this project is in a highly specialized spiritual niche. You might find the metrics a bit hard to understand.” I didn’t say a word. I just slammed a thick stack of financial documents onto the table. “Oh, I understand the metrics perfectly.” “I understand how you buy cheap plastic crystals on AliExpress for $1.50 and sell them as ‘soulmate magnet stones’ to insecure college students for $1,200.” “I understand how you pay bot farms to flood social media with doom-scrolling anxiety bait, telling people their families will get sick if they don’t buy your $5,000 protection charms.” I tapped the paper, pointing at the numbers. “Chloe, your studio claims to make millions in revenue, but your tax filings for the last three years show consecutive losses. Where is the money going?” “According to these offshore account statements, the cash is being funneled through shell companies straight into a bank in the Cayman Islands.” “You call this cosmic energy? The IRS calls this money laundering.” Chloe’s face turned paper-white. She screamed, “This is slander! These are confidential files! Where did you get this fake data?!” I mocked her with a sweet smile. “Oh, remember? I’m just a low-vibe broke girl who has nothing better to do than dig through trash. When you have nothing to lose, you’d be surprised what you can find.” *** **4** Ethan panicked and lunged across the table to grab the documents. “Amber, you’re doing this because of a personal grudge! You’re just jealous because I found a better business partner, and you can’t stand seeing Chloe succeed!” He turned to Julian, desperately pleading. “Mr. Vance, don’t listen to her! She’s my bitter ex-girlfriend. She’s been stalking us ever since I refused to marry her!” I stepped forward and slapped Ethan hard across the face. The sharp sound echoed in the quiet conference room. “Ethan, stop trying to make your freeloading sound romantic.” “Did you take the thirty thousand from our joint account and max out my credit cards just to bail out Chloe’s bleeding business?” I unlocked my tablet and displayed their private Snapchat chats and hotel booking receipts on the main screen. “Imagine stealing your girlfriend’s life savings just to play sugar daddy to a fake psychic.” “How pathetic do you have to be to fund your own girlfriend’s replacement?” Ethan’s face went completely bloodless. Sensing the danger, Chloe turned to Julian, tears streaming down her face. “Mr. Vance, please, you have to protect us! A prestigious firm like Summit shouldn’t allow an employee to behave so unprofessionally…” Julian let out a soft laugh. “Actually, Amber’s due diligence is spectacular.” “Summit Capital does not invest in pyramid schemes or money laundering operations.” “Furthermore, Amber has already forwarded all of your tax evasion data to the financial crimes division.” “So, both of you… your lucky streak has officially ended.” “Security, throw them out.” With that, Julian turned and walked out. A group of burly security guards marched in and dragged a screaming Ethan and Chloe out of the building. Watching them get dragged away was satisfying, but I still needed my fifty thousand dollars back. Just as I was planning my next move, my phone vibrated. It was my mother. My chest tightened. I picked it up. “Amber, you useless brat! I heard you got a fancy new job! Send me fifteen thousand dollars right now!” “Your brother Tyler has his state civil service exam next week. Chloe told me he has a massive block in his career sector. She said he needs a ten-thousand-dollar high-frequency crystal pyramid to pass!” I gripped the phone tightly. Chloe’s scam had actually reached my own family. “Did you hear me, Amber?! Send the money now!” “Ethan promised he would pay for it, but he called today saying his investments are frozen! You’re his ex-girlfriend—it’s basically your fault his business failed. You owe us this money!” The sheer absurdity of her logic made me laugh. “My fault? Am I Ethan’s mother or his keeper?” “And what the hell is a ten-thousand-dollar crystal pyramid?” My golden-child brother, Tyler, had graduated from a bottom-tier college and spent the last three years playing video games in his room, living off our parents. He claimed he was “studying for the civil service exam,” but he hadn’t even opened a textbook. And my mother honestly believed a plastic pyramid would make him pass? Did she think the examiners were brain-dead? My mother yelled through the speaker, “What do you know?! Chloe blessed that pyramid herself! She said once Tyler puts it on his desk, the universe will write the answers for him! He’s destined to be a high-ranking government official!” “I’m telling you, Amber, if Tyler fails this exam, it’s because your trashy energy cursed him!” “I don’t have any money,” I said, my voice dead and cold. “Not fifteen thousand, not fifteen cents.” “If you believe that scammer so much, why don’t you sell your house to pay her?” The phone erupted into screeching. “You ungrateful, selfish bitch! Why did I even raise you?!” “You’re ruining your own brother’s future! If you don’t send the money, I will come to your office and make a scene! I’ll tell everyone you refuse to support your aging parents!” I hung up without a second thought. Growing up, every good thing in that house went to Tyler. I got the leftovers. My college tuition and living expenses were paid entirely through my own sweat, sleepless nights of part-time jobs, and academic scholarships. And now, they wanted to bleed me dry for a fake psychic? In their dreams. That afternoon, I met with Julian to brief him on Chloe’s next moves. Since Summit had rejected her, her cash flow was completely dry. She needed quick cash, and she needed it now. “She’s hosting a ‘Cosmic Awakening Seminar’ this weekend,” I explained. “Tickets are $2,500 each, and she’s hosting a VIP auction for high-ticket ‘blessed artifacts’ at the venue.” Julian raised an eyebrow. “$2,500? That’s a very aggressive scam.” “It’s aggressive because she’s desperate.” “Chloe is backed by a predatory talent agency run by a guy named Richie Miller. He’s a shady ex-coal mogul who washed his money into social media. He’s her sugar daddy and her main investor. But Richie is incredibly paranoid. If he finds out Chloe is losing his money, he will ruin her.” Julian looked at me. “What do you need from me?” “I need your best legal team. And…” I paused. “I need you to use your connections to make sure the police show up at the venue exactly on time.” “I’m going to smash her entire business to pieces.” Julian smiled. “Amber, Summit doesn’t do favors for free. What do I get in return?” “I will deliver Richie Miller’s internal money-laundering ledger to you. Once his agency collapses, Summit can buy up their premium digital assets for pennies on the dollar.” JuJulian stared at me for a long moment. “Deal. Not only do you get the legal team, but I’ll also personally go with you to watch the show.”

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My boyfriend vanished without a trace three years ago. I searched every corner of the city, posted flyers, and exhausted every lead, but found nothing. Until last week. He suddenly appeared at my doorstep, covered in horrific wounds. He told me he had been kidnapped and trafficked to an illegal brick kiln in the middle of nowhere, and it took him three agonizing years to finally escape. My heart broke into a million pieces. Trembling with pity, I brewed him healing tea, dressed his wounds, and took care of him twenty-four hours a day for seven whole days. But this morning, the police knocked on my door. “We found a body at an abandoned brick kiln last night. The medical examiner estimates the time of death was about a week ago.” “The deceased is your boyfriend, Julian.” I froze. “That’s impossible. He’s been staying with me all week.” *** “That’s impossible,” I repeated, my voice shaking. The detective opposite me frowned, pushing the case file across the metal table. “Ms. Harper Vance, we’ve already run the checks. The victim had Julian’s driver’s license in his wallet. The facial recognition database matches the missing person report you filed three years ago perfectly.” I could hear the tremor in my own breath. “But he’s been with me this entire week. In my apartment. He hasn’t left the room.” The two detectives exchanged a heavy look. The older one was Detective Carter. I had seen him dozens of times. Three years ago, I practically lived at the police station, pleading for updates every week. Then it became once a month. Eventually, I thought I’d never have to go back. Detective Carter pulled a glossy photo from the manila folder and laid it in front of me. I looked down, and my stomach instantly violently churned. A wave of cold nausea hit me. It was a body, lying on a metal slab, eyes closed, skin a sickly ash-gray. The background was dark, likely taken at the crime scene under harsh camera flashes. Every grim detail was painfully sharp. It was Julian. No, wait. It was his face. It was definitely Julian’s face. I stared at the photo for what felt like an eternity, until Detective Carter gently called my name. “Harper?” I snapped my head up. “This isn’t him.” “We ran the facial recognition. It’s a ninety-eight percent match.” Detective Carter’s voice was flat, stating an undeniable, cold fact. “And he had Julian’s ID. Name, date of birth, social security number—everything matches the file from your missing person report.” “But—” “Harper.” He cut me off gently. “Julian’s immediate family has passed away. His parents died in a car crash shortly after he went missing three years ago. You know this, right?” I knew. Of course I knew. Four months after Julian vanished, his devastated parents drove to another state following a fake lead about his whereabouts. They crashed on the highway. I was completely numb back then. When I got the call, I didn’t even know how to cry. Later, I was the one who handled their funeral and packed up their belongings, thinking that if Julian ever came back, at least he would have something left of his family. But he never came back. “So right now, you are the only emergency contact we have on file,” Detective Carter said. “We need you to come to the morgue to formally identify the body and sign the paperwork.” My mouth opened, but no sound came out. “He’s sleeping in my bedroom right now,” I said, pointing toward the hallway. “If you don’t believe me, I’ll go wake him up. You can see for yourselves.” I stood up abruptly and walked toward the bedroom. I was walking too fast, stumbling over my own feet, but I didn’t care. I pushed the bedroom door open. The bed was empty. ***

