On the day I was diagnosed with stomach cancer, I sat outside the hospital clutching a positive pregnancy test, staring blankly for a very long time. My phone buzzed. It was Julian, my boyfriend of eight years. “Lily, about getting the marriage license… can we hold off for a bit? Give me some time to think it over?” “Sure.” “It’s not that I don’t want to marry you—” He paused, clearly stunned that I had agreed so easily and without a fight. He quickly added that he wouldn’t be home for dinner and hastily hung up. 1 Julian and I had been dating for eight years. We were supposed to be getting married soon. We started our own business right after college, and last year, it finally took off. We bought a car, put a down payment on a new house, and were getting ready to renovate. If I hadn’t gotten this disease, maybe next year I would have had a soft, sweet little baby sleeping in my arms. Since Julian wasn’t coming home for dinner, I made myself a simple bowl of vegetable noodle soup, hesitating over how to tell him the news tonight. After all, we had agreed last year that we would get our marriage license by the end of this year. My doctor was a young woman, only a few years older than me. She gently advised me not to keep the baby and to focus on aggressive treatment. She told me not to be afraid—I was young, and the cure rate should be high. Honestly, I wasn’t that afraid. Because I had Julian. He would always be by my side. The doorbell rang. I wondered why Julian was ringing the bell instead of using his keys. When I opened the door, Julian was standing there, heavily intoxicated. Supporting him was Mia, a new hire from our PR department—a fresh college grad. “Hey, Lily. We were out entertaining clients, and Mr. Vance had a bit too much to drink. His car is parked downstairs,” Mia said. She was wearing a cute, floral slip dress, her cheeks slightly flushed, as she brushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I just brought him up. I’ll catch an Uber back.” Julian, eyes glazed over with alcohol, stumbled onto the couch and immediately fell asleep. I took his suit jacket from her. It carried the faint, sweet scent of orange blossom perfume—Mia’s perfume. “Thanks, Mia,” I smiled. “It’s too late. Let me drive you home.” Mia politely declined at first, but I insisted. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting a young girl like you take an Uber alone at this hour.” “So, Lily, when are you and Mr. Vance tying the knot?” On the drive, Mia asked the question tentatively. I froze for a second, thinking of the phone call from Julian earlier that afternoon. I forced an awkward smile. “We’re going to wait until the company is a bit more stable for another year or two.” …Wait until my condition stabilizes. “Oh, I see…” Mia looked out the window, seemingly lost in thought. Suddenly, she lowered her head and smiled sweetly. “Got it.” After dropping Mia off, I parked the car. I suddenly remembered that I had left a bottle of Vitamin E supplements I bought last time in the passenger-side glove compartment. I opened the passenger door, but my eyes caught something wedged in the gap of the seatbelt buckle. It was a torn, small, square wrapper. Oil from the wrapper seeped onto my fingers. I froze. Suddenly, I thought of Mia’s slip dress and her flushed cheeks when I opened the door. I thought of Julian’s phone call that afternoon, and how he used his drunkenness to look away, avoiding my eyes. I sat blankly in the passenger seat. So many things had happened in a single day. For a moment, I didn’t even know where to begin. 2 Julian and I started dating during our freshman year of college. He pursued me. At the time, I was working part-time at a local pho shop near campus to earn tuition money. Julian fell in love with me at first sight. To woo me, Julian—a bona fide trust-fund kid—ate pho every single day for a solid year. On the day I finally agreed to date him, he got so sick of the food that he threw up violently right there in the shop. To this day, he still can’t stand the smell of pho broth. Knowing I was proud and wouldn’t accept handouts, he ate at the cheap dining halls with me. He would buy fruit and milk and forcefully shove them into my hands: “What if my future wife gets malnourished?” Knowing I hated the smell of smoke, he quit smoking cold turkey. Once, when the cravings hit him hard, he braved the bewildered stares of his rich frat-boy friends, pulled out a lollipop, and stuck it in his mouth, his face red as he tried to save his ego: “Psh, what do you guys know? This is what family men do.” Honestly, I never really knew why Julian liked me. He was 6’2″, handsome, and wealthy. But Julian didn’t care. He said if he liked me, he fucking liked me. He was incredibly stubborn. Once he set his mind on a path, he would walk it to the very end. I saw that clearly the time he took me home to meet his parents on Christmas Eve. I stood awkwardly in front of his parents, holding a modest fruit basket I had bought. His parents hosted me with frigid politeness. While the maid was clearing the dining table, his mother coughed lightly and gave Julian a look, gesturing for him to step aside to talk with her. The chandelier in the villa was so blindingly bright it was almost harsher than the August sun, making me unable to lift my head. Its light cast a harsh glare on my worn-out puffer jacket and faded jeans. And those were actually my best clothes. I sat on the European-style sofa with my legs pressed tightly together, trying my best to shrink my presence. The maids’ gazes drifted over me, accompanied by faint, muffled snickers that scraped against my pride like knives. I heard his mother’s hysterical voice carrying from the other room: “She definitely knows you have money, right?!” “She has no parents! What can she possibly offer you in the future?!” My heart felt like it was being brutally stomped on. It hurt so much I couldn’t breathe. My head dropped lower and lower. I pinched my arm hard, telling myself not to cry. The next second, I heard the sound of Julian slamming a door. His face was dark with anger as he stormed toward me. He grabbed my hand where I sat with my head bowed on the sofa: “We’re leaving!” “Julian Vance! If you walk out that door, don’t ever call me your mother again!” her voice echoed from behind. “We won’t give you a single cent!” Hearing his mother’s threat, Julian’s steps faltered. Before his mother could look smug, Julian turned back and snatched the fruit basket I had brought: “You don’t deserve this!” It was Christmas Eve. The streets were practically empty of pedestrians and cars, and even the subway had stopped running. We had no choice but to walk to a hotel. As we crossed an overpass, the wind howled through my hair. The quiet city was lit up with thousands of lights from homes celebrating the holiday, looking like a sea of stars in the distance. But not a single one of those lights belonged to me. I didn’t turn around. I just kept my head down and said very, very softly: “Julian, let’s break up.” He didn’t say a word. “Julian, we—” He unzipped his winter coat and wrapped his arms around me from behind, engulfing me entirely in his embrace. He held me in silence, hugging me so tightly, as if afraid I would disappear if he let go even a little. The silence dragged on. He buried his face in my neck, holding me for a very long time. Suddenly, he spoke. His voice was soft, but incredibly firm: “Lily, I’ll give you a home.” 3 When I got back inside, Julian was fast asleep on the couch. I gently draped a blanket over him. His phone lit up. Two unread messages. They were from Mia. “I got her home safe and sound! Don’t worry, Boss!” Followed by a cute sticker of a little girl winking and saying goodnight. I knew I shouldn’t be snooping, but I couldn’t resist scrolling up to read their chat history. “What did Boss Vance have for lunch today? A bento box she made for you?” “Yeah.” “Ugh, so unfair. You should eat takeout with us single dogs sometimes, Boss.” “Maybe tomorrow.” The date was the day before yesterday. I remembered the next day Julian specifically told me I didn’t need to wake up early to make him lunch. When I asked why, he hugged me from behind, kissed my neck softly, and said he didn’t want me to work so hard, giving me a “day off.” “Boss, when are you guys getting married?” Attached was a sticker of a little girl wiping tears. Unlike his previous instant replies, this time he took ten minutes to respond: “I don’t know.” He said he didn’t know. I put the phone down. I didn’t scroll any further. There was no need. There were no explicit messages. Just Julian replying to Mia as instantly as he did to me, with Mia referring to me simply as “she” in every sentence. But in the vibe of their conversation, it felt like I was the third wheel intruding on them. I put his phone back, stood up, and placed my medical records and the pregnancy test in the bottom drawer of the study desk, right next to our joint savings passbook. The wind had picked up outside. It had just rained a little, and the wind blew a damp, warm breeze into the room. I closed the door and sat blankly at the desk. Honestly, when I got the diagnosis, saying I wasn’t afraid would be a lie. I sat at the hospital entrance back then, watching the busy traffic, trying desperately to think for a very long time. I wondered how I could say it casually. How I could break the news without making him too sad. I planned to tell him with a smile. Julian, I have good news and bad news. Which one do you want to hear first? If he wants the good news, I’ll tell him he’s going to be a dad. If he wants the bad news, I’ll say I was just kidding about the dad part. Then he would definitely flick my forehead, and then I’d tell him about the cancer. He would definitely hug me tightly from behind like he did back then, telling me not to be afraid. I’d comfort him back, tease him for being so nervous, and tell him I wasn’t scared at all. Or maybe I’d cry and tell him the truth. Tell him I was terrified. I was afraid of the pain, afraid it couldn’t be cured. I was afraid chemotherapy would make me bald, that I wouldn’t be able to wear a ponytail or look pretty in dresses anymore. Tell him how much I couldn’t bear to lose this baby. We had left a wall in the nursery of our new house for Lego displays. He had said that if we had a daughter, he would build Legos with her and buy her lots of pretty dresses. Then he would definitely say the cheesiest romantic things. He would say that in his heart, I would always be the most beautiful woman in the world. That we would have lots of kids in the future, and if this one was too impatient to wait, we wouldn’t want it anyway. But before I could figure out what to say, his call came through. On the phone, he said he wanted to hold off on getting the marriage license. I agreed almost without hesitation. He loved me so much. How could I tie him down for the rest of his life when he had given up everything for me? At that moment, I even hoped he didn’t love me anymore. That way, he wouldn’t be so sad. Maybe right then, a passing deity looked down at the mortal world and heard my wish. He really didn’t love me as much as he used to. I really wanted to live, too. But I didn’t know if staying alive would be more painful than chemotherapy. 4 I sat in the study, letting the wind blow over me all night, still unable to figure out what to do. Julian woke up around seven o’clock. He rubbed his temples and pushed open the study door. Wearing dress pants and a light blue dress shirt, his broad shoulders and narrow waist were accentuated. I was never one to obsess over looks, but I was still often caught off guard by how handsome he was. Seeing me sitting there, he paused and asked what was wrong. I shook my head: “Nothing. I’m planning to ask for some time off from the company.” Julian smiled and reached out to ruffle my hair: “You can just quit if you want. It’s not like I can’t support you.” I gently dodged his hand. Julian’s hand hovered awkwardly in the air before he retracted it, looking a bit unnatural: “Why the time off?” “I’m just tired lately.” It was a valid excuse for a working adult. I had been grinding for nine years; it was about time I felt tired. I had been working part-time since freshman year of college. When we first graduated, I was the one supporting Julian. Back then, Julian had cut ties with his family to start a business with his best friend. We were renting a tiny apartment and living paycheck to paycheck. To save fifty dollars on rent, I took a subway commute that was an hour longer. For an 8 AM shift, I had to wake up at 5:45 AM. When I worked overtime until 9 PM, by the time I got home and washed up, it was already past 11 PM. I would fall asleep the second my head hit the pillow. Back then, we had neither time nor money. At our most extreme, Julian and I went an entire week without speaking a single word to each other. But no matter how late, he always came home. Once, he forgot his keys. I woke up in the middle of the night, realized he wasn’t beside me, checked my phone messages, and opened the door to find him asleep outside. He was afraid knocking would wake me, so he just decided to catch some sleep out in the hall. Our poorest time was the winter of our first year out of college. My company delayed my salary for two months, and by the end of the year, we were genuinely broke. That day, Julian came to pick me up at the subway station. We walked across the overpass from the station. A new hot pot place had just opened underneath. Spicy beef tallow broth was their signature dish. There was a long line, and the steaming, fragrant mist hit you right in the soul. Julian said that when we had money, our very first meal would be hot pot, right at that place. We’d order a split pot—mild beef tallow and tomato broth—and ten plates of sliced lamb. “Why ten plates?” “Five to look at, five to eat,” he said. “Gross. I refuse to eat hot pot with someone who orders a split pot.” “How can you be so prejudiced against half-and-half broth? I don’t even judge people who put pineapple on pizza…” Before Julian could finish, he choked on his own saliva and started coughing violently. I panicked and patted his back. While I was patting him, our eyes met. We suddenly started laughing. We laughed so hard we doubled over, drawing stares from people passing by. Thinking back now, I don’t even know what was so funny. We were probably just finding joy in our misery. Later, we finally had some money, but that hot pot place had closed down. We never got to eat there. Once you start reminiscing, it’s hard to stop. Thinking about the past, my eyes suddenly welled up with tears. “Why are you crying?” Julian suddenly panicked, hurriedly wiping my tears. “Don’t cry.” “It’s nothing. I just don’t want to go to work. I’m too tired.” I leaned against him. “Be good. You rest up. If management doesn’t approve your leave, we’ll just quit, okay?” Julian crouched down and looked at me very seriously. The gentleness in his eyes was almost overflowing. Eight years had passed. The impulsive, reckless rich kid had grown into a mature man. I knew I shouldn’t, but looking at his face, I couldn’t bear to let go. I hesitated, but still reached out and tugged his shirt slightly: “Julian… could you stay with me today…?” I thought to myself, If he stays with me, I’ll lay everything out and explain it to him clearly. Whether we break up or stay together. We’ve been together for eight years; there has to be a resolution. “I have a very important meeting today, but I’ll come back early. You catch up on sleep, binge a show, read a book, and I’ll be back before you know it, okay?” I let go of his shirt. Julian tucked me in, kissed my forehead just like he always did: “Be good and get some sleep. I’ll do all the dishes this month, deal? Next month is your birthday, I’ll buy you whatever you want, okay?” I nodded, and Julian finally relaxed. I watched him gently close the bedroom door, followed by the sound of the front door closing. I was alone again. 5 “I agree.” I looked down, signed my name, and pushed the organ donation registry form toward the female doctor. The doctor’s last name was Anderson. She had a pale complexion and looked only a few years older than me. She asked me with deep concern: “Do your family members agree? If your family disagrees when the time comes, they can revoke it on your behalf.” “I don’t have any family.” I smiled. “Donate whatever is usable.” If I donated, at least someone would visit my grave periodically. I looked at her, keenly catching the fleeting flash of pity on her face. “Don’t worry about it. It’s really fine.” “…Actually, your situation isn’t entirely hopeless. You need to stay optimistic. Mood greatly affects the illness.” She seemed even more anxious than I was. “Chemotherapy and targeted therapy will affect the fetus, so I don’t recommend…” “I know.” I had Googled it. If it was early-stage, I could try to save it—maybe both mother and child would survive. But for late-stage cancer, doctors strongly advise against keeping the baby. If I had family with me, the doctor might have played along with them and told me my illness was actually very mild. I read on a forum yesterday that sometimes, if you lie to patients and keep their spirits up, miracles really do happen. Unfortunately, I had no one to lie to me. I couldn’t just leave a child alone in this world, isolated like me. “…At seven weeks pregnant, roughly how big is the baby?” I lowered my head and smiled. “Actually, I haven’t felt a thing.” “It has a heartbeat.” “So its heart is really beating?” “Yes.” Dr. Anderson must have really loved children; she couldn’t help but smile softly when she said it. “That’s so nice.” I did the math. If everything had gone smoothly, the baby would have been born next May. If everything had gone smoothly. Seeing my expression, she hesitated, then wrote down a note and handed it to me: “This is my phone number, my WhatsApp is the same. If anything happens, contact me directly.” “Thank you so much, Dr. Anderson.” The bus ride back was very crowded. I sat in my seat and sent Dr. Anderson a message: “Hi Dr. Anderson, I looked it up online. They said pregnancy nausea is similar to late-stage symptoms. I can’t eat anything. I can’t really tell the difference.” While waiting for Dr. Anderson’s reply, someone suddenly shoved me: “Young lady, these seats are for the elderly, disabled, and pregnant. Get up and let this gentleman sit.” An elderly man with gray hair but a sturdy build stood in front of me, flanked by a self-righteous middle-aged woman. “Young folks are strong and healthy, standing for a bit won’t kill you.” The rest of the bus chimed in, echoing her sentiment. I pulled out my medical record book and smiled: “I’m pregnant and have stage-four stomach cancer. I’m dying soon. Can I sit for a little while?” The entire bus went dead silent. In that moment, I felt like the collective conscience of everyone on board had just been put on trial. I didn’t know why, but saying those words out loud suddenly made me feel incredibly liberated. Right. I was going to die soon anyway. What was there left to be afraid of? 6 “I want hot pot.” From the bubbling, spicy beef tallow broth, Julian fished out a slice of beef tripe after fifteen seconds and placed it in my bowl. I took a small bite. It was very crisp and tender. But I couldn’t swallow it. Since two days ago, I noticed that swallowing had become incredibly difficult. My stomach had started hurting half a year ago, and occasionally I’d feel nauseous. I thought it was just because I often skipped breakfast and had irregular eating habits. When I was in college, I ate whenever I could, never at consistent times. My body had been giving me warnings for a long time, but I never paid attention. Pretending to wipe my mouth, I secretly spit the tripe into a napkin. “I still prefer the non-spicy broth.” I said that just to let Julian tease me for contradicting my past self. Suddenly, his phone screen lit up. He looked down and quickly replied to the message, a faint smile on his face that he didn’t even notice. I propped my chin on my hands and watched him. Sometimes I wondered, why did I have to be the one to get sick? Why do people who hurt others get to live long, healthy lives? The birthday song started playing. The Haidilao staff were already walking over, pushing a cake and carrying LED signs. He lit the candles for me, put down his phone, and watched me make a wish. Julian, you have to live a long, long life. “Do you like the gift? I really did my research.” Julian started fishing for compliments. It was a horn comb, smooth and elegant. “I love it.” I smiled and nodded. “Julian, after dinner, I want to go see our new house.” “Okay. It’s your birthday today, whatever you want.” Julian leaned over to buckle my seatbelt. When he brushed against my arm, he frowned: “Why are you so skinny? Are you dieting? I told you I don’t mind if you gain weight.” “I haven’t had much of an appetite lately.” How should I put it? Sometimes he was actually quite oblivious. Over these past two months together, I hadn’t told him my period was here so we couldn’t be intimate. I hadn’t curled up in bed groaning about cramps either. And he had completely forgotten to ask. I thought of the WhatsApp message Mia sent him, one of them was asking for time off for period cramps. “Boss Vance, tummy hurts.” “What’s wrong?” “Girl problems, I can’t tell you!” The sticker was a little cat rolling around on its stomach. Julian approved two days off for her, and she happily replied with a “Love you!” Julian didn’t reply again. The car window was cracked open slightly. The evening breeze, carrying the scent of camphor trees, blew past my ear. Outside was the colorful neon nightscape of the city. Honestly, I didn’t believe Julian would actually cheat, because the evidence was too flimsy. The manipulative, try-hard tactics of a fresh college grad were transparent to me. The torn wrapper might have been placed there deliberately. Delaying the marriage license might not have even been because of Mia. He didn’t necessarily fall in love with Mia, but when it came to his love for me, he was definitely wavering. He could have chosen a male colleague to drive him home. He could have politely shut down her boundary-crossing texts. He could have chosen not to reply instantly. He could have loved me just a little bit more firmly. Just like that Christmas Eve. If he had hesitated for even a single second when I was being humiliated, I would never have left with him. Love is a firm choice. Love doesn’t waver. Once it wavers, taking that step across the line is only a matter of time. It was the perfect time for an evening stroll. Walking into our new building complex, we saw many neighbors and noisy children running around. One little boy was running too fast and crashed into me. I instinctively shielded my stomach. “I’m so sorry! Leo Smith! Get over here and apologize right now!” The boy’s mother dragged the little boy over to apologize to me. “The lady is so thin, what if you knocked her over?!” The mother had a booming voice that instantly cowed the boy. “If you bump into someone elderly, frail, sick, or disabled, the police will lock you up…” The boy wilted, keeping his head down and staying silent. “It’s totally fine.” I quickly crouched down to comfort him. “I’m not hurt.” “Do you guys live upstairs?” the mother asked. “Yeah. We haven’t finalized the renovations yet, so we’re not in a rush.” “So you guys are getting married soon?” I froze and looked up at Julian. Before Julian could answer, the elevator doors opened, interrupting the conversation. The apartment was still bare concrete. We originally chose it because of the great natural light. Across the street was a kindergarten, and two blocks away were an elementary and middle school. I opened the windows and turned on the lights. The gentle evening breeze filled the room, suddenly bringing a bit of life to the empty space. I held Julian’s hand, smiling as I pointed to the school across the street: “Do you remember? When we bought this place, you told me that if we get called in for parent-teacher conferences, it would be super convenient. You said we’d play rock-paper-scissors, and the loser would go get yelled at.” Hearing me say that, Julian suddenly laughed. “I remember. You even asked why it had to be a scolding.” “And then what did I say?” “You said that if the kid was like you, they’d definitely be winning awards, and we’d be speaking as ‘Outstanding Parents.’” “The bedroom is big enough to put up a partition for two desks. When you were a sophomore, you had to stop gaming because of space. I always felt bad for you.” “The kitchen needs a good exhaust fan. You’ll definitely want to have hot pot at home.” “You said we could build a Lego wall here. To build Legos with our daughter in the future.” I stood beside him, smiling as I watched him open the Pandora’s box of memories. All those moments of loving me—he actually remembered them. But when did the hand that once held mine so tightly let go? In a daze, the suited, mature man in front of me slowly overlapped with the reckless, arrogant boy who had grabbed my hand and run into the night on that Christmas Eve. They looked alike, yet so different. I didn’t want to cry, but tears suddenly started falling. Julian froze, frantically trying to wipe away my tears: “Why are you always crying lately? Are you overthinking things again?” I rested my head on his shoulder. After a long pause, I said in a muffled voice: “Julian, I really want to go back to the past…” “The past? You mean when we were broke? What was so good about that? Starving and swallowing our pride every day. It’s nothing like now. We can eat hot pot whenever we want, you can take ten days or half a month off work…” He was right. We were so poor back then. We starved and suffered every day. What was so good about it? But why did I miss it so much?