The duvet was tossed to one side, as if someone had just gotten up. I walked over and pressed my hand against the sheet. It was ice cold. “Julian?” I called out, my voice barely a whisper, as if afraid to shatter the silence. No answer. I called again, louder this time. Still, only silence. I turned and checked the bathroom. Empty. The kitchen. Empty. The balcony. Empty. My apartment was tiny—barely six hundred square feet. You could see the whole place in one glance. I stood in the middle of the living room, looking at the two detectives who had followed me in. Seeing the pity on their faces made me feel like a complete lunatic. “Maybe he went out to buy groceries,” I muttered. Detective Carter didn’t say a word. He just watched me. I looked down at the coffee table. Last night, I had brewed a mug of herbal tea for Julian. It was a dark, bitter home remedy to help him sleep. He had only drunk half of it, complaining it tasted like liquid dirt, so I left the mug on the table. I had told him I would make him a fresh cup today. But the mug was gone. No, it wasn’t just the mug. My heart skipped a beat as I looked around. For the past week, the coffee table had been cluttered with ointment tubes, rolls of gauze, antiseptic wipes, and cotton swabs. Julian’s wounds needed dressing every day. I had accumulated a small mountain of bloody bandages, which I kept in a trash bag by the door, intending to take it down to the dumpster. Now, there was nothing. The coffee table was sparkling clean. The half-empty mug was gone. The gauze was gone. The trash bag by the door was gone. No. This was all wrong. I stood there, my ears ringing. Something dark and terrifying was clawing its way up my throat, but I forced it down. Detective Carter stepped closer to me. “Harper, are you alright?” “He came back,” I said, turning to him, emphasizing every single word. “He really came back. Last Wednesday night, he knocked on my door. He was covered in blood and bruises. I barely recognized him. He said he was trapped in a forced labor camp and spent three years trying to escape. I made him soup, I dressed his wounds, I held him for seven nights. I didn’t dream this. It wasn’t in my head. He was here.” Detective Carter was quiet for a long moment. “Then why didn’t you call the police?” I froze. Why didn’t I call the police? Because Julian begged me not to. “He said…” I scrambled to piece together the memories of that night. “He said the owners of the brick kiln had powerful connections. He said the local cops were paid off, and if we reported it, they’d just drag him back. He told me he just wanted to hide out for a while until the dust settled. He said having me was enough. He didn’t want anyone else to know.” Detective Carter looked at me, his eyes filled with a complicated mixture of skepticism and concern. “During these seven days, did anyone else see him?” I thought about it. “No. He never left the apartment. Aside from my quick runs to the pharmacy and grocery store down the street, I stayed by his side the entire time.” “What about security cameras? Does your building have CCTV?” “It’s an old building. The cameras in the lobby have been broken for years. Management never fixed them.” Detective Carter nodded slowly. The younger officer next to him whispered, “Sir, this is getting a bit too…” Detective Carter raised a hand, silencing him. “Harper, come with us to the station first. Let’s get the identification over with.” ***

His tone had softened, laced with sympathy. “We can figure out the rest later.” I looked at him, then at the eerily clean coffee table, and finally nodded. The entire drive to the precinct, my mind was racing, trying to find the glitch in reality. The night Julian knocked on my door was last Wednesday. I remembered it clearly because I had worked late. I had grabbed a cup of instant ramen from the convenience store downstairs, planning to have a sad dinner. As I approached my building’s entrance, I saw a shadow slumped against the brick wall. I gasped, instinctively stepping back. The shadow moved, and a voice, raspy and broken, called out, “Harper.” It was Julian. I stood frozen. The cup of ramen slipped from my hands, rolling to a stop near his dirty sneakers. He took two agonizing steps forward, and the streetlights illuminated his face. He was unrecognizable. His face was a map of purple bruises, his lip was split, one eye was swollen shut, and his clothes were tattered rags. His exposed arms were covered in a horrific lattice of old and new scars. He was limping heavily, his left leg dragging. “Julian?” my voice cracked. He nodded weakly. I rushed to him, my hands hovering over his body, terrified of hurting him. He was a walking open wound. In the end, I just stood there, tears streaming down my face. “How… how are you…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. He looked at me through his one good eye, a faint, emotional glint shining through the pain. “Harper, I escaped,” he whispered. The details after that were a blur. I remember helping him up the stairs, guiding him to the sofa, and frantically grabbing my first-aid kit. His injuries were worse than they looked. His back was covered in angry whip welts—some scabbed over, others still oozing blood. His feet were a mess of popped blisters and thick, dirty calluses. I cried the entire time I applied the antiseptic, my hands shaking. He remained incredibly quiet, only letting out a sharp gasp when the alcohol stung his raw skin. Once I finished wrapping him up, he leaned back against the sofa, looked at me, and suddenly said, “Harper, don’t call the cops.” I blinked. “Why?” “The people who ran that place… they have people everywhere. The police won’t help.” “I saw a guy try to report them once. They sent him right back. He didn’t survive the night.” “But we can’t just—” “Harper.” He reached out and squeezed my hand. “Just let me catch my breath first, okay? I’ve been running for three years. I just want to be safe with you for a few days.” Looking into his desperate eyes, I nodded. Over the next week, I called in sick to work and stayed by his side. He was too weak to move much, so he spent most of his time in bed. I cooked for him, kept him hydrated, and wiped his feverish brow. He didn’t talk much. Whenever I asked about his time at the labor camp, he would shudder and shake his head, saying he couldn’t bear to relive it. When I asked how he survived those three years, he just looked at me and said, “By thinking of you.” There was one moment, while I was heating up some soup, he watched me from the kitchen doorway and said, “You still have the same habit. You always let it boil over first, then panic and turn the heat down.” I smiled. “How did you know?” “You used to make me soup when we lived in our college dorm.” “Like that time I had the flu, and you insisted on making some terrible vegetable broth that tasted like hot dishwater. I couldn’t swallow a single sip.” Now, sitting in the back of the police cruiser, staring at the blurred city lights outside, I scrutinized every single memory from the past week. His words. His gestures. The way he looked at me. Everything was so normal. He remembered my favorite foods, the places we used to go, the stupid arguments we had. At one point, I casually mentioned how much I missed my old cat who ran away years ago. He immediately said, “You mean Milo? The chubby orange tabby? You cried for two weeks and searched every shelter in the city.” If this man wasn’t Julian, how could he possibly know these intimate details? ***

But… The cruiser pulled up to the precinct. Detective Carter opened the door. “We’re here.” The process of identifying the body was faster than I expected. I was led into a cold, sterile room. On the gurney in the center lay a body covered in a white sheet. An assistant walked over and pulled the sheet down, revealing the face. It was clean. The dirt, the blood, and the bruises were gone. There was only the pale, lifeless skin and closed eyes. But the facial features were unmistakably Julian’s. The jawline, the curve of his brow—it was him. I stood there, a cold dread wrapping around my spine. This was Julian. But this wasn’t Julian. Two violently clashing voices roared in my head, leaving me completely disoriented. “Harper?” Detective Carter’s voice cut through the fog. “Can you confirm? Is this Julian?” I walked closer to the gurney, staring at the cold face. Slowly, I reached out, took the corpse’s left wrist, and turned it over. There should have been a scar. Julian had a deep, jagged scar on his left wrist from a dark period during his senior year of high school. He had attempted suicide during a severe depressive episode. He survived, but the ugly pink scar remained. When we were together, I used to gently trace that scar, asking if it still hurt. He would always smile and say it only hurt when he remembered how lonely he was before he met me. But this wrist was completely smooth. Clean, unblemished skin. Not even a faint scratch. I whipped my head around to face Detective Carter. “This isn’t Julian.” Detective Carter walked over, glanced at the wrist, and then looked back at me. “Are you sure?” “Julian has a prominent scar on his left wrist.” I pointed at the dead man’s bare skin. “It’s deep and impossible to miss. This man doesn’t have it.” Detective Carter fell silent for a few seconds. He pulled out the DNA report and reviewed it again. “But the DNA matches,” he said, handing me the document. “See for yourself.” I snatched the paper, my eyes scanning down to the bold print at the bottom: *99.97% DNA match with Julian’s deceased parents’ DNA database.* My hands began to tremble violently. “This is impossible.” I looked up, panic rising in my chest. “If this dead man is Julian… then who the hell was living in my apartment this past week?” Detective Carter stared at me, silent. “He was there,” my voice cracked into a sob. “For seven days, he slept in my bed. I fed him. I kissed him. He called me Harper. He knew everything about us! If Julian is dead on this table, then who was that man?” “Harper, please, calm down.” “How can I be calm?” I snapped. “The DNA says this is Julian, but Julian has a scar! This makes absolutely no sense!” Detective Carter frowned, examining the corpse’s wrist again. “Is it possible you misremembered? Maybe the scar faded over the years?” “I didn’t misremember!” I yelled, tears finally spilling over. “I touched that scar thousands of times. It was about two inches long, slightly raised, and lighter than the rest of his skin. I could draw it with my eyes closed!” Detective Carter turned to the medical examiner standing nearby. “Can you explain this?” The medical examiner stepped forward, carefully examining both of the corpse’s wrists. “There is absolutely no scar tissue here. But DNA doesn’t lie. Unless…”