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On my wedding day, the company was hit with a massive tax evasion scandal. To save our future—to save him—I stepped forward. I confessed to crimes I didn’t commit and took the fall for Bennett Sterling. I went to prison so he could stay free. Ten years later, I walked out of those gates a free woman, only to find that Bennett had built a life without me. He had a home, a wife, and a brood of children. When I confronted him, trembling with a decade’s worth of suppressed rage, asking him how he could betray me so completely, he didn’t even have the grace to look ashamed. “I needed an heir,” he said, as if he were discussing a business merger. “I needed to carry on the family name.” The world blurred. My eyes burned with hot, stinging tears as the shouting match began. But I wasn’t just fighting him; I was fighting a wall of indifference. My in-laws tried to “soothe” me with poison. “Even if Bennett had children with someone else, you’re still the mistress of the Sterling estate. Just be graceful about it. A comfortable life is better than pride, isn’t it?” Even my own parents, the people who were supposed to be my sanctuary, turned their backs. “Nora, Bennett took care of us while you were behind bars. The Sterling line is old and prestigious; he couldn’t just let the bloodline end while waiting for you.” “Besides,” my mother added, her voice dropping to a cold, clinical whisper, “you’re a felon now. You have a record. You should be grateful Bennett isn’t divorcing you outright.” I clenched my fists so hard my nails drew blood, biting my lip to keep from sobbing. “And how exactly do you see this working, Bennett? What is our ‘relationship’ supposed to be?” Bennett took a slow, nonchalant sip of his tea. “As long as you stay in your lane and don’t cause a scene, I won’t divorce you. But the Sterling empire? That goes to Hunter and his five siblings. They’ll take care of you when you’re old. Consider them your own.” The last flicker of hope in my chest died then. A single tear escaped, tracing a cold path down my cheek. I was done. “I don’t need them,” I said, my voice finally finding a terrifying, quiet clarity. “Bennett, I want a divorce.” I turned on my heel and left. The first call I made was to the woman I’d met in the yard—the woman who ran the cell block and, as it turned out, half the city’s underground. … 1 “Divorce?! Absolutely not!” My father was the one who erupted first. Before I could react, his hand lashed out, catching me across the face. The sting was sharp, but the shock was deeper. “How did I raise such a petty, selfish brat?” “Bennett is a man of status,” he sneered. “In another era, he’d have a dozen wives and no one would blink. He’s offering to keep you, despite your shame, and you’re throwing a tantrum over a few kids?” My brother, Tyler, jumped up from the sofa, his face flushed with greed. “Nora, what the hell is wrong with you? My house, my car, the down payment for my wedding—it all came from Bennett. So what if there are kids? It’s not a big deal!” “If it bothers you so much, just have one of your own with him. It’s not like he can’t afford another mouth to feed.” Blood is thicker than water, they say. But in the face of a direct deposit, my family was more than happy to let mine spill. Bennett, who hadn’t looked me in the eye since I’d been processed out, finally looked up. A flicker of something—maybe panic, maybe just annoyance—crossed his face. “Nora, don’t be dramatic. You’re my wife. That hasn’t changed.” A chill settled into my bones. I let out a dry, hollow laugh. “Do you even remember what you said to me? Right before I walked into that courtroom to lie for you?” Bennett froze. He looked at me for a long beat, his expression shifting from confusion to a defensive, ugly scowl. “Are you really going to hold that over me now?” he snapped. “I spent ten years taking care of your family, playing the dutiful son-in-law. I don’t expect a ‘thank you,’ but my parents are getting old. They wanted grandkids. I wanted to give them that. So… Hunter and the others happened. Can’t you show a little compassion? A little understanding?” He spoke of his “sacrifices” as if he were the one who had spent a decade staring at a grey concrete ceiling. He listed my faults as if I were the one who had broken a vow. I tilted my head back, forcing the tears back into their ducts. I grew up in a house where I was always second-best to my brother. Bennett had been my escape. He’d pursued me with a frantic, desperate passion, telling me I was the only thing that mattered. I’d fallen for it. I’d walked away from a high-paying career to build his dream from the dirt up. He told me he hated the “fake” corporate world, so I became the face of the company. I did the dirty work, the late-night networking, the high-stakes negotiations. I drank until my stomach bled to land contracts. I miscarried twice because I couldn’t afford to stop moving. Three years of blood and sweat, and the company finally hit the big leagues. We got married. And then, on the day we were supposed to start our lives, the IRS came knocking. His parents had knelt at my feet. “Nora, Bennett can’t go to prison. He’s the only son. A felony would destroy the family legacy. You helped build the company—just say the decisions were yours. You’re a woman; people will be more lenient. We won’t judge you. Just save him. Please.” Bennett had grabbed my hands, his eyes wet with tears as he shouted at his parents. “Don’t pressure her! She’s my everything! I’ll respect whatever she chooses!” Then he looked at me, his voice a broken whisper. “Honey, if you do this for me, I swear on my life, I will never betray you. If I ever break this vow, may I lose everything I hold dear.” I believed the performance. I took the fall. For ten years, the thought of our “happily ever after” was the only thing that kept me from breaking. And now, the promise was just a ghost, and bringing it up was treated like a crime. I had walked through fire for love, only to realize I was the only one burning. “Pay them off,” I said, my voice cold. “Get them out of our lives, or I’m filing for divorce.” The room went dead silent. My in-laws’ faces twisted with sudden, sharp malice. “Absolutely not!” my mother-in-law shrieked. “We finally have our grandsons! Why should a barren woman like you get to kick them out?” I kept my eyes on Bennett. This was ten years of obsession speaking. I wanted to give him one last chance to be the man he promised he was—and give myself one last reason to stay. He looked miserable, his brow furrowed in a tight knot of frustration. “Nora, does it have to be like this? On the day we’re finally back together, you’re really going to tear this marriage apart with your own hands?” 2 When I didn’t flinch, his tone shifted to something patronizing. “You just got out. You’re overwhelmed. You aren’t thinking straight.” “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that nonsense. I’ll give you time to adjust, but Nora, my patience isn’t infinite.” A laugh bubbled up in my throat, sharp and hysterical. He was the one who cheated. He was the one asking me to pay for his sins. And yet, he was the one “granting” me a chance? I didn’t bother arguing. I turned and walked out the door. If this wasn’t a home anymore, I wasn’t going to haunt it like a ghost. As I reached the curb, a black Rolls-Royce pulled up. The window rolled down to reveal Roxy. We’d met in the yard; she was a powerhouse who’d ended up inside after “protecting her interests” a little too aggressively. She’d been released the day before me. “Hey, girl! I went to the gate to pick you up, but you’d already vanished!” Roxy hopped out, her eyes scanning my face and seeing the wreckage underneath. “I figured you’d be here at the Sterling place. Listen, I did some digging. That husband of yours? He’s not the pining widower you thought he was. While you were doing time, he was busy playing house with some gold-digger. Six kids, Nora. They’ve been busier than a farm in spring.” Roxy, who had been stabbed in the back by her own ex-husband, was vibrating with indignant fury. She pulled a thick manila folder from the backseat. “This prick? If we were back in the day, he’d be at the bottom of a lake.” I took the file. My heart hammered against my ribs. Inside were records of Bennett accompanying a woman named Melanie to prenatal checkups. Six kids in ten years. The oldest was eleven. I did the math, and the world tilted. He’d been with her before we even got married. There were insurance policies worth millions for each of them. Seven villas. Transfer records that could fund a small country. And at the back, a photo of a wedding—Bennett and Melanie, looking radiant. A family of eight, with my parents and his parents in the background, all of them smiling. I had traded my freedom for a lie. I had carried his shame so they could play house. I closed the folder. The fire in my heart went out, replaced by a cold, hard stone. “Roxy,” I said, my voice steady. “Help me get my case reopened. I’m going to clear my name.” “And after that… I’m coming with you. Let’s see what we can build in the private sector.” Roxy was a shark who’d been trying to recruit me since my third year inside. She grinned, a predatory, beautiful thing. “About damn time. Men—especially the trashy ones—are just overhead we don’t need.” The day of my brother’s wedding arrived. To no one’s surprise, Melanie and her six children were the guests of honor. She was wearing a sleek, crimson designer gown that hugged a figure that showed no signs of six pregnancies. The kids were dressed in miniature tuxedos and matching silk dresses. The boys were clones of Bennett; the girls had Melanie’s sharp, hungry eyes. Bennett was in a deep navy suit that perfectly complemented Melanie’s dress. I felt a bitter pang of irony. Bennett used to tell me he hated matching outfits—said they were tacky. It turns out he just didn’t want to match with me. My in-laws were hovering over the children, doting and frantic. They were sweating through their clothes, chasing toddlers, but they looked happier than I’d ever seen them. Melanie handed my brother an envelope. “A little something for the honeymoon. A hundred thousand to get you started.” My mother’s eyes practically turned into dollar signs as she snatched it. “So generous! It’s no wonder the Sterlings are so blessed with children!” She threw a sideways glance at me. “Unlike some people. Family, my foot. A ‘felon’s discount’ gift of eight hundred bucks? Talk about a cheapskate.” Tyler took my red envelope, pulled out the cash, and dropped the paper on the floor, grinding it into the carpet with his heel. “Pocket change. Who does she think she’s impressing?” I watched them, a profound sense of nausea rising. That money was all I had. I’d earned it cents at a time, working the laundry and the kitchen in prison, saving every scrap for years. I had less than a hundred dollars left to my name. I said nothing. The oldest boy, Hunter, walked up to me. He stared at me for a long minute before letting out a sharp, practiced sneer. “Are you the woman from jail?” “You’re ugly. And you’re trying to steal my daddy. You have no shame.” He turned to the other kids, waving them over. “Look, guys! It’s the bad lady who makes everyone say we’re ‘illegitimate’!” Melanie rushed over, putting a hand over Hunter’s mouth with a dramatic sigh. “Hunter! That’s enough! Tell the lady you’re sorry.” She scolded him, but her eyes were dancing with triumph. It was a performance designed to trigger my in-laws’ protective instincts—and it worked. They immediately began coddling the boy and glaring at me. Bennett heard the commotion and walked over. He ruffled Hunter’s hair, his face softening with a fatherly concern I’d never seen. “It’s okay, buddy. It’s Daddy’s fault for letting people whisper.” Then he looked at me, his voice firm. “But from now on, legally, Nora will be your mother. No one will ever call you that word again.” 3 The next oldest boy, Parker, burst into tears. My mother-in-law immediately scooped him up. “What’s wrong, my angel? What’s hurting you?” Parker pointed a trembling finger at me, his face red and blotchy. “My teacher said people in jail are bad! I don’t want a bad lady to be my mommy! I want my real mommy!” That set off a chain reaction. Within seconds, the room was filled with the wails of six children. It was a symphony of chaos. “Don’t cry, sweetheart! The bad lady isn’t going to be your mommy, Grandpa and Grandma promise!” Hunter, the eldest, shot me a look of pure, calculated malice before squeezing out a few crocodile tears. “Grandma, you can’t promise that. I heard people say Mom can’t be the real Mrs. Sterling because Daddy won’t let her.” My in-laws spun around to face Bennett. “Bennett! Say something! If my grandson cries himself hoarse, I’ll never forgive you!” Bennett looked at me, then at the crying children. He looked caught, performative, and finally, resolute. “Stop crying,” he said, his voice carrying over the din. “I’ll give you the result you want. A man doesn’t cry; he takes care of his family. You have to be a role model for your siblings.” The crying stopped instantly. Melanie’s eyes welled up with “emotional” tears. “Bennett… do you mean it? Is this real?” Bennett remained silent, but he wouldn’t look at me. Suddenly, Parker—who was barely nine but easily weighed a solid 150 pounds—charged at me. “Get away from my daddy! Die, you bad lady! Die!” He was a heavy kid, and he was coming at me like a freight train. Instinct took over. I stepped to the side. He overbalanced, missing me entirely, and slammed face-first into the wainscoting of the wall. His nose erupted in blood, and a second later, a scream ripped through the room that sounded like a siren. “My baby!” Melanie shrieked, rushing to him. Then she turned on me, her face a mask of fury. “Ms. Shen, I know it’s been hard for you, watching me take your place all these years. If you have a problem, take it out on me! Parker is a child! How could you be so cruel?” I was speechless at the sheer audacity. Before I could get a word out—CRACK. Bennett’s hand moved faster than I could see. My head snapped to the side, the world spinning as the coppery taste of blood filled my mouth. “I thought you just needed time to adjust,” Bennett hissed, his eyes cold and murderous. “But you’re actually laying hands on a child?” He had hit me with everything he had. My cheek felt like it was on fire. “I told you,” he snarled, “these children are the future of the Sterling name. They are the masters of this house. And you? You’re a leech. You’re a convicted felon whose parents live off my charity. Who the hell do you think you are?” Three-year-old Mia toddled over, hugging Bennett’s leg. “Don’t be sad, Daddy. I’ll help you hit the bad lady.” She balled up her tiny fist and shook it at me. Bennett picked her up, kissing her cheek. “My little angel. A princess shouldn’t have to do dirty work like that.” He gestured for Melanie to take the kids, and the eight of them began to walk toward the exit. My in-laws followed like obedient dogs, pausing only to spit toward me. “Pathetic, ungrateful bitch!” Once they were gone, my parents’ faces turned black with rage. “You ruined the wedding!” my father yelled. “You should have stayed in that cell for the rest of your life!” Tyler was even worse. The “humiliation” of his ruined day had pushed him over the edge. He rolled up his sleeves and lunged at me, his fists raining down on my head and shoulders. “You bitch! Why won’t you just die?” He grabbed me by the hair and began dragging me toward the door. The strength difference was too much; the more I fought, the more he tore at me. Bennett and the others stopped to watch. The kids clapped their hands, cheering. “Look, Daddy! The bad lady is losing!” “Uncle Tyler is a superhero!” My in-laws nodded approvingly. “See, babies? That’s what happens to bad people.” My head was ringing. My body was a map of blooming bruises. Everyone was watching the show, and Bennett’s cold, detached gaze was the sharpest blade of all. As Tyler raised his hand for another blow, I curled into a ball, closing my eyes and waiting for the end. Hate, hot and thick as tar, began to flood my heart. And then, the heavy oak doors of the ballroom swung open. A familiar, raspy voice boomed through the hall. “Who the hell gave you permission to touch her?”