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My girlfriend had been missing for three whole years. I had searched every corner of the city, followed every lead, but found absolutely nothing. Until last Wednesday, when she suddenly showed up at my doorstep, covered in bruises and cuts. She told me she had been kidnapped and forced to work in an illegal sweatshop, and that it had taken her three agonizing years to finally escape. My heart broke just looking at her. Shaking, I brewed herbal remedies for her, applied ointment to her wounds, and took care of her day and night for seven straight days. But this morning, the police knocked on my door. “Last night, we found a body in an abandoned sweatshop on the outskirts of town. Time of death was estimated to be about a week ago.” “The victim has been identified as your girlfriend.” I froze. “That’s impossible. She’s been staying with me all week.” “It’s not impossible.” The officer opposite me frowned, pushing the file folder on the desk closer to me. “Mr. Lucas Hunt, we’ve already verified the identity. The deceased had her ID on her, and our system database confirmed her fingerprint match. It’s Chloe Vance, the girl you reported missing three years ago.” I heard my own voice trembling. “But she’s been staying with me this entire week. In my apartment. She hasn’t left at all.” The two officers exchanged a look. The older one was Officer Miller. I had met him several times before. Three years ago, I used to report to the station almost every week, then it became once a month, and eventually, I thought I’d never have to come back here again. Officer Miller pulled a photo from the folder and placed it in front of me. I looked down, and my stomach instantly churned with a wave of intense nausea. It felt like a physical blow to my chest. The photo showed a person lying on a metal table, eyes closed, skin a sickly grayish-white. The background was dark, likely taken at the crime scene. The camera flash hit her face, making every brutal detail blindingly clear. It was Chloe. No, wait. It was that face. It was Chloe’s face. I stared at the photo for a long time, so long that Officer Miller had to call my name softly. “Lucas?” I looked up. “This isn’t her.” “We’ve already run a facial recognition scan. It’s over a ninety-eight percent match.” Officer Miller’s tone was flat, stating a fact that left no room for doubt. “Plus, she had her ID on her. The name, the social security number, everything matches. We pulled your old missing person report, too. All the details are identical.” “But—” “Lucas.” He cut me off. “The victim’s immediate family members have all passed away. Her parents died in a car crash shortly after she went missing three years ago. You knew about that, right?” I knew. Of course I knew. Four months after Chloe vanished, her parents had driven out of state to look for her. They crashed on the highway. I was completely numb during that period. When I got the call, I didn’t even know how to react. Later, I was the one who handled their funeral and sorted through their things, thinking that if Chloe ever came back, at least she’d have something left of them. But she never came back. “So, the only legal contact we can find right now is you,” Officer Miller said. “We need you to come to the morgue, identify the body, and sign the release papers.” I opened my mouth, trying to say something, but the words died in my throat. “She’s sleeping in my bedroom right now,” I said, pointing toward the hallway of my apartment. “If you don’t believe me, I can go call her out right now.” I stood up immediately and walked toward the bedroom. I knew I was walking too fast, even stumbling a little, but I didn’t care. I pushed the bedroom door open. The bed was empty.

The blanket was tossed to one side, as if someone had just gotten up. I walked over and touched the sheets. They were cold. “Chloe?” I called out, my voice quiet, as if I was afraid of waking someone. No response. I called her name again, louder this time. Still, silence. I turned and checked the bathroom. Empty. The kitchen. Empty. The balcony. Empty. My apartment was tiny—barely six hundred square feet. You could see the whole place in one glance. I stood in the middle of the living room, looking at the two officers who had followed me in. Seeing the expressions on their faces, I suddenly felt like an absolute idiot. “She… she probably went out to buy some groceries,” I muttered. Officer Miller didn’t say anything. He just watched me. I looked down at the coffee table. Last night, I had brewed a hot remedy for Chloe. It was a dark, bitter liquid. She had only drank half of it, complaining it was too bitter, and left the rest on the table. I had told her she could finish it tomorrow, that I’d make her a fresh batch. Now, the mug was gone. No, it wasn’t just the mug. I suddenly realized that all the medical supplies I’d been using—the ointment jars, the gauze, the antiseptic, the cotton swabs—which had been piled messily next to the coffee table, were gone. Chloe’s wounds needed daily dressing. Every time I changed her bandages, I would put the blood-stained gauze into a trash bag by the door, planning to take it down later. Now, everything was gone. The coffee table was completely clean. The half-empty mug was gone, the gauze was gone, the medicine jars were gone. This wasn’t right. None of this made sense. I stood there, my head buzzing. Something dark was clawing its way up my throat, but I forced myself to swallow it down. Officer Miller walked up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Lucas, are you okay?” “She came back,” I said, turning to look at him, emphasizing every single word. “She really came back. Last Wednesday night, she knocked on my door. She was covered in cuts, her face was bloody, and I barely recognized her. She told me she had been kidnapped and trafficked to a sweatshop, and she’d been running for three years to escape. I cooked for her, bandaged her wounds, and took care of her for seven days. I didn’t dream this. I didn’t make this up. She was here.” Officer Miller was silent for a moment. “Then why didn’t you call the police?” I froze. Why didn’t I call the police? Because Chloe begged me not to. “She said…” I tried desperately to recall that night. “She said the people running the sweatshop had powerful connections. She said the police wouldn’t help and would just send her back. She told me she wanted to lay low for a while until things blew over. She said having me was enough, that she didn’t want anyone else to know.” Officer Miller looked at me, his eyes filled with something I couldn’t quite read. “During these seven days, did anyone else see her?” I thought about it. “No. She never left the apartment. Other than running down to get groceries and medicine, I was with her the entire time.” “What about security cameras? Did the cameras at your building entrance catch her?” “My building is old. The security cameras have been broken for years. Management never fixed them.” Officer Miller nodded slowly but didn’t say anything else. The younger officer beside him whispered, “Sir, this is getting a bit too…” Officer Miller raised a hand to silence him. “Lucas, come back to the station with us first. Identify the body.”

His voice softened slightly. “We’ll figure out the rest later.” I looked at him, then at the empty coffee table, and finally nodded. All the way to the station in the back of the police cruiser, my mind was racing, trying to figure out where things had gone wrong. The night Chloe came back was last Wednesday. I remembered it clearly because I had worked late that night. I had grabbed a cup of instant ramen from the convenience store downstairs, thinking I’d just have a quick dinner. As I walked up to my building entrance, I saw a shadow slumped against the wall. I startled, instinctively taking a step back. The shadow moved, and a voice, raspy and incredibly hoarse, called out, “Lucas.” It was Chloe. I froze on the spot. The cup of ramen dropped from my hands, rolling on the concrete before stopping at her feet. She took two steps forward, and only then did the dim streetlamp illuminate her face. She was covered in bruises. Her lip was split, her eyes were swollen almost shut, and her clothes were completely tattered, revealing arms covered in layers of old and fresh scars. She limped heavily, as if one of her legs was badly injured. “Chloe?” my voice shook. She nodded. I rushed over, wanting to hold her, but I didn’t even know where to touch. She was so battered I was terrified of hurting her more. In the end, I just stood there, tears streaming down my face. “How did you…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. She looked at me, and through her swollen eyelids, I saw tears glistening. “Lucas, I escaped,” she whispered. I didn’t remember much of what happened next. I just remembered helping her upstairs, setting her down on the sofa, and frantically searching for the first-aid kit. Her injuries were far worse than they looked. Her back was covered in whip scars—some had scabbed over, others were still oozing blood. Her feet were covered in blisters that had popped and healed over and over again, leaving thick calluses. I cried the entire time I applied antiseptic to her wounds. She remained incredibly quiet, only letting out a sharp gasp when it stung, never screaming. Once I finished bandaging her, she leaned back against the sofa, looked at me, and suddenly said, “Lucas, don’t call the cops.” I blinked. “Why?” “The owner of that place has people in high places. Going to the police is useless.” “I saw a girl try to call them once. They just brought her back and beat her twice as hard.” “But we can’t just—” “Lucas.” She grabbed my hand. “Just let me catch my breath first, okay? I’ve been running for three years. I just want a few quiet days with you.” Looking into her eyes, I couldn’t say no. I nodded. For the next week, I took some paid time off and didn’t leave her side. Because she was so badly hurt, she spent most of her time lying down. I made her soup, brewed herbal remedies, cooked, and helped her clean up. She didn’t speak much. Whenever I asked about the sweatshop, she’d just shake her head and say she didn’t want to talk about it. When I asked how she survived those three years, she simply said, “By thinking of you.” Once, while I was brewing some herbal tea for her, she watched me from the kitchen doorway and suddenly said, “You still have the same habit. Bring it to a boil on high heat first, then let it simmer on low.” I smiled. “How did you know?” “You used to make it for me.” “Remember that time I had a terrible cold? You insisted on brewing this fancy herbal remedy. You spent four hours on it, and in the end, it was so bitter I couldn’t even swallow a sip.” Now, sitting in the back of the police car, looking at the streetlights flashing past the window, I desperately replayed every detail of this past week. Her words, her gestures, the way she looked at me. Everything was so normal. She remembered my favorite foods, the places we used to go to, every little promise I had made. Once, I casually mentioned a stray cat we used to feed that eventually got lost, and how I had cried for days over it. She said, “Yeah, it was a ginger cat named Butterscotch. You searched the whole neighborhood for two weeks after he disappeared.” If this person wasn’t the real Chloe, how could she possibly know all these intimate details?

But then… The car stopped in front of the police department. Officer Miller opened the door and looked at me. “We’re here.” The identification process went much faster than I had anticipated. I was led into a cold, sterile room. There was a metal table in the center covered with a white sheet. An assistant walked over and gently pulled back the top half of the sheet. I saw the face. It was clean. The bruises were gone, the dried blood was gone. There was only grayish-white skin and closed eyes. But the features were unmistakably Chloe’s. The brow, the nose, the shape of her jaw—it was all her. I stood there, a cold sweat breaking out across my back. This was Chloe. No, this wasn’t Chloe. Two conflicting voices screamed in my head, tearing at my sanity until I couldn’t tell what was real anymore. “Lucas?” someone whispered beside me. I turned and saw Officer Miller looking at me with a worried expression. “Can you confirm if this is Chloe Vance?” I stepped closer to the table, staring at the face for a long time. Then, I reached out, took the corpse’s left wrist, and flipped it over. There should have been a scar. Chloe had a very deep scar on her left wrist, from a suicide attempt back in high school. She had told me she was severely depressed back then and wanted to end it all. She was saved, but the scar remained. When we were together, I used to gently run my thumb over that scar, asking if it still hurt. She’d smile and say it didn’t hurt anymore, it just looked a bit ugly. But on this wrist, there was nothing. The skin was smooth, pale, and completely unblemished. Not even a faint line. I whipped my head around to look at Officer Miller. “This isn’t Chloe.” Officer Miller stepped forward, glanced at the wrist, and then looked back at me. “Are you sure?” “Chloe has a deep scar on her left wrist.” “It’s very prominent. This person doesn’t have it.” Officer Miller was silent for a few seconds. He pulled out the DNA report and looked at it again. “But the DNA matches.” He handed the report to me. “See for yourself.” I took the paper, my eyes locking onto the bold letters at the bottom. *DNA match probability with Chloe Vance’s parents’ reference samples: 99.97%.* My hands began to shake violently. “This is impossible.” I looked up at him. “If this body is Chloe, then who the hell was staying in my apartment this past week?” Officer Miller stared at me, speechless. “She came back,” my voice cracked. “For seven days, she was with me. I cooked for her, I bandaged her. She called me Lucas. She remembered everything about us. If this is Chloe, then who is she?!” “Lucas, you need to calm down.” “How can I calm down?!” I snapped, interrupting him. “The DNA matches, which means this body is Chloe. But Chloe has a scar on her wrist, and this body doesn’t! It makes no sense!” Officer Miller frowned, looking back at the corpse’s wrist. “Is it possible you misremembered? Maybe the scar wasn’t that deep, or it faded over time?” “I would never forget that scar,” I said, glaring at him. “I touched it a thousand times. It runs from left to right, about two inches long, and the middle is slightly raised and lighter than the surrounding skin. I could draw it with my eyes closed.” Officer Miller remained silent for a moment before turning to the medical examiner standing nearby. “Can you explain this?” The medical examiner walked over, examined the left wrist closely, and then checked the right one. “There is indeed no scar tissue here,” she said. “But DNA doesn’t lie. Unless…”

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I was desperately, miserably in love with Selene. Even though she kept a string of lovers on her leash, and had openly cheated on me with Hunter—her family’s former adopted heir. I still couldn’t bring myself to let her go. I hit the gym religiously, pumped my body with endless fertility medications, all because I desperately wanted to have a child with her to secure our marriage. Until today, when the doctor finally told me my fertility metrics had met the standards. Holding the lab report, I rushed to her office without wasting a single second. “Selene, I—” My voice caught in my throat. Selene was wrapping her arms around her newly hired male secretary, kissing him passionately. Hearing me enter, she cast a cold, irritated glance over her shoulder. “Get the hell out!” At that exact moment, a cold splash of reality hit me. I could tolerate having a cheating wife. But could our future child tolerate having a mother like this? *** ### It was half an hour later when the office door finally clicked open. Out stepped the new secretary. He casually adjusted his rumpled shirt, throwing me a smug, disdainful smirk before sauntering down the hallway. I had witnessed this kind of silent provocation hundreds, if not thousands of times. In the beginning, it would break my heart and leave me in tears. But now? I was entirely numb to it. I pushed the door open and walked in. Hearing my footsteps, Selene turned her head. The moment her eyes fell on me, her brow furrowed in habitual annoyance. “What are you doing back here?” “Didn’t I tell you to stop coming to my office for no damn reason?” I hesitated. Quietly, I slipped the fertility lab report deep into my bag and spoke in a calm, flat voice: “Selene, let’s get a divorce.” The hand Selene used to hold her slim cigarette paused mid-air. She let out a mocking laugh and looked at me. “What? You can’t take it anymore?” “Lest you forget, you were the one who begged on your knees and signed that prenuptial agreement, giving up your dignity just to marry into my family.” As soon as the words left her mouth, her phone on the desk buzzed twice. It was Hunter. Selene glanced at the screen. She didn’t even bother to dismiss me, answering the call right in front of me. Her voice instantly turned sweet and dripping with affection: “Hey, babe. Miss me already?” “Of course I love you the most. You’re my only baby.” “You’re back in the country? Great, I’ll see you in a bit.” A man’s low, playful laughter drifted faintly from the receiver. A few minutes later, Selene hung up and redirected her icy gaze back to me. She tilted her chin toward a corner of her massive mahogany desk. “The divorce papers are right there. I’ve already signed my part.” “If you want to sign it, go ahead.” “It’s not like this is the first or second time you’ve thrown a tantrum about getting a divorce.” Selene stood up, grabbed her designer coat from the back of her chair, and walked toward the door. She paused at the threshold, throwing a cold warning over her shoulder: “Oh, and don’t bother waiting up for me tonight. Stop playing the dutiful, pathetic husband waiting at the door.” “It annoys me, and it makes my mother nag at me every time she sees you like that.” With that, she opened the door and walked out without a single backward glance. Faced with Selene’s relentless humiliation and disdain, I probably should have collapsed onto the floor, sobbing my heart out. But strangely, My eyes were completely dry. I couldn’t squeeze out a single tear. I walked over to her desk, pulled out the divorce agreement, and flipped to the last page. Selene’s elegant, sharp signature was already penned there. “Heh.” I shook my head, letting out a self-deprecating chuckle. I didn’t even bother reading the clauses about property division or alimony. None of it mattered to me anymore. I pulled a pen from the holder. Stroke by stroke, I wrote down my name, Ashton, and took my copy of the agreement. It was only when I walked out of the corporate building that I pulled two other papers from my pocket: the fertility approval sheet, and an early-stage stomach cancer diagnosis. I had honestly wanted to leave a child behind for her. *** ###