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Maxwell Prescott’s memory resets every ninety days. Every three months, he returns to the day he hated me most. Like clockwork, he’d break my spirit—and sometimes my bones—to avenge his ward’s honor. Then, after a hundred nights of penance, he would propose to me under a canopy of fireflies, only for the cycle to restart the next morning. I lived through the loop, over and over, waiting for the day his memory would finally hold. I believed my love was a tether that would eventually pull him back to reality. Until I heard him through the cracked door of a private lounge at the club. “Max, how long are you going to keep this up?” It was one of his inner circle laughing. “The ‘memory reset’ thing? Only a delusional girl like Daisy would buy it. Every time, she’s on her knees begging us to help her ‘remind’ you of your love, desperate to marry you.” “Three days until the next ‘reset,’ right? Which round is this?” “The ninth,” Maxwell’s voice replied. It was deep, cool, and devastatingly clear. “Daisy’s pathetic little catering mistake poisoned Maisie and ruined her debutante ball. This is just the interest on the debt she owes.” I heard the soft rustle of fabric—him ruffling Maisie’s hair. “Nobody messes with my girl,” he added, his voice dropping into a register of tenderness he had never once used with me without the shroud of ‘amnesia.’ The betrayal was a physical blade between my ribs. My “devotion” was nothing more than the punchline to a cruel, year-long prank. I wiped my face, the salt of my tears stinging my chapped skin, and summoned the Interface in my mind. Negotiations are over, I told the cold, mechanical voice. In three days, when the mission fails, wipe every trace of Maxwell Prescott from my mind. … [Host, are you certain?] Before I could answer, the voices in the lounge drifted out again. “I heard if Daisy’s hand gets broken one more time, she’ll never be able to hold a paintbrush again.” The speaker sounded hesitant. “Max, isn’t the punishment… enough?” The clink of a wine glass stopped. I pictured Maxwell’s lips thinning into that hard, aristocratic line. Maisie lowered her head, her fingers tracing the custom diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist. “Uncle Max, I love this birthday gift. The debutante ball was just a formality… it doesn’t matter that it was ruined.” Her voice was soft, performatively sweet. Every word was designed to sound like a grace note while hitting like a hammer. Maxwell’s temper flared instantly. I heard the thud of a boot hitting a chair. “Since when do you tell me how to handle my business?” He took Maisie’s hand in his, treating her like a piece of priceless Ming porcelain. “Even if Daisy loses her hand, it wouldn’t compensate for what you lost. A street-food cook thinking she can be a fine artist? It’s pathetic. She’s a moth reaching for a star she doesn’t deserve.” A sharp, mocking huff escaped his nose. It felt like a thousand needles piercing my heart. I remembered when I lost that scholarship competition. I wanted to give up on my dreams, but he was the one who held me. He told me I was a “Sunflower”—that no matter how dark it got, I had to keep my head up and face the light. But the light was a lie. In his eyes, I wasn’t a sunflower. I was a nuisance. Laughter erupted in the room. “She’s got some talent, though,” someone joked. “If Max hadn’t called the judges beforehand, she actually would’ve taken first place.” The world went silent. My fingers began to shake uncontrollably. I had poured my soul into that competition. It was my one ticket out of poverty, my one chance to stand beside him as an equal. And he had crushed it with a single phone call. Are the dreams of the poor really that cheap? Just something for the elite to stomp on for sport? I clenched my fists so hard my nails drew blood. [Host, I ask again: do you wish to proceed with the memory wipe?] the Interface chimed. [You previously traded ten years of your lifespan to extend this mission. Are you truly giving up?] A bitter laugh bubbled up in my throat. A month ago, I was terrified of losing him. I had begged the System for more time, desperate to save the man I thought was trapped in a cycle of trauma. What a joke. I closed my eyes, letting the hot tears spill over. I’m sure. Delete it all. Right then, my phone buzzed violently in my pocket. “Daisy, it’s your mom. There’s been an accident!” Kidney failure. The words on the medical report blurred. I looked at my mother, pale and fragile on the hospital bed. I had been so obsessed with “saving” Maxwell that I hadn’t noticed the shadow of death creeping over her face. Guilt crashed over me like a tidal wave. At the billing counter, my vision was swollen and red. I looked at the balance in my bank account—a number I could count on one hand. The nurse sighed, her gaze flickering with pity and impatience. “Ms. Mona, we need the deposit now.” “Can I just…” I started, my voice cracking. Then, the elevator dinned. Maxwell appeared, walking with that effortless, powerful stride. He was slightly out of breath. “Daisy, I heard about your mother…” Seeing my ruined face, he pulled my cold body into his chest. “It’s okay. I’m here.” The warmth. The scent of expensive cologne and cedarwood. He always did this. He always appeared at my lowest moments—car accidents, legal scares, every crisis. It was as if he had a sixth sense for my pain. I grew up without a father. I was starved for a protector. That was why, even after he broke my hand the first time, I forgave him. Because he knelt and apologized with such “sincerity.” Because he stayed by my side for weeks, enduring my anger without a word. I fell for a man twelve years my senior because his “warmth” was like top-shelf whiskey. One sip, and I was too drunk to find the exit. “Uncle Max!” Maisie’s voice cut through the air. Maxwell pushed me away instantly. The sudden coldness snapped me back to reality. I felt like a fool. I was still craving the comfort of a man who was actively destroying me. Maisie glanced at my phone screen, seeing the pathetic balance. She gasped, loud enough for the waiting room to turn their heads. “Daisy, is that all you have left? Doesn’t Uncle Max give you enough of an allowance?” The whispers started. To the strangers in the lobby, I was just a cheap mistress being scolded by the “real” family. Maxwell frowned, but he didn’t correct her. Instead, he leaned in and whispered, “Maisie didn’t mean it that way. I’ll talk to her at home. She’s sensitive, I can’t embarrass her in public.” So, for her pride, I had to wear the scarlet letter. Of course. How could a “sinner” like me compare to his precious ward? I looked at him, my eyes dead. “Give me five hundred thousand dollars.” Maxwell froze. I had never asked him for a dime in three years. But if I was going to be labeled a mistress, I might as well get the market rate. My mother needed that surgery. His expression darkened. “What did you say?” “The bags, the jewelry you bought to ‘apologize’ over the months… I never kept them. They’re worth more than half a million. Give me the cash.” Maxwell’s jaw tightened. “That’s different.” It was. Gifts to a pet are an act of mercy. A pet demanding payment is an act of rebellion. Maisie patted his arm, and he settled instantly, like a lion being tamed by a child. She smiled at me—a smile dripping with pure, unadulterated contempt. “Daisy, Uncle Max didn’t bring his cards in a hurry. I have five thousand in cash here. Take it for now.” She pulled a stack of bills from her designer bag and reached for my hand. But as she pressed the money into my palm, her sharp, manicured nails dug deep into my skin, drawing blood. I flinched, shoving her hand away. Maisie let out a theatrical shriek and collapsed onto the floor. The cash scattered like autumn leaves. “Daisy!” she sobbed, looking up with big, watery eyes. “Why did you push me? I just wanted to help. I didn’t mean to insult you!” Maxwell’s gaze turned to ice. “Is this how you ask for help, Daisy?” “She stabbed me—” I started, but he cut me off with a raised hand. “I know what you’re going to say. ‘She tripped herself.’ Spare me.” I closed my mouth. I was done explaining. I was done believing he’d ever choose the truth over her. I knelt on the dirty hospital floor, numbly picking up the bills one by one. This was my mother’s life. Suddenly, a heavy boot stepped on my hand, crushing it into the tile. Maxwell looked down at me from his height. “Apologize to Maisie.” The rubber sole of his shoe ground into my knuckles, crushing the last of my dignity. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Say it like you mean it.” I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper. I let my knees hit the floor with a heavy thud. “I am sorry.” I looked up at him, my face a mask of indifference. “Are we done?” His chest heaved. He sighed, a sound of weary disappointment, and knelt to help me pick up the rest of the money. “I know you’re stressed about your mother, but that’s no excuse to take it out on Maisie. Don’t let it happen again.” “It won’t,” I said softly. Because there wouldn’t be a next time. Maxwell used some of the cash to pay the immediate hospital fees and shoved the rest into my hand. “Take me to see her.” My mother hated Maxwell. Even with his billions, she saw him for what he was—a broken, dangerous man. She never gave him a kind word. But today, she was different. She held his hand and talked for a long time. I knew why. She was trying to entrust me to him. She was afraid that after she was gone, I’d be alone in this world. A suffocating bitterness rose in my throat. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the man she was pleading with was the wolf at our door. I didn’t break character. I needed his money for the treatment, and I needed his connections to find a donor. That night, he found a match. A kidney was being flown in. If it arrived by tomorrow, my mother would live. The next day, I waited. From dawn until dusk, I sat by her bed. But Maxwell never showed. The orange glow of the sunset hit my sleeping mother, making her look like a ghost already fading away. With trembling hands, I dialed his number for the hundredth time. Finally, someone picked up. It wasn’t Maxwell; it was his friend. “Oh, Daisy? Yeah, Max is busy. Maisie had a sudden migraine, and she was crying for him. He’s at the villa taking care of her.” He was with Maisie. And he had the transport documents for the kidney. I flew to his villa like a madwoman. I didn’t even look at the two of them on the bed—intertwined, mid-kiss. I grabbed the medical cooler tossed in the corner and bolted for the door. I had thirty minutes. If I could get to the hospital in thirty minutes, the organ would still be viable. But as I hailed a cab, Maxwell’s security team swarmed me. They dragged me back to the rooftop of the villa. Maisie was standing on the ledge, weeping beautifully. Maxwell, his face dark with rage, grabbed me by the collar and shoved me toward her. “Because you burst in like that, Maisie is traumatized! She thinks you’ve misunderstood everything, and now she’s suicidal!” he roared. “Tell her! Tell her you didn’t see anything!” I let out a jagged, hysterical laugh. “Misunderstood? Misunderstood that you’re two deviants masquerading as ‘family’ while you’re sleeping together?” Slap. The force of his hand sent my head spinning. “Shut your mouth!” Maxwell hissed, his voice shaking with fury. “If Maisie doesn’t step down from that ledge, you can forget about that kidney. And you can forget about any surgeon in this city touching your mother.” I stared at him, seeing the absolute coldness in his eyes. He meant it. He would let my mother die to soothe Maisie’s ego. My mother was waiting for me. “I didn’t see anything!” I screamed at the girl on the ledge. “You’re innocent! You’re a perfect, loving family! Just get down!” Maisie’s eyes glinted with triumph. She took her sweet time, lingering for several more minutes before finally stepping down. I sprinted