When I returned to the estate, Victoria was waiting for me in the living room. The moment she saw me, she hurried over. “Ashton, you’re back!” “You went to the hospital for your check-up today, right? Did the results come out? I noticed you haven’t had much of an appetite lately. Are you feeling unwell?” I lowered my gaze, forcing a calm lie: “I’m fine, Victoria.” “The doctor said it’s just some minor indigestion and stomach sensitivity. Nothing to worry about.” Victoria had always been incredibly kind to me. Since I had already decided to divorce Selene, there was no need to make this gentle older woman worry about my health. The anxiety on Victoria’s face softened, and her tone remained warm: “Oh… thank goodness. Your health is the most important thing. I’ll have Maria brew some herbal tea to soothe your stomach. Drink it before bed, okay?” “Thank you, Victoria.” Victoria seemed to have more to say, but the heavy front doors of the villa were suddenly pushed open. Was Selene back? Didn’t she say she wasn’t coming home tonight? A pair of polished black leather shoes stepped into the foyer, followed by a smug, handsome face. It was Hunter. “Good evening, Victoria. Hey, Ashton.” “Selene brought me over for dinner. I hope you don’t mind.” The smile on Victoria’s face instantly froze. She whipped her head around, glaring at Selene with sheer fury. No matter how wild Selene acted outside, Victoria could turn a blind eye as long as it wasn’t brought into the open. But bringing her side-piece into our family home was a direct slap to my face. “Selene, how dare you—” I quickly stepped forward, gently rubbing Victoria’s back to soothe her. “Victoria, please calm down. Remember what the doctor said about your high blood pressure. Anger is bad for your heart.” “It’s just dinner.” Then, I turned around to face Selene and Hunter. I offered them a polite, empty smile. “I don’t mind at all.” “Maria, please set two more plates. Dinner is ready. You two can wash up and join us.” Perhaps my reaction was too peaceful. Selene raised an eyebrow in surprise, searching my face as if trying to figure out what kind of mind game I was playing. At the dining table, Hunter was radiant. He constantly used his fork to pile Selene’s favorite dishes onto her plate, his voice dripping with artificial sweetness: “Selene, try this. You’ve been working so hard lately, you need to eat more.” Selene didn’t reject his advances. Instead, she smiled, picked up a piece of perfectly deboned fish, and held it to Hunter’s lips. “You should eat too, babe.” Hunter giggled, taking it from her fork. As he chewed, his eyes darted toward me, flashing a triumphant, mocking look. Victoria’s face turned completely pale. Unable to tolerate the disrespect any longer, she slammed her bowl onto the table with a loud *clack*. “I’m done.” She got up and left the dining room in a hurry. I didn’t raise my head. I just kept chewing my food slowly and methodically. The doctor had told me this morning that because it was early-stage stomach cancer, we had caught it just in time. But I had to eat properly to prepare my body, or I wouldn’t even survive the surgery next week. Selene found my dead-silent reaction incredibly boring. Seeing that Victoria had left the table, she leaned into Hunter’s chest and said loudly, deliberately aiming her words at me: “Oh, by the way, Ashton. Don’t sleep in the master bedroom tonight.” “Hunter and I are using it.” “Go sleep in the guest room on the third floor.” Hunter let out a soft, performative laugh, wrapping his arm tightly around her waist. “Oh, Selene… don’t say things like that in public. It’s so embarrassing…” Only then did I look up, my voice steady: “Sure.” I stood up from my chair. “I’m finished. Enjoy your dinner.” The master bedroom or the guest room made no difference to me. I wasn’t picky about where I slept. For a cancer patient, getting enough sleep was my only priority. But my total indifference seemed to light a sudden, inexplicable fire in Selene’s chest. She abruptly shoved Hunter away, stood up, and blocked my path in three large strides. She grabbed my wrist with bruising force, her voice laced with sudden rage: “Stop right there!” “Ashton, who the hell do you think you’re giving attitude to?” *** ###

Her sudden burst of anger caught me off guard. What was Selene even mad about? In the past, I had behaved like a hysterical madman. I had done everything to track down evidence of her affairs, checked her phone for endless flirty texts, and tried to block every man who came near her. Back then, she despised me for it. She called me a psycho, a controlling freak. Now that I was finally giving her the freedom she wanted, why was she still angry? I felt incredibly exhausted. I took a deep breath, gently but firmly prying her fingers off my wrist. “I’m not giving you attitude, Selene. I’m just tired and want to rest.” I took two steps, then paused as something crossed my mind. I turned back. “By the way, I’ve signed the divorce papers. My signed copy is in my bag, and yours is back on your desk. If you have time tomorrow morning, let’s go to the attorney’s office to file the paperwork. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.” “I haven’t told Victoria about this yet. Her health is fragile, and I don’t want to shock her. You should find a gentler way to tell her later.” Selene let out a harsh, bitter laugh, her words dripping with sarcasm: “You’re calling her ‘Victoria’ already? How ungrateful.” “Ashton, if my mother hadn’t literally threatened to starve herself to death, a guy like you would have never even crossed my path, let alone married into the corporate dynasty.” My fingernails dug into my palms, turning my fingertips white. But I didn’t want to argue. I just kept my head down, remaining silent. My silence made Selene feel like she was punching a wall of soft cotton. Her irritation flared even higher. She pushed her plate away and stood up abruptly. “Fine! You’re in such a rush to leave? Let’s go tomorrow!” The next morning, the silence in the back of the town car was suffocating. Suddenly, Selene turned her head, a cruel, mocking smile playing on her lips. “Too bad Hunter was still asleep and couldn’t join us. Otherwise, once we file these papers, I could have proposed to him right outside. He’s been with me for years; it’s time I gave him a legal title.” I knew she was trying to get a rise out of me, so I didn’t take the bait. Instead, I turned to look at her. “Since we’re legally parting ways today, can you tell me the truth?” “Selene, why have you hated me so passionately all these years?” *** ###

The air in the car instantly froze. Selene’s throat bobbed, as if she were desperately suppressing a wave of fury. After a long pause, she whipped her head around and glared at me with pure venom. “Because you deserved it!” “Honestly, when I first met you, I actually liked you. But then you just *had* to play the desperate, pathetic puppy who wanted to marry into my family. You made my mother use her own life to force me into this marriage!” “I am so sick of it! I am sick of my mother controlling every single aspect of my life! I wanted freedom! I told you that back then, and you said you didn’t care as long as you could be with me. Well, this is what you get. You brought this entirely on yourself!” Selene screamed the words in one breath. Then, she slumped back against the leather seat, panting heavily. I listened to her, quiet and still. I wasn’t shocked, just incredibly amused by the sheer absurdity of it all. Looking at her flushed, angry face, I offered a sincere apology: “I’m sorry, Selene. For wasting these past few years of your life.” “Now that we are divorced, I promise I will never bother you again.” Selene didn’t reply, her brow furrowing even tighter. By the time the filing was complete and we returned to the estate, Selene remained dead silent. I had no desire to irritate her further, so I retreated directly to the third-floor guest room to pack my things. At dinner, the four of us sat together again: Victoria, Selene, Hunter, and myself. This time, Selene and Hunter weren’t acting overly touchy. But as the chandelier light caught Hunter’s wrist, my eyes snagged on a familiar glint of green. That was… That was my mother’s heirloom emerald bracelet! Shock and panic seized me. I stood up so fast my chair screeched, and I lunged across the table to grab Hunter’s wrist. “Give it back!” “That’s my mother’s bracelet! Who gave you permission to go into the master bedroom and ransack my jewelry box?” Hunter shrieked in pain as I gripped his wrist. But a split second later, a flash of smug satisfaction crossed his eyes. He instantly whimpered, tears pooling in his eyes. “What do you mean, your bracelet? Ashton, what are you talking about? I bought this myself a few days ago! I was planning on gifting it to Selene!” “Selene, he’s hurting me! Make him let go!” Selene stood up almost the exact second I grabbed Hunter. Hearing his whimper, she violently slapped my hand away without a shred of hesitation. “Ashton! Have you lost your damn mind? Let go of him!” “I knew you wouldn’t let this divorce go smoothly! It’s just a bracelet! If Hunter said he bought it, he bought it! Stop causing a scene over nothing!” I stared at Selene, my voice turning sharp and hysterical: “I’m causing a scene? Selene, open your eyes and look at it!” “This was in the safety deposit box of my mother’s estate! It’s her last legacy!” Selene glanced at the bracelet with irritation. It did look familiar. It probably was mine. But just as she opened her mouth to tell Hunter to take it off and give it back, Victoria slammed her hand on the table, standing up and pointing a shaking finger at Hunter. “You thief! I’ve seen that bracelet before. It belongs to Ashton. Give it back to him right now!” “You cheap, lying thief.” “Selene, let me tell you something. If you defend this parasite one more time, you will no longer have a mother!” Victoria’s threat instantly triggered Selene’s deep-seated rebellion. She stepped in front of Hunter, shielding him completely. “I said it’s Hunter’s, so it’s his.” “It’s just a piece of jewelry. I’ll buy Ashton a better one at the Sotheby’s auction tomorrow. Stop using every little thing to make Hunter’s life miserable!” Lies! That was the last physical memory I had of my late mother. Even if she bought me ten thousand bracelets, none of them would be the one my mother wore. Blinded by grief and panic, I threw myself forward, trying to wrench the bracelet from Hunter’s wrist. Selene pushed me back. Then Victoria joined the fray, trying to pull Selene away from me. In the chaotic scuffle, to keep me from reaching Hunter, Selene violently shoved me away— A massive force slammed into my shoulder. I didn’t expect her to use so much strength. My ankle twisted, and I lost my balance completely, falling backward like a chopped tree. *CRACK!* A sickening, dull thud echoed through the dining room. The lower half of my back slammed violently against the sharp, carved corner of the heavy mahogany dining table. In an instant, an agonizing, white-hot pain exploded from the point of impact, paralyzing my lungs and stripping away my ability to make a sound. Taking advantage of my fall, Selene grabbed Hunter’s hand and stormed out the door. “Stop! Selene, you absolute monster!” “Get back here! Someone stop them!” Victoria screamed at the top of her lungs, calling for the security guards. But Selene and Hunter had already vanished into the night. Victoria turned around, intending to comfort me, but the words died in her throat. Beside the dining table, I was slumped on the floor, surrounded by a rapidly expanding pool of dark red blood, my face as white as a sheet of paper. “Ashton—!” Victoria nearly fainted from shock. I was rushed to the ER, and the red “Surgery in Progress” light stayed on for an entire day and night. Meanwhile, Selene knew she was in the wrong. The next day, she took Hunter to an exclusive jewelry auction, intending to buy me an even more expensive emerald bracelet to replace the one she had let Hunter keep. While she was sitting in the VIP suite, browsing the catalog, The doors were suddenly kicked open. It was Victoria. Abandoning all her usual elegance and poise, she pushed past the bodyguards and stormed into the room. She held a thick manila envelope in her trembling hand. *SLAP!* Victoria marched right up to Selene and delivered a thunderous slap across her face. “Open it!” Victoria roared. Nursing her stinging cheek, Selene looked at Victoria’s devastated, tear-streaked face. For the first time, she felt a chill of panic. Seeing her hesitate, Victoria screamed again, “I said, open it!” With trembling fingers, Selene pulled the documents out of the envelope. Her eyes scanned the pages. Her pupils shrunk to pinpricks, and a horrific, strangled gasp escaped her throat: “No…” The tears Victoria had been holding back finally streamed down her face. She let out a broken, agonizing sob: “Look at it, Selene! Ashton is dead! You killed him! You killed my boy with your own hands!”