back to the hospital, heart hammering against my ribs. But when I arrived, the surgeon looked at me with a heavy shake of his head. “It’s too late. The tissue is degraded. We missed the window by ten minutes.” I collapsed, the screams tearing out of my throat until I had no breath left. Later that night, a courier delivered a familiar, exquisite gift box. Then, Maxwell called. “Maisie is my best friend’s daughter. I couldn’t just let her jump, Daisy. We’ll find another donor…” I said nothing. He sighed, changing the subject. “You got the dress, right? Wear it tomorrow night. Meet me at our usual spot. I have something important to say.” I remembered then. Tomorrow was his ninth “proposal.” He still wanted to play the game. But Maxwell, I’m done playing. The next night, I didn’t go. The couture gown went into the trash. As I was signing the discharge papers to take my mother home for hospice, Maxwell’s friend appeared and forced me into a car. “Max has been waiting for hours! What’s wrong with you? This might be the time his memory actually stays—don’t throw it away now!” The field was filled with fireflies. I had seen this eight times before, and every time, I had cried with joy. I used to think I was his ultimate choice. Now I knew I was just his favorite victim. The lights weren’t magical anymore. They were blinding. I watched Maxwell, in the same suit, reciting the same vows. When he held out the diamond ring, I reached out and slapped it into the dirt. Maxwell froze. “Daisy? What… don’t you want to marry me?” “Maxwell,” I said, my voice like dry ice. “Stop acting—” Suddenly, his friend ran up, staring at his phone. He whispered something to Maxwell, and they both glanced at me. Maxwell tried to shove him away. “Not now! Can’t you see I’m busy? Get out!” A serpent of dread coiled in my gut. I snatched the phone from the friend’s hand. My heart stopped. It was a live stream. My mother was standing on the hospital rooftop. I ran. I flagged a taxi, my hands shaking so hard I could barely hold the phone. I spammed the chat in the live stream. Mom, please get down. I’m coming! The streamer, a young kid looking for clout, saw my comments and laughed into the camera. “Oh, you’re the daughter? Your mom is jumping because of you! She found out her daughter is a high-end hooker for some billionaire. She’s too ashamed to live!” The blood in my veins turned to slush. Then, my mother’s voice came through the speaker. She was talking to a nurse. “My Daisy… she’s a good girl. She shouldn’t have to sell her soul to pay for my life. Tell her… tell her she’s free now.” I gripped the phone, a scream of pure agony trapped in my chest. I reached the hospital just in time to hear the crowd below shouting. “Just jump already! Having a daughter like that is a failure anyway!” Then… Thud. A sickening, heavy sound. My mother bloomed like a red flower on the pavement right before my eyes. “No!” I threw myself onto her broken body, cradling her. My tears mixed with the blood on her face. I looked at the crowd, my mouth open, but no sound came out. Please. Help her. Somebody help her. [Host, the mission window has closed. You have failed.] [Beginning the wipe of all memories related to Maxwell Prescott…] … Maxwell intended to follow Daisy to the hospital, but Maisie called. Another headache. He hesitated, then turned the car around. He stayed with her through the night, eventually falling into a deep sleep by her bedside. When he woke up at noon, his group chat was blowing up. “Max, are you starting the ‘Reset’ act today? Round nine?” Maxwell stared at the screen for a long time. Beside him, Maisie stirred. He typed one word: Yeah. After showering, he sent his usual instructions to his security team: Go find Daisy. Break her hand. But an uneasy feeling was gnawing at him. Two hours later, the lead guard called back. “Sir… Ms. Mona is gone.”

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At the gala celebrating my reunion with my biological parents, Bennett’s star student got “lost” again. He was ready to walk out on both our families before the first course was even served. I didn’t want to break my parents’ hearts on the night they finally went public with the daughter they’d spent a decade searching for, so I swallowed my pride and pleaded with him. “My parents have been waiting years for this moment, Bennett. If you leave now, what are they supposed to think?” Instead of staying, Bennett looked at me with a condescending pity that made my skin crawl. “Callie is alone in this city, June. She has no one. I’m her mentor—that’s a sacred bond. I can’t just abandon her when she’s panicking.” He adjusted his cuffs, his voice dropping to that smooth, professorial tone he used to win over lecture halls. “You grew up an orphan too. You of all people should empathize with her instead of being so petty.” A knot formed in my throat, the resentment I’d been stifling for months finally boiling over. “Are you really worried about a ‘student,’ Bennett? Or is it because that student is her?” He shot me a look so cold it felt like a physical slap. Without another word, he turned and walked toward the exit. I slammed my hand against the table, the silver rattling. “Bennett! If you walk out that door, we are done!” He froze. When he looked back at me over his shoulder, his eyes were like chips of ice. “You have a family now, June. But Callie only has me. Stay here and enjoy your parents.” He vanished into the night. Ten minutes later, Callie Brooks posted a new photo to her Instagram. [Doesn’t matter if you’re lost, as long as you’re with the person willing to find the romance in the sunset with you!] In the photo—taken by a passerby—the two of them were silhouetted against the orange sky, their hands joined to form a giant heart. The happiness radiating from the screen was a knife to my gut. … 1 The whispers of the guests felt like needles pricking my skin. My father’s face went from hurt to a terrifying, stony rage. He slammed his wine glass onto the tablecloth, the crystal shattering. “Enough! I spent ten years scouring the country for my little girl, only for her to be treated like an afterthought?” Bennett’s parents turned pale. They scrambled forward, their voices trembling as they tried to play peacemaker. “Charles, please, it’s all a misunderstanding! Bennett is just… he’s dedicated. He’s a professor; he feels a deep responsibility for his students. He’s just being a good man.” My mother’s face remained frozen. She took my hand in hers, her grip firm and protective, as she stared them down. “A good man? I don’t think so. That ‘student’ is a grown woman, isn’t she? If he has so little respect for his wife’s dignity that he’d run to another woman on a night like this, then we have nothing more to discuss.” A wave of warmth flooded my chest. For years, I had navigated the world alone, fighting for every scrap of affection. Now, someone was finally standing in the gap for me. I squeezed my mother’s hand, blinking back tears, and turned to the room with a voice like steel. “Mom, Dad… let’s continue the party. We have a lot to celebrate.” I paused, looking directly at Bennett’s parents. “And one more thing. I’m filing for divorce.” The room went deathly silent. Bennett’s parents looked like they’d been struck by lightning. The guests began to murmur, their eyes darting between my parents’ wealth and my sudden, cold resolve. I ignored them. My mind drifted back to our fifth anniversary, just a month ago. Bennett had invited all his colleagues and friends to witness our “perfect” life. But the moment the appetizers were served, his phone rang. He looked at me with that practiced expression of regret. “Honey, a few of my students got into some trouble at a bonfire. I have to go deal with the campus police. I’m so sorry.” I had urged him to go, thinking it was an emergency. I spent the rest of the night playing the perfect hostess, laughing off the pitying looks from his friends. The next day, I went to the campus infirmary with gift baskets for the “troubled students.” Instead of a group of kids, I found Bennett in a private room, his eyes dark with exhaustion, tenderly tucking a blanket around Callie Brooks. When I confronted him, he didn’t even flinch. “Callie went for a hike and got turned around,” he’d said. “You know she has no one else in this city, June.” The memory made my blood run cold. The rest of the gala was a blur of apologies from Bennett’s family. By the time I got back to our apartment, the adrenaline had faded, leaving a hollow ache in its wake. My phone buzzed. A text from Bennett. [Callie sprained her ankle. She’s terrified of hospitals, so I’m staying the night to watch over her. I’ll be back in the morning.] I stared at the text, then opened Instagram. Like clockwork, Callie had posted again. [A lonely night, but at least I have you.] The photo showed Bennett’s sharp profile, his head resting dangerously close to her lap as he sat by her bed. I knew she’d taken it while he was distracted, but the fact that he allowed her this level of intimacy—this constant, blurred line—was the real betrayal. My heart felt like it was being carved out by a dull blade. I had known Bennett and Callie for years. I couldn’t understand how it had come to this. I was the one who had encouraged him to mentor her. I was the one who had suggested we help fund her studies when she told us she was an orphan from a broken-down town in the Ozarks. And Bennett? He was the man who had once stayed by my side through a grueling health scare, promising he’d never let me be alone again. How did we get here? I picked up my phone and messaged my parents. [Dad, Mom… tell the University of Chicago I accept the visiting professorship. I’ve made up my mind. I’m moving back to the city to be with you.] 2 I finished packing my essentials just as the sun began to peek through the blinds. The front door opened. Bennett walked in, bringing with him the faint, cloying scent of Callie’s perfume. He climbed into bed, the mattress dipping as he tried to pull me toward him. “Still mad, babe? I know I sounded harsh yesterday. But we’ve watched Callie grow up. You know her background; you know how hard it is for her to trust people.” I kept my back to him, as rigid as a statue. He sighed, resting a warm palm on my hip. “Look, once things settle down at the department, I’ll take you to a nice dinner with your parents to apologize, okay?” “I understand,” I said, my voice flat. He paused, sounding relieved. “I knew you’d see reason. You’ve always been the bigger person, June. I bought you that necklace you wanted—it’s on the counter. I’m going to go jump in the shower.” After the bathroom door clicked shut, I went to the kitchen. The jewelry box was sitting there. I opened it to find a modest gold pendant. The receipt was tucked underneath: $450. My stomach turned. I grabbed Bennett’s phone from the counter—I still knew his passcode. I navigated to his banking app and looked at his “recently deleted” transactions. There they were. Series of transfers to Callie Brooks. $5,000. $8,000. $5,000. It all made sense now. I had been sending Callie a $500 monthly “stipend” out of my own pocket to help her with groceries. Meanwhile, she was sporting Chanel bags and Hermès scarves on her “student” budget. While I was taking the subway to save money for our future, she was driving a brand-new Lexus. Bennett was subsidizing her entire life while I balanced our household ledgers down to the cent. The pain was a physical weight in my chest. When Bennett came out of the shower, he leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Goodnight, beautiful,” he whispered. “Or good morning, I guess.” “Goodnight,” I replied, already counting down the hours until I could leave. The next morning, I went to the Dean’s office and handed in my resignation. Then, I headed to the year-end Academic Excellence Awards. I planned to accept my research grant and leave quietly, but as I finished my speech, Callie Brooks practically stormed the stage. She snatched the microphone