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When I was sixteen, a killer broke into our house, tortured and murdered my mother, and burned the place to the ground, erasing all the evidence. I was there. I watched the whole thing. My dad, my uncle, the cops—they asked me over and over what happened that night. I kept my mouth shut. They thought the trauma had made me mute, so they handed me a pen and paper, asking me to write down what the killer looked like. I still stayed silent. I didn’t move a muscle. Ten years later, I’m twenty-six. Because of my mother’s unsolved murder, my dad and I had a falling out. We hadn’t seen each other in eight years. But suddenly, he showed up. I came home from my shift to my tiny studio apartment, opened the door, and saw him sitting there with Uncle Leo. Both of them looked at me with freezing, cold eyes. “Vivian, did you kill your mother?” My body went completely rigid. I clenched my teeth, glaring at him with pure rage. He was my father. How could he even think, for a second, that I would kill my own mother? My dad read my expression and let out a cold, bitter laugh. “Then why won’t you tell us who did it?” “It’s been ten years, Vivian! How do you sleep at night? How do you eat?” “When you dream, does Susan’s burned body crawl out and ask you why you didn’t avenge her?!” I avoided his eyes and looked down. I didn’t know how to face him. He was only forty-six, but he looked sixty-four. The night my mom died, his hair turned white overnight. After that, he sold the house, the car, and everything we owned. He became obsessed, chasing leads like a madman, never giving up for ten long years. Now his back was hunched, but the burning desire for revenge in his eyes was still as sharp as ever. And now, he was locking onto me. “Vivian, how long are you going to play mute?” “I’ve been following you. You’re not mute! I saw you talking with my own eyes—” Furious, he pulled out his phone and played a blurry video. It was me, walking down the street. At a corner, I suddenly stopped, looked up, and murmured, “Don’t worry, don’t worry…” Then I looked down and kept walking. I had no idea my own father was stalking and doubting me. Suddenly, he grabbed my collar like a lunatic. “You know who the killer is! Why won’t you speak? Why play dumb?” “There’s only one explanation…” “You did it!” “You killed your mother!” Leo couldn’t take it anymore. He pulled David away from me. “Enough!” “My sister was tortured for hours before she died. How could Vivian do that to her?” My dad’s teeth gritted so hard I could hear them grinding. “She hated her mother! She’s a psycho!” “She’s capable of anything!” “Even if she didn’t pull the trigger, she’s an accomplice!” Looking into my dad’s bloodshot eyes, seeing the complex storm of emotions inside them, I knew my worst nightmare had come true. My dad had found out about the other case from ten years ago.

When I was sixteen, I was a sophomore in high school. My parents were always out of town running their business, and my grandma was too old to look after me. So my mom came back to our small town, rented an apartment for me, and stayed with me for a few months. Because she had been away for so long, and I was at that sensitive, awkward teenage phase, we barely spoke. We weren’t close at all. I went to school; she focused on her work. I usually came home late, but because she had to meet clients, negotiate prices, and go to business dinners, she came home even later. Once, I felt like someone was stalking me on my way home. I told her about it and asked her to pick me up after school. She promised she would, but she flaked. I waited for her at school until midnight. A massive thunderstorm hit. I couldn’t find anywhere to hide from the rain, so I had to run all the way home through the storm. That night, the nightmare happened. While taking a shortcut through a dark alley, the stalker jumped out and tackled me to the ground. The pouring rain and loud thunder swallowed my screams. When I finally stumbled back home, I was covered in half rain, half blood. My mom was fast asleep on the couch, the living room smelling heavily of alcohol. “Vivian?” Woken up by the metallic smell of blood, my mom opened her eyes. When she saw what I looked like, she sobered up instantly. She threw her arms around me and sobbed hysterically. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…” “Vivian…” “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault!” She said she was on her way to get me, but then a supplier offered her a drink, and she thought she could get a cheaper deal if she stayed. She thought I’d be fine. Ha. Maybe because of the physical pain, or maybe because of the burning hatred, I pushed her away. I didn’t want her to touch me. I only said one word: “911.” My mom started crying even harder. “We can’t call the cops!” “Vivian, if we call the cops, everyone in this town will know! How will you face people at school? What about your future? Your college applications?” “Mom is here, okay?” “I won’t leave anymore. I’ll stay here and protect you…” But less than three months later, she was brutally murdered. With her death, I thought that nightmare would stay buried forever. But my dad had found out. He slammed a worn, wrinkled notebook onto the table. “Your mother kept a diary. Before she died, she wrote down all the important things.” “She was afraid someone would find it, so she locked it in a metal box and hid it. It survived the fire, and now I have it.” My dad grabbed my collar again, shaking me. “Your mom made a mistake, but she didn’t mean to! She didn’t call the cops because she wanted to protect your reputation!” “How could you kill her for that?” “Are you even human?” My dad’s screams made my ears ring. Beside us, Leo didn’t try to stop him this time. Instead, with trembling hands, he picked up the diary from the table. It was indeed my mom’s neat handwriting. She had written about her guilt and how her negligence had led to my assault. There were smudges on the paper, likely from her tears. I could feel her deep, agonizing regret in every word. Leo finished reading, wiped his eyes, and said with a shaky voice, “David, calm down.” “Even with this… it doesn’t prove Vivian is the killer.” “My sister was stabbed over thirty times, and there were signs of sexual assault. Vivian couldn’t have done that.” Leo pushed my dad away, grabbing my hands with pleading eyes. “Vivian, did you hold a grudge against your mom, so you’re hiding the killer to punish her? Is that why you won’t help us find him?” “I swear to God, Vivian, if you just tell us who did it so your mom can rest in peace, I will get him myself!” “I’ll carve up the bastard who hurt you with my own hands!” Leo’s eyes were bloodshot, his gaze so intense I had to look away. Before I could react, my dad let out another bitter laugh. “You won’t need to do that. That piece of trash is already dead. And Vivian probably killed him!” “The police are already investigating. We’ll have answers soon.” “Vivian, I don’t want to throw my own daughter in prison.” “But I can’t let Susan rest in an unmarked grave of injustice. You forced my hand!”