from the stand, her ponytail swinging defiantly. “I have to respectfully disagree with Dr. Whittaker’s findings!” she announced to the crowded auditorium. “My own recent research shows that her theory is based on outdated data. It’s a shortcut, frankly. It’s not rigorous.” I didn’t look at her. I looked at Bennett, who was sitting in the front row, legs crossed, watching her with a look of immense pride. Callie rambled on, throwing out complex-sounding jargon that meant nothing. She finished with a triumphant smirk. “In fact, these new conclusions were reached through private lab sessions with Dr. Mitch. Isn’t that right, Bennett?” Bennett nodded, giving her a look that a father might give a precocious child. The room erupted into whispers. The predatory nature of the academic world took over instantly. “Wow, Callie’s got guts. Challenging a titan like Whittaker to her face?” “I don’t know, June’s been winning awards for years. Maybe she’s been coasting.” “Bennett is so objective. He won’t even take his wife’s side if the science isn’t there. That’s integrity.” I felt my nails digging into my palms. “And what exactly are you proposing, Callie?” Bennett stood up. As the most senior faculty member in the room, his word was law. “The methodology Callie is describing is indeed groundbreaking,” he said smoothly. “Given the overlap, I think it’s only fair that the grant for this project be transferred to her name.” The betrayal was total. It wasn’t just my marriage; he was trying to strip away my career. I felt a cold laugh bubble up in my throat. I grabbed the microphone back. “Dr. Mitch, I’m afraid I have to disagree with your… assessment.” Both their faces shifted. I didn’t give them a chance to speak. I tore Callie’s “logic” apart piece by piece, citing the very data she claimed was missing. I exposed the flaws in her “groundbreaking” theory with the surgical precision of someone who had spent twenty years in the field. By the time I was done, the room was silent. Callie was beet-red, her eyes welling with tears of humiliation. She turned and ran out of the hall. Bennett’s face darkened. He shot me a look of pure vitriol before rushing after her. The room broke into thunderous applause, but I didn’t feel like a winner. The trophy in my hand felt like a lead weight. After the ceremony, Bennett cornered me in a secluded hallway. His eyes were bloodshot. “June, what the hell was that?” he hissed. “You already have everything. You have the reputation, the tenure, the parents. Why couldn’t you just let her have this one win?” “Because it wasn’t hers to take, Bennett,” I said, my voice remarkably calm. “She’s your student, not mine. And for the record? I’m cutting off her stipend. Effective immediately.” Bennett’s frustration boiled over. “If you’re still punishing her because you’re jealous of my time, that’s one thing. But don’t sabotage her future just because you’re having a tantrum about your parents’ party!” I didn’t have the energy to argue. He didn’t even realize that every sentence he spoke began and ended with Callie. I turned to walk away, but a blood-curdling scream echoed through the quad. “Help! Someone help me!” 3 We ran toward the sound. Near the parking lot, Callie was being dragged toward a rusted-out van by three burly men in flannel shirts. One had a fist in her hair; another was pinning her arms. Bennett didn’t hesitate. He lunged forward. “Hey! Let her go!” The men looked up, their faces weathered and mean. “Back off, pal. This is family business. Callie owes the family back home in the holler. She’s supposed to be married to my brother, and we’re taking her back to finish the job.” Callie was hysterical. “Bennett, help me! I don’t want to go back there! I want to stay with you!” Looking at her, I saw the girl she used to be—the one who begged me for a chance to escape her past. I’ve taken self-defense and kickboxing for years; I was ready to step in. But then Bennett spoke, and the world stopped turning. “Let her go!” he shouted, his voice cracking. He closed his eyes for a split second, then pointed directly at me. “You’ve got the wrong girl! That’s Callie Brooks. The woman you’re holding is my wife!” The air left my lungs. My heart hammered against my ribs in a frantic, sickening rhythm. I couldn’t believe the words had actually left his mouth. The three men didn’t wait to check IDs. They shoved Callie aside and lunged for me. I wasn’t fast enough. A hand clamped over my mouth, and another yanked my hair so hard I felt my scalp tear. The pain was blinding. Before I could land a solid blow, they threw me into the back of the van. The doors slammed shut. Inside the dark space, it was a blur of violence. I fought like a cornered animal, using every ounce of my training, but three-on-one in a confined space were impossible odds. Ten minutes later, the back doors were kicked open. I crawled out, my arm dangling at a wrong angle, my face a mask of blood and bruises, my clothes torn. Inside the van, the three men were groaning on the floor, nursing broken noses and cracked ribs. I had held my own, but I was shattered. Bennett was a few yards away, kneeling on the grass, whispering sweet nothings to a sobbing Callie. When he saw me emerge, he stood up. He didn’t rush to me. He didn’t ask if I was okay. He spoke in a commanding, clipped tone. “June, stay here and look after Callie. I’m going to find the campus security.” He looked at my injuries like they were an inconvenience—an eyesore he didn’t want to deal with. I let out a ragged, wet laugh. My eyes locked onto Callie. The “damsel” act vanished for a second. She looked at me with a chillingly blank expression. “Did you see that, June?” she whispered so only I could hear. “He chose me. Even when it meant throwing you to the wolves. He’ll always choose me.” She wiped a fake tear away. “I’m not a girl who gets lost, June. Bennett is smart, but he sees what he wants to see. And he wants to see a girl who needs him.” I stared at her, my vision blurring. “Callie… I gave you everything. I treated you like a sister.” She scoffed. “And you have everything. Money, power, a family that actually wants you. You don’t know what it’s like to have to fight for survival. Bennett is my survival. And he’s mine. In this life and the next.” I shook my head. I wasn’t angry anymore; I was just profoundly disappointed. She had the brains to make it on her own, but she’d chosen to be a parasite. Suddenly, Callie’s face crumpled. She dropped to her knees and started slapping herself across the face, over and over. “I’m sorry! Dr. Whittaker, please! I’ll do better! Don’t hurt me!” “June!” Bennett roared, charging toward us. He shoved me aside. Because of my shoulder and my shredded leggings, I lost my balance and fell into a bed of rosebushes. The thorns tore into my skin, but I didn’t make a sound. “Are you bullying her again?” Bennett yelled, his face twisted with rage. I didn’t answer. I forced myself up, ignoring the stabs of pain, and began to walk toward the gates. Near the exit, a group of my graduate students and colleagues ran toward me, their faces full of horror. “Dr. Whittaker! My god, what happened?” “June, we heard you’re leaving for Chicago—please tell us it isn’t true!” I didn’t want them to see me like this. I mumbled a lie about a car accident and kept moving. But Bennett wasn’t done. He caught up to me, grabbing my bruised wrist. “June, Chicago? You’re actually leaving? Why didn’t you tell me?” I winced as his grip tightened on my injury. A white-hot fury sparked in my chest. “It’s none of your business.” “The hell it isn’t! I’m your husband! Chicago is cutthroat, June. You won’t survive there without my support.” I laughed—a sharp, jagged sound. I swung my good arm and slapped him across the face with every bit of strength I had left. “After you literally handed me over to kidnappers to save your mistress? You don’t get to talk about support. You’re lucky I don’t kill you right here.” I walked away. Behind me, Bennett shouted, his voice desperate. “You’re just throwing a tantrum! You want me to beg for your forgiveness? Fine, I’m apologizing! Is that what you want?” I didn’t look back. I didn’t need his apologies. I needed a bridge, and I was going to burn it with him on it. 4 On the Uber ride home, my phone blew up with texts from Bennett. [June, come back. Stop being dramatic.] [I’m sorry about Callie’s family. It was a split-second decision. I knew you could handle yourself.] [June, answer me! Don’t do this!] I blocked him. When I got to the apartment, my mother was already there. She had a suitcase open on the bed. Her face, usually so composed, was soft with concern. “June, honey… let’s go home.” I finally broke. I collapsed into her arms, sobbing for the girl I used to be—the orphan who thought she’d finally found safety in a man who turned out to be a coward. As we were walking out the door with my bags, Bennett and Callie pulled up in his car. “June, wait!” Callie cried, rushing toward us. “Please don’t go! It’s all my fault… I’ll go back to the Ozarks. I won’t bother you anymore. Just don’t let Dr. Mitch lose his wife because of me.” Bennett hurried to her side, looking at me with a scowl. “Callie, stop. I’m not letting you go back to that hellhole.” My mother stepped in front of Bennett. Before he could react, she delivered a stinging slap to his face. “You coward!” she hissed. “You knew what kind of place she came from, and you tried to send my daughter there instead? Her life is worth more than yours will ever be.” Bennett rubbed his jaw. “June knows how to fight. Callie doesn’t. It was a logical choice.” My mother’s face went pale with fury. She turned and slapped Callie, too. “And my daughter earned those skills through years of struggle! You don’t get to profit off her strength.” As Callie wailed and Bennett tried to shield her, we moved toward the black Rolls Royce waiting at the curb. But then, a roar of an engine cut through the air. A van screeched to a halt behind us. My mother shrieked as she was shoved aside. I was pushed to the pavement, my knees scraping against the gravel. When I looked up, my heart stopped. It was the men from the campus. And they brought friends. One of them swung a heavy wooden club. My mother, trying to protect me, took the blow. She slumped to the ground, blood blooming from her head. “MOM!” The world went red. I scrambled toward her, my hands shaking as I tried to stem the flow of blood. The lead man sneered. “Thought you could hide, Callie? You knocked out my brothers, but we got reinforcements now. You’re coming home to the village.” I looked at Bennett. He was standing by his car, frozen. “I’m not Callie!” I screamed, my voice raw with hatred. “She is! The woman behind you!” The men looked toward Callie. Bennett stepped forward, but when he saw the sheer number of armed men, he faltered. “Let them go,” Bennett stammered. “Sure. Just tell us which one is the real Callie Brooks, or we take ’em both.” I looked at Bennett, my eyes burning. “Bennett, tell them the truth. Give them what they want.” Callie stepped out from behind him, looking like a martyr. “It’s okay, Bennett. Let me go. I’d rather die than see you two unhappy.” Bennett’s eyes went wide. The manipulation worked perfectly. He looked at me, then at Callie, and his face hardened. He pointed at me—at my bleeding, broken mother and me. “She’s Callie. Take her.” The next few seconds were a nightmare. Rough, greasy hands grabbed my hair. My blouse was torn as they dragged me away. My mother was screaming, clutching my ankles, until they kicked her aside. I saw Bennett cover Callie’s eyes, holding her close, protecting her from the “tragedy” he had just authored. As they threw me and my unconscious mother into the back of the van, I managed to reach into my pocket for the burner phone my father had given me. I sent a GPS pin. “Dad,” I whispered into the receiver, my voice a jagged edge of ice. “Send the medevac. Send the security teams. And bring Bennett Mitch and Callie Brooks to me. I want to watch them burn.”