They locked me in the room and took my phone. I could only sit there, waiting for the police investigation. My dad and Leo sat right outside, chain-smoking one cigarette after another. Whenever I locked eyes with my dad, I realized he didn’t see me as his daughter anymore. To him, I was an enemy. A monster that had tortured him for ten years. I didn’t blame him. I did watch my mother get murdered. I saw the killer’s face. I remembered everything. But no matter what he did, he would never get a single word out of my mouth. He loved my mom so much. After she died, getting revenge became the only thing keeping him alive. He had ruined his life, living like a ghost for ten years just to find the killer. But he had found nothing. Then he discovered I could speak, that I wasn’t actually mute from trauma, and that I was lying to him. I was hiding the truth. And then he found out about my assault. And the man who assaulted me had died a brutal death—his limbs broken and twisted—on a dark street corner just a week before my mom was killed. He suspected me. In his mind, I had a motive, and I was crazy and ruthless enough to do it. He believed I hated my mother, hired someone to kill her, and that was why I refused to name her killer. It was a very logical theory. I didn’t defend myself. I just silently waited for the police. *Ring… Ring…* My dad’s phone suddenly rang. He picked it up instantly. Detective Miller’s voice, which I knew all too well, came through the speaker. “David, are you with Vivian?” My dad’s voice was hoarse. “Yes! Did Vivian have anything to do with that bastard’s death?” “Yes. Keep her there. We’re on our way!” The moment the call ended, my dad’s fist crashed heavily into my face. “If you had the guts to kill the guy who hurt you, why did you have to hate your mother?” “She didn’t call the cops because she loved you! Things were different back then! She was terrified of the rumors destroying your life!” “Before she came back home, she couldn’t sleep at night. She would cry herself to sleep holding your picture!” “How… how could you…” He couldn’t finish his sentence. He completely broke down, burying his face in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably. Leo smoked in silence, looking at me as if I were a stranger. A monster. I held my swollen cheek, staring blankly at the ceiling. A tear slipped down my cheek, feeling slightly warm. I quickly wiped it away, whispering to myself in my head. *Soon. It’s almost over.* *Everything will end very soon.* Twenty minutes later, Detective Miller arrived with a few officers. He pulled out a pair of cold handcuffs and snapped them onto my wrists. “Vivian, you are under arrest in connection with a ten-year-old homicide. Come with us.”

In the interrogation room, Detective Miller put a crime scene photo on the table. Even though the man was dead, and even though ten years had passed. Seeing his face made me shudder uncontrollably. A deep, primal fear shook my soul. This was the man who had stalked and assaulted me ten years ago. It took me a long time to calm my breathing. Miller spoke. “Do you know him?” I nodded. “How?” There was no point in hiding it anymore. I reached for the pen to write it down, but Miller coughed. “Cut the act, Vivian. Your dad told us you can talk. You’re not mute.” I let out a bitter smile, dropped the pen, and spoke. “He assaulted me.” “Why didn’t you report it?” “My mom wouldn’t let me.” Miller’s voice turned incredibly sharp and intense. “So you took justice into your own hands and brutally murdered him?” I shook my head. “I didn’t kill him.” “Still denying it? Ten years ago, we couldn’t solve this case because of limited forensics. But after your dad prompted us to look into it again, we re-examined the victim’s preserved fingernail scrapings. We found your skin cells. The DNA is a perfect match.” Before I could say anything, Miller stood up, leaning over the table to pressure me. “Confess now, and I’ll talk to the DA for a plea deal. You were a minor ten years ago. You won’t get a long sentence.” “But if you keep fighting this, you will rot in prison for the rest of your life!” I just blinked, my expression unchanged. I wasn’t afraid of prison. Ten years ago, I had already prepared myself to spend the rest of my life behind bars. But now was not the time. Miller was bluffing. His evidence was weak, and he didn’t have enough to convict me. I took a deep breath and looked him dead in the eye. “I told you, I didn’t kill him.” “Then why is your DNA on his body?” I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember much from ten years ago. If you have solid proof, lock me up. If you don’t, let me go.” After that, no matter what they asked, I remained dead silent. Forty-eight hours later, they had nothing, and they had to release me. But the moment I stepped out of the precinct, my dad and Leo forced me into their car. Detective Miller pretended not to see, staying close by just to make sure things didn’t get violent. Inside the car, my dad glared at me with bloodshot eyes. “You talked to the detective. Drop the act.” “I’m asking you one last time. What happened the night your mother died?” “I swear to God, Vivian, if you keep lying to me, I will do something crazy.” “You can hire a hitman? So can I! I have plenty of ways to make you talk!” He looked completely insane. This unsolved case had lasted ten years. Ten years of my mother’s ghost begging for justice. It had driven everyone crazy. Honestly, I was losing my mind, too. Fortunately, I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. “Just wait. Give me one last month.” “In one month, I will tell you everything.” My dad gritted his teeth, shaking with rage. “Why a month? What game are you playing?” I didn’t answer. I looked out the window. Floating just outside the car was a soul that only I could see. She had been with me for ten years, and now she was about to fade away completely. I smiled slightly and waved in my mind. *Goodbye, Mom. I’ll be a good girl.* But in reality, I wouldn’t. I had lied to my dad for ten years. And I had lied to her for ten years, too.

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My childhood best friend lost contact while working deep undercover abroad. I immediately filed an application with the department to go in and assist him. When I finally found him, he was rotting. He had been tortured beyond recognition in a dark basement. But thankfully, he never opened his mouth. He kept his cover, and he kept his life. Over the next few years, the two of us worked in perfect, silent sync. Step by step, we climbed the ranks until we became the top two lieutenants of the cartel. We got closer and closer to the very core of the organization. Finally, on his 33rd birthday, we took them all down. The mission was complete. Looking at the plane tickets back home in my hand, my eyes suddenly welled up with tears. I hadn’t even flinched when I took a bullet to the shoulder last year, but now, I was sobbing. “Leo, our parents are avenged. We can finally go home.” I was just about to pull out the birthday gift I had prepared for him when Leo suddenly sighed. “Yeah. It’s been so long. I wonder if the old oak tree we used to climb still stands.” His eyes were red with emotion, but my heart stopped. A cold dread washed over me. Our parents had both been brutally murdered by drug traffickers when we were kids. Before we even entered the police academy, we knew we would face these monsters eventually. Back then, I suggested we cut our palms and become blood brothers, so that if one of us died, the other would carry on for both of us. But Leo had pointed at the oak tree in the backyard and said, “We’re already brothers, Mason. We don’t need a silly ritual. The ashes of our parents are buried right beneath this tree. All we need to do is get revenge. If there ever comes a day when one of us is captured, we must find a way to say the words ‘blood brothers’ to the other.” “It means: *I’m compromised. Do not believe a single word I say.*” But right now, we were completely safe. And yet, he had just looked me in the eye and brought up that tree. He wasn’t Leo. Then where was my best friend? Who was this man who had stood by my side, risking his life on the edge of a knife, fighting with me for years?

Noticing my sudden stiffness, “Leo” looked at me with concern. “What’s wrong, Mason?” he asked, his voice dripping with worry. “Is the PTSD kicking in? I know the pressure of the last few years has been insane.” Looking at the genuine concern in his eyes, I forced myself to relax slightly. My parents and his parents had been partners on the force. They were brutally tortured and killed by the cartel when we were young. Since then, I had suffered from severe insomnia and clinical anxiety. But I had Leo. Even though we were the same age, he was always the mature one, the strong one. With his help, I slowly put my shattered mind back together. Only Leo knew about my mental struggles. And I knew his face better than my own. The man standing in front of me looked exactly like my best friend. Even the tiny, faint scar near the corner of his lip was identical. Maybe he was just overwhelmed by the end of the mission? Maybe he actually forgot our secret code in the excitement? I decided to test him. “I’m fine. It’s just… when you mentioned the oak tree, I felt a pang of guilt.” “During the months you went missing, some cartel clean-up crew tracked down our old place and set it on fire. I was too busy preparing for my own undercover deployment to notice. The fire killed the tree. It burnt to ashes.” His eyes widened in shock. “Burnt? But our parents’ ashes were buried under it! Mason, did you manage to save them?” The burial of our parents’ ashes was a secret. No one in the world knew about it except the real Leo and me. My heart eased slightly. I was just about to answer when “Leo” rubbed his red eyes and sighed. “Forget it. What’s done is done. Don’t beat yourself up, Mason. We brought down the cartel. We got justice for them. Their spirits will understand.” He smiled warmly, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Besides, we are blood brothers. Whether the tree is there or not, we are brothers forever.” The words I was about to say choked in my throat like a fistful of dry gravel. He said it again. *Blood brothers.* If he had forgotten the code the first time, there was no way he wouldn’t have remembered it now. This was the sacred oath he made me swear the night before we entered the academy. It was about life, death, revenge, and our absolute core belief. We had branded those words into our very souls. “Yeah,” I forced a smile, my voice barely a whisper. “We’ll always be brothers.” “Leo, today is your birthday. Let’s not talk about sad things.” I subtly stepped back, breaking his touch, and pulled out the watch I had customized for him. Suddenly, my hand slipped. The watch hit the hard tile floor. The glass shattered. “Oh, damn it!” I gasped. “I am so sorry, Leo. Let me get this fixed. I’ll get you another one.” He waved his hand, smiling. “It’s fine, man. I don’t care about material stuff.” But I insisted. I told him I couldn’t leave the country without giving him a proper gift. I canceled our flight tickets. I needed to find my best friend on his birthday. Dead or alive. ***

While waiting for the new gift to be ready, “Leo” took me to a local arcade. He knew exactly what games I liked to play when I needed to decompress. He even remembered my favorite characters and combos. When I reflexively used my teeth to pop open a soda bottle, he frowned, grabbed the bottle, and scolded me just like the old days, nagging about germs and dental bills. Apart from the “blood brothers” phrase, he was perfectly, flawlessly Leo. “Mason, the last time we celebrated our birthdays together was five years ago, right?” During dinner, before I could even probe, “Leo” brought up the past. “I went behind your back and applied for the undercover op. When you found out, you lost your mind. We got into a massive fistfight.” “But you lost,” he chuckled, lighting a cigarette, his eyes filled with nostalgia. “You were so mad you cried and stayed up all night.” I remembered that night. We had agreed that I would be the one to go undercover. Leo had smiled and agreed to my face, but then stole the assignment behind my back. He wanted to sacrifice himself to protect me. He was the same age as me, but he always acted like a protective big brother. But was that Leo still alive? I clenched my fists under the table, forcing a chuckle. “Of course I remember.” “You went back on your word. I was so desperate I wanted to call Director Miller to beg him to swap us. What did you do then?” He laughed harder. “I confiscated your phone and locked you in your room. By the time you broke the door down, I was already on a flight out of the country.” I tried to laugh with him, but my facial muscles felt frozen. Our fistfight was public knowledge among a few close colleagues back at the precinct. But the part about him locking me in my room? Leo would have never told a soul. It was embarrassing and highly unprofessional. Yet, this man knew. He knew every single detail. How? How could he know so much? In the silence, “Leo” suddenly stood up and reached over with a napkin. “You still eat like a toddler. Wipe your mouth. How am I supposed to set you up on dates back home if you eat like a pig?” His nagging was so familiar, so warm, and so frustratingly comforting. My vision blurred. Memories of the years we spent relying only on each other rushed back. I wanted so badly for him to be real. Then, the final dessert was served—a classic Peach Cobbler. I had ordered it on purpose. I stared intensely at his face. I saw him freeze for a second, and then his eyes turned red. “Our parents loved peaches,” he whispered softly. “It’s a pity our ‘blood brother’ oak tree is gone. I wonder if they missed the sweet smell of peaches these past few years.” Every ounce of warmth in my chest vanished instantly. My mind went ice-cold. He said it again. *Blood brothers.* Once. Twice. Three times. He was not Leo. My instinct was to tackle him, call the local backup agents still cleaning up the city, and beat the truth out of him. But I didn’t dare. If the real Leo was still alive somewhere, any reckless move on my part could get him killed. I had to play along. I had to find out where Leo was. ***

But I couldn’t understand. When did the swap happen? Three years ago, Leo went dark. Out of the four undercover agents our department planted in the cartel, three were tortured and killed. Leo was the only survivor, but we lost contact with him. Everyone thought he was dead. Without hesitation, I volunteered to take over the mission. Three months later, with the department’s help, I managed to get close to one of the cartel’s mid-level bosses and successfully infiltrated the syndicate. That was when I saw Leo again. He was chained to the wall of a damp basement. His body was a map of raw, infected burns and cuts. He looked half-dead, but it was him. The boss who brought me down there laughed and said, “We probably got the wrong guy. The Big Boss suspected he was a fed, but no cop could survive six months in this hole without singing.” I didn’t dare show any emotion. In the brief second our eyes met, Leo looked at me. He was in agony, but his eyes were sharp, fierce, and unbroken. He silently mouthed five words: *Don’t worry. I’m okay.* I almost broke down right then and there. He had survived the torture that we thought no human could withstand. I was 100% sure that the Leo in the basement three years ago was the real Leo. Later, he cleared his name, got promoted within the cartel, and we started working together. He never betrayed me. In fact, he saved my life multiple times. So, the Leo of the past three years must have been real too. Exactly when did this impostor take his place? I racked my brain, but I couldn’t find a single gap. “Mason, the gift should be ready by now,” “Leo” said as we walked out of the restaurant. “Let’s grab it, book the earliest flight, and head home.” I couldn’t make up any more excuses to delay. I pretended to have a sudden, agonizing stomach cramp. I locked myself in a bathroom stall and messaged my handler, asking him to send over every encrypted log of our communication during the undercover years. We had pretended not to know each other, communicating only through cyphers left at dead drops. I needed to read every single word. I needed to analyze the syntax, the slang, the tiny habits to see if there was a shift in tone. But after reading them three times, I found absolutely nothing. Outside, “Leo” knocked on the door. “Mason? If your stomach is that bad, I’ll run to the pharmacy. If we delay any longer, we’re going to miss the red-eye flight.” His voice made my skin crawl. A sudden, terrifying thought hit me. What was the point of this impersonation? ***

If he was an impostor, to know these intimate details about our childhood, he must have captured the real Leo and tortured the information out of him. But if he had already captured Leo and compromised us, why did he let the entire cartel get destroyed? And now, instead of running away with his money, he was actively trying to enter the United States with me—a place where law enforcement would make his life ten times harder. “Mason!” “Talk to me, man!” “You didn’t pass out on the toilet like Wyatt did back in academy, did you?” He sounded genuinely worried, knocking louder. “I’m coming out!” I called back. The puzzle pieces weren’t fitting. If he wanted to fool me, knowing my childhood was enough. Why would he remember a stupid story about our classmate Wyatt passing out in the bathroom six years ago? Even under extreme torture, no cartel interrogator would ask about classmate gossip. And Leo would never crack. His conviction was absolute. He would never bow to these monsters. I walked out, and he immediately checked my forehead for a fever. His worry looked 100% real. Could it be… that the years of psychological trauma had messed up Leo’s mind? Had his memory fractured, making him truly believe we had a literal “blood brother” ritual? That was the only logical explanation left. “Leo, let’s go to the hospital,” I muttered, holding my stomach. “I think my ulcer is flaring up again.” Before I could finish, “Leo” grabbed a passing waiter. “Where is the nearest ER?” Once he got the address, he threw my arm over his shoulder and practically carried me to a cab. He didn’t even look this panicked when he was chained up in that basement. My throat tightened. I wanted to believe he was real. I went to the hospital to buy time. I had secretly messaged a local backup agent to meet us at the hospital and quietly collect a hair sample from “Leo” for an express DNA test. If he was the real Leo, we would go home together. If he was fake, I would arrest him right there. I managed to snag a few strands of his hair from his jacket and handed them to the undercover agent in the hospital hallway. The next twenty hours of waiting felt like a slow death. Finally, my phone buzzed. *“DNA matches Leo Vance. The sample is clean. He is who he says he is.”* The moment I read the text, I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for years. I could finally breathe. I ran back to his room. “My stomach is fine now, Leo. Let’s go home! Let’s get the hell out of here!” He grinned, relieved, and immediately pulled out his phone to book the flight. In the Uber to the airport, I finally let my guard down. We talked about where we’d go for vacation, and how we would take our parents’ ashes to all the places they had wanted to visit but never got the chance to. It felt like stepping out of hell straight into heaven. Knowing Leo was alive and safe was all that mattered. “Oh, wait—” As we pulled up to the airport terminal, “Leo” suddenly snapped his fingers. “We don’t have much savings, and the department’s bonus is going to take months to clear probate. We don’t have the cash to travel right now, do we?” “How about we dig up the stash our parents left us? We agreed back then that once we got revenge, we could finally use it.” My body went completely rigid. “What stash?” “Leo” laughed naturally. “What do you mean, ‘what stash’? Did you forget?” “The cash we buried under the Tree of Wrath.” My eyes widened. Cold sweat broke out across my entire body, and my blood turned to ice. There was no “Tree of Wrath.” There was only the oak tree. “Tree of Wrath” was a code word we used to describe our target list. It was a psychological tool we created to keep our hatred alive, to remind ourselves never to compromise, never to give up. And there was no treasure. Only our parents’ ashes.

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