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “414033”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

Hudson had a “Core Four.” Three guys, one girl—an inseparable, airtight clique. My roommates begged me to stay away from them. They warned me that groups like that were toxic, a black hole of codependency and drama. I didn’t listen. I spent a year meticulously working my way into Hudson’s orbit, playing the long game until I finally secured the title of his girlfriend. Before he took me to meet them, Hudson gave me a final, stern warning. “Tinsley is the heart of our group. She’s like a sister to us. If you so much as breathe a mean word to her, we’re done. Instantly.” I nodded, looking as innocent and compliant as a Sunday school teacher. Inside, my heart was racing with pure, caffeinated adrenaline. Replacing the “clique queen”? That was exactly the kind of psychological warfare I lived for. 1 “Even though you’re my girlfriend, Tinsley comes first. She’s the priority.” Hudson was laying it on thick, delivering a speech so delusional it made my roommates want to scream. I reached over, physically covering one of my friend’s mouths before she could go off on him, and gave Hudson a bright, shimmering smile. “Of course, Hudson. Your friends are my friends. I’m sure Tinsley and I are going to be best sisters.” My roommate, Ruby, looked like she was going to have an aneurysm. She waited until Hudson stepped out to grab his car before she cornered me. “You’re the campus sweetheart, Jade. You have guys falling over themselves for you. Why are you debasing yourself for a guy in a cult-clique? You’re going to regret this.” I didn’t answer. I just adjusted my lip gloss, grabbed my designer clutch, and slipped into the passenger seat of Hudson’s Audi. “Let’s go,” I chirped. “I don’t want to keep them waiting.” When we walked into the private booth at the lounge, Tinsley was front and center. She was wearing a silk white slip dress, looking every bit the “pure, fragile angel” that men find irresistible. Two handsome guys were flanking her, their body language protective, almost territorial. I expected a spoiled brat. Instead, the second Tinsley saw me, she leaped up and grabbed my hands with terrifying warmth. “You must be Jade! Hudson’s new girl. Oh my god, you’re stunning.” She turned to the other two. “This is Bennett and Jax. Guys, stop being brooding statues and welcome the newest member of the family!” Bennett, the one with the wire-rimmed glasses and a sharp, intellectual vibe, gave me a polite but chillingly brief handshake. Jax, a guy with a buzzcut and a gym-rat build, didn’t even bother to uncross his arms. He stared at me with blatant, unwashed hostility. I licked my lips, my smile widening a fraction. I loved a challenge. Tinsley didn’t stop talking. “Seriously, you’re like a supermodel. How did a dork like Hudson land you?” Hudson laughed, an affectionate, practiced sound, and rubbed the top of Tinsley’s head. He took off his jacket and draped it over her chair before she even sat back down. “You’re on your period,” he whispered loudly enough for me to hear. “Keep your back warm.” Tinsley immediately looked at me, her eyes wide with faux-worry. “Oh no, Hudson, stop! Jade’s going to get the wrong idea. Are you trying to start a fight between us?” The room went silent. Hudson’s brow furrowed, his protective instinct already flaring. I just tilted my head, my expression a picture of pure grace. “Why would I be mad? Hudson already told me you’re the heart of the group. Seeing you in person, I totally get it. You’re so sweet and petite—of course they treat you like a little sister.” The tension in the air evaporated. The guys relaxed. Tinsley’s smile faltered for a microsecond—just long enough for me to register it—before she recovered. “You’re so different from the other girls,” she said, her voice dropping into a confiding tone. “Usually, Hudson’s flings get so… competitive with me. I try so hard to be friends, but they always end up hating me.” She let out a tiny, girlish sigh. “The guys actually stopped dating for a while just so I wouldn’t have to deal with the drama.” 2 She paused, casting a lingering, slightly mournful look at Hudson. “I can’t believe Hudson actually let you lock him down. You must have some really impressive… techniques.” I just smiled, letting the backhanded compliment slide off me like water. I could see exactly what she was doing. She wasn’t just “one of the boys”—she was the gatekeeper of their hearts. When the appetizers arrived, I felt the shift in the room. Tinsley was getting ready to make her move. I stayed still, waiting for the opening. Suddenly, Tinsley let out a sharp gasp. A bowl of soup—not boiling, but warm enough to cause a scene—sloshed over and drenched her white dress. She looked down at the stain, her face contorting into a mask of theatrical pain. I moved to help her, but before I could reach her, Hudson shoved me aside. Hard. I hit the floor with a thud. “I knew it!” Jax barked, his face turning an angry shade of red. “They’re all the same. Act nice for ten minutes and then show their claws. You did that on purpose!” Bennett pushed his glasses up his nose, his voice cold. “We told you, Hudson. No one touches Tinsley. Not even your girlfriend.” “Jade,” Hudson’s voice was low and dangerous. “Apologize. Now.” Tinsley was curled into the guys’ arms, looking up at me with a tiny, triumphant glint in her eyes that only I could see. If I were any other girl, I would have screamed, thrown my drink, and walked out. But I wasn’t any other girl. I let the tears well up instantly. My lower lip trembled, and I made sure my voice came out broken and breathless. “I’m so sorry, Tinsley… I thought you were handing me the bowl… I was just trying to help…” I turned my head slightly, showing the most vulnerable angle of my neck, letting a single tear track down my cheek. “I love Hudson so much, and I wanted so badly for us to be friends. You’re so kind, Tinsley… please tell me you don’t think I did this on purpose.” Tinsley froze. The guys froze. She had spent years perfecting the “victim” role, but I was currently out-victim-ing her in front of her own audience. “Of course,” Tinsley stammered, forced into a corner. “Guys, stop. It was an accident. Don’t be mean to Jade.” I sobbed quietly and threw myself into Hudson’s arms. I looked up at him through my lashes, my eyes full of hurt and longing. For the first time, Hudson looked genuinely guilty. He held me tight, but before he could speak, Tinsley jumped in. “Let’s just finish and go to the pool! Hudson, you promised to teach me that new stroke today. I even brought my new bikini.” Nobody cared if I’d actually eaten. They dropped their forks and stood up. The three of them swarmed Tinsley, treating her like a porcelain doll, leaving me to trail behind like a forgotten shadow. Hudson glanced back once, but Tinsley immediately leaned into him, whispering a question about swimming techniques. Jax snorted. “I’m a better swimmer than Hudson, Tinsley. Let me teach you.” Tinsley giggled. “One at a time, Jax. You’re next.” We arrived at the campus athletic center. Tinsley emerged from the locker room in a dainty, floral one-piece, her arm linked through Hudson’s. The moment her toe touched the water, she let out a tiny shriek and jumped into Hudson’s arms. I stepped out in my own suit—a sleek, midnight-blue bikini that left very little to the imagination. “Hudson?” I called out, my voice soft. “I’m actually not a very strong swimmer. Do you think you could help me too?” The three of them turned. The air seemed to leave the room. If you want to play the game of a “pick-me” girl, you need the hardware to back it up. I had it. Every guy in the pool area was staring. Hudson’s expression darkened with a sudden, sharp possessiveness. 3 He instinctively started to let go of Tinsley to come toward me. But Tinsley gripped his arm tighter, laughing. “Sorry, Jade! Hudson’s mine for the afternoon. I called dibs.” Hudson hesitated, rubbing the back of his neck. “I did promise her, Jade. Just hang out for a bit, okay?” They splashed into the water, Tinsley clinging to his chest like a barnacle. I sat on the edge, watching calmly, until a guy from the varsity swim team approached me. “Hey,” he said, flashing a confident grin. “You look like you need a coach. Want some pointers?” In the water, Hudson’s head snapped toward us. “She’s my girlfriend,” he called out, his voice echoing off the tile. “She doesn’t need your help.” The swimmer looked at Hudson, then at Tinsley, who was currently wrapped around Hudson’s waist. He gave a look of pure disgust. “Dude, you’ve got a girl in your arms and another on the hook? Learn some respect.” “She’s like my sister!” Hudson yelled, clearly stung. “Yeah, ‘sister.’ Right.” The swimmer rolled his eyes and looked back at me. “Beautiful, here’s my number. Give me a call when you realize you’re dating a clown.” He walked away, but not before Hudson’s ego was thoroughly bruised. Hudson swam to the edge, looking agitated. “Those guys are just trying to take advantage of you, Jade. Use your head.” I looked at him with big, watery eyes. “But I’m bored just sitting here. If you’re busy with Tinsley, maybe Jax or Bennett could help me? They’re your best friends, right? I’m sure I’d be safe with them.” Jax, who was sitting nearby, looked up. “I’m not going to ‘take advantage’ of you. I’m not that thirsty.” I gave him a sweet, challenging smile. “Then it’s settled. Teach me.” I practically forced them into the water. As they stood on either side of me, guiding me in, Tinsley’s voice turned sharp. “Hudson! Focus on me!” I glanced over and caught Hudson’s eye. He wasn’t looking at Tinsley anymore. He was watching Bennett’s hand on my waist as I lowered myself into the pool. I blinked, then suddenly let out a small cry. I “cramped” up, my body going limp as I tumbled directly into Jax’s chest. Jax froze like he’d been struck by lightning. “My leg… it hurts so much,” I whispered into Jax’s ear, my breath brushing his skin. I looked over his shoulder at Bennett with a look of pure, helpless distress. “I should have stretched. Can you help me?” Bennett hesitated, then reached underwater to massage my calf. “JAX!” Tinsley’s voice was almost a scream. Jax flinched and reflexively shoved me away to turn toward her. Without his support, I slipped under the surface, purposefully inhaling a bit of water to make it real. The panic of drowning is hard to fake. I clawed at the nearest body—Bennett—and as I broke the surface, coughing and gasping, I pressed my lips against his, desperately “searching for air.” Bennett’s pupils blown wide. He was paralyzed. I scrambled out of the pool, looking like a drowned, beautiful wreck. Bennett stared at the water, his face unreadable, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. Tinsley stormed over to me, her face flushed with rage. “Jade! You’re Hudson’s girlfriend! How could you be so… disgusting? Kissing Bennett in front of everyone? Have you no shame?” 4 I looked like I was about to collapse. Before I could say a word, Bennett and Jax spoke up simultaneously. “Her leg gave out, Tinsley. She was drowning. It wasn’t on purpose.” “And honestly,” Jax added, his voice oddly defensive, “it’s not like there isn’t touching involved in swimming. You’ve been all over Hudson all day, and Jade didn’t say a word.” The silence that followed was deafening. Tinsley’s eyes welled with real tears of shock. “Are you… are you yelling at me? For her?” The guys looked stunned by their own words. They seemed confused as to why they were defending me. Jax immediately tried to backtrack, grabbing Tinsley’s hand. “No, no, Tinsley, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Hit me if you want, just don’t be mad.” Bennett reached out to wipe a tear from her cheek. “Tinsley, don’t cry.” Hudson, meanwhile, looked like he’d swallowed a lemon. “You guys are acting like she’s your girlfriend. I’m the one who’s supposed to be pissed here.” Bennett went quiet, looking guilty. Jax just blustered, “I don’t want a girlfriend. I only care about Tinsley.” It took ten minutes of them groveling before Tinsley finally “forgave” them. But then she turned her gaze on me. My internal “pick-me” radar went off like a siren. “Jade,” she said, her voice dripping with artificial sadness. “I really thought we could be friends. But you’re just like the others. You came into this group just to drive a wedge between us.” She sighed, looking at the boys. “I guess she’s just better at it than the other girls. This is the first time you’ve ever been mean to me because of a stranger.” She looked at me, her head tilted. “Why? We’re both girls. Why can’t we just get along? Why do you have to be so… competitive?” I watched as Bennett’s expression turned cold and distant again. Jax’s hostility returned. Hudson’s face darkened. “Jade,” Hudson said. “Did you do that on purpose?” I had to hand it to her. She was good. She was the one constantly competing, yet she was framing me as the aggressor. No wonder these guys were single. Their “sister” was a psycho-gatekeeper. I blinked, letting tears overflow. “I’m so sorry, Tinsley. It’s just… Hudson was so busy with you, and I was lonely. I thought we were all friends. I didn’t realize I wasn’t actually part of the group. I was so stupid to think I belonged.” I looked at Hudson, my lips trembling. “We should break up.” Hudson’s eyes widened. “What? No. It’s not that big a deal, Jade. I didn’t say we were breaking up.” “You don’t get it,” I whispered, my voice thick with suppressed sobs. “Tinsley is right. She’s the priority. And she clearly doesn’t want me here. Neither do Jax or Bennett. I love you, Hudson, and I don’t want to make your life difficult. I’d rather lose you than make you choose.” I looked at Jax and Bennett. They looked away, shifting uncomfortably. “When Tinsley and the guys are actually ready to accept me… maybe then. But for now, goodbye.” I turned and walked away, perfectly poised even in my exit. The moment I got back to the dorm, I blocked Hudson on everything. 5 I didn’t see the “Core Four” again for two weeks. Not until the Greek Life Mixer.

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I was the one who played the villain. Five years ago, in a high-stakes survival horror game known as The Gloom, I targeted a background character—a literal “nobody” NPC. I used my status as a seasoned player to seduce him, toyed with his heart and his body, and then I vanished, deleting my account without a second thought. Returning to the game now, five years later, the streetscape is the same—a perpetual, rain-slicked neon noir. But standing under a flickering streetlight is a child who shouldn’t exist. A translucent floating screen—the global spectator feed—scrolled frantically in my peripheral vision. [Wait, is that the Arch-Fiend’s kid? The one who eats players for breakfast?] [Poor little monster. He comes here every night looking for his ‘mommy.’ When is the Heroine finally going to enter this S-Rank zone?] The boy’s face was smeared with grime. He was scavenging, picking up a piece of raw, unidentifiable meat from the gutter. My heart twinged. I knelt beside him, reaching out to wipe his cheek with my sleeve. “Hey, kid. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to eat things off the ground?” Suddenly, the comment feed exploded. [Who is this suicide-wish NPC? She’s touching the Heroine’s kid!] [RIP. I remember this scene in the original script. This random fodder gets her hands bitten off by the Big Boss. It’s brutal.] [The Heroine saved the Boss’s life when he was weak and won the favor of the entire Nightmare Realm. She’s top three on the leaderboards. This girl is toast.] The smile on my face froze. I slowly began to retract my hand. The boy’s round, innocent eyes suddenly shifted. His pupils didn’t just dilate; they narrowed into jagged, vertical slits. My pulse hammered against my ribs. “You know what? I’ll just… let your dad come find you. My mistake.” 1. My hand hung suspended in the damp air. The boy was waiting for me to finish cleaning his face. He had closed his eyes, his long lashes fanning out like delicate shadows against his chubby, dirt-streaked cheeks. When I first spotted him, I was internally cursing the game’s developers for dragging a toddler into this hellscape. Everyone knew the monsters in The Gloom didn’t have a biological drive to procreate; the world was filled with nothing but solitary, vengeful entities. The other Newbie players in my spawn group had hissed at me to keep moving. “Don’t be a martyr, Jade. You want to die on day one?” They didn’t realize this wasn’t my first rodeo. Based on my clearance experience from five years ago, I knew I could protect one child. But the moment I knelt, the “Spectator Chat”—the voice of the system’s audience—revealed the truth. This wasn’t just a survival game anymore. It had been overwritten. It was now a dark, twisted romance novel. The “Heroine,” a player named Madison, was the savior of the Realm’s most terrifying Boss. They supposedly had a child together, and after five years of separation, they were destined for a grand, bloody reunion. Madison had used the “Love Interest’s Favor” to breeze through dozens of S-Rank trials without breaking a sweat. She was a “Mary Sue” with a cheat code, destined to escape to the real world with infinite wealth and her monster family. And I? I was the nameless casualty in the chapter where the lovers reunite. A piece of “cannonball fodder” who lacked the situational awareness to stay away from the Heroine’s son. In the original script, the Boss would find me “threatening” his cub and tear my hands off before letting the lesser ghouls feast on the rest of me. I looked at my hands—calloused, scarred from the trials I’d survived five years ago. If I lost them, my return to this world was for nothing. “Sorry, little guy,” I said, my voice tight and cautious. “I’m sure your dad will be here any second.” After all, he was the offspring of “The Widow”—the Great Spider of the Urban Legends sector. I’d fought every nightmare in the book, but giant arachnids were my one psychological breaking point. Just thinking about the Boss’s true form made my skin crawl with phantom legs. I backed away. I had to stay alive. I had to find someone. I wondered how he was doing. That beautiful, stuttering NPC who used to cry whenever he got a scratch. He was gorgeous, but he could barely string a sentence together. I hoped the Great Spider hadn’t eaten him yet. 2. The rain turned into a rhythmic drizzle. In this dark cityscape, the only thing more unreliable than the law was the lighting. The boy’s hair was matted with water, drooping like a drowned puppy’s ears. When he saw my polite, distant smile, his expression shattered into something heartbreaking. He forced his mouth open, revealing rows of tiny, needle-sharp teeth. “M… Ma…” His voice was a tiny rasp, as if he hadn’t quite mastered human speech. I couldn’t make out the word. Before I could ask him to repeat it, a pair of hands reached out from the shadows behind him. A woman stepped forward, her face radiant with a staged, cinematic sweetness. “I finally found you, my little angel,” she cooed. The spectator feed went wild. [FINALLY! The reunion! I’ve been waiting ten chapters for this!] [Madison is here! Bring on the fluff and the gore! Where’s the Boss?] The players in my group perked up, their eyes gleaming with hope. “You’re that new player, right? The ‘Good Luck Charm’ of the Realm? Madison?” one of them asked, practically bowing. “We’re so lucky to be in your squad. Can we kick that other woman out? She’s a liability.” Madison smiled modestly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Oh, it’s just luck, really. Don’t worry, everyone. I have… connections in this zone. I won’t let anything happen to you.” She wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t care. The kid’s “mom” was here, which meant I could go look for my own ghosts. I turned to leave. A sharp tug caught the hem of my coat. The boy, who barely reached my waist, was scowling, his face twisted with panic. “Don’t… go…” he managed, each syllable a struggle. The chat was stunned. [What is wrong with this kid? His mom is right there, and he’s grabbing the random girl?] [Did the fodder use a hypnotic item on him? Madison looks devastated. They say if you don’t raise them yourself, they have no loyalty.] Madison’s smile flickered. She knelt, reaching for the boy with a wet wipe. “You’re so messy, sweetie. Let Mommy clean you up. I know I’m a stranger now, but we’ll be best friends soon.” She must have put points into her Strength stat. She physically pried the boy’s fingers off my coat, the fabric tearing with a sharp rip. I felt a surge of cold fury, but I kept my face neutral. The boy froze. He slowly turned his head toward Madison. His eyes went dark—no whites, no color, just void. Was this woman suicidal? The boy’s pupils contracted into needles. His jaw unhinged slightly, the shark-like teeth extending. He was going to swallow this “Heroine” whole for interrupting him. “Kid. Did you hurt your hand?” My voice, calm and steady, cut through his murderous trance. I stepped between him and Madison. Instantly, the boy’s monstrous features receded. He looked up at me, then reached out and grabbed my rough, scarred hand with his small, soft one. He went quiet. Submissive. Almost forgot, he thought. Dad told me I have to act pathetic. That’s how he tricked Mom into staying the first time. The boy buried his face in my hip, hiding his expressionless eyes. I can do pathetic. 3. Against my better judgment, I stayed with the group. The kid wouldn’t let Madison within three feet of him, but he clung to me like a burr. I figured I’d just deliver him to the Great Spider and be done with it. We descended into the sewers, where the air was thick with the stench of stagnant rot. It was midnight. Two meters above us, on the surface streets, the monsters were starting their nightly harvest. I crushed a crawling, severed hand under my boot. Those things were “Ankle-Biters”—if they grabbed you, you were cursed to stay in the zone until sunrise. The boy was silent, following me with an eerie, focused obedience. It reminded me of the first time I met the “Nobody.” It had been in a tunnel just like this. I was running for my life, bleeding out, when I rounded a corner and saw him. His name-tag simply read [Background Character A]. He was slumped against the brickwork, his midsection a mess of torn flesh. He was gorgeous—porcelain skin, soulful eyes that looked like they were made of liquid amber. When he saw me, he didn’t growl. He just started to cry, fat tears rolling down his face. I should have kept running. But my heart did a frantic little dance in my chest. It wasn’t just pity; it was a primal, physical attraction. Even knowing he wasn’t human—just a little monster who hid in the dark to weep—I stayed. For a week, I used “first aid” as an excuse to touch him. I mapped out every inch of his chest and shoulders under the guise of cleaning his wounds. He was soft. He didn’t know how to resist. He didn’t even know how to kiss. When I finally pressed my lips to his, he just blinked his golden eyes and whispered, “Sweet.” I lingered as long as I could. But on the final day, I held his elegant, pale fingers and looked into his innocent eyes. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I have to go.” I’d won the game. I was allowed one wish. I chose a cure for cancer. It was a promise to my mother—the woman who had worked herself to the bone to raise me, only to be diagnosed just as I finally had the means to take care of her. I had to save her life. I was a ghost. I’d taken what I wanted from that stuttering boy and vanished. Now, five years later, the “Urban Legend” zone had jumped from B-Rank to S-Rank. “The Boss is losing his mind,” one of the veteran players whispered. “He used to ignore us. Now, he’s hunting players for sport. It’s like his wife ran away and he’s taking it out on the world.” “Quiet,” I signaled. “It’s 3:00 AM.” The Witching Hour. The veil between the sewer and the nightmare realm was at its thinnest. Drip. Drip. Drip. I thought it was just the pipes. Then the scent hit me—saltwater and old scales. I looked up. A pair of lidless, milky-white eyes were staring directly down at me.

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Five years. That was the length of time I’d given Elena, only for it to feel like a lease that was finally running out. My mother’s voice was a jagged edge over the phone, sharp with a frustration that had been building for half a decade. In the living room, Elena was hunched over the coffee table, deep in a game of Jenga with Toby. My cat, a tabby I’d raised since he was a kitten, was curled contentedly in Toby’s lap. They looked like a portrait of domestic bliss. I was standing on the balcony, separated from them by a sliding glass door, feeling less like a partner and more like a ghost haunting my own life. “Are you even listening to me, Miles? You’re twenty-eight. You aren’t a kid anymore.” “I know, Mom.” “If Elena wanted to marry you, she would have done it by now. You need to start looking out for yourself. I need you back in the city this weekend. No excuses.” Her tone left no room for negotiation. Before I could argue, the line went dead. I stared at the screen, a bitter laugh bubbling up in my throat. Every year she asked, and every year I had nothing to give her. Because every year, Elena gave me the same excuse: “I want to wait until Toby is settled. Once he’s on his feet, then we can think about us.” I used to tell myself it was noble. Toby’s father had been Elena’s mentor, the man who had shaped her career before he died in a tragic accident. Elena felt she owed him the world, so she took Toby in. I’d spent five years compromising, playing second fiddle to a boy who wasn’t even her blood. But tonight, the compromise felt like a slow-acting poison. 1 Later that night, my mother sent over a contact card. She must have sensed my silence was a white flag. [Jordan Riggs. 5’8″, ex-Army, sharp, disciplined. Both parents are in the civil service. Good family.] I didn’t know how “sharp” Jordan was, but it was funny to see my mom listing combat experience as a selling point. She was definitely keeping up with the times. I sent a friend request with a brief note of my name. No immediate response. Elena walked into the bedroom just as I set my phone down. She’d just walked Toby back to the apartment she’d bought for him right across the hall. She was wearing a fresh sweatshirt, and she smelled like expensive sandalwood soap—the kind Toby used. She’d obviously showered over there. Sometimes I wondered if this apartment was our home or just a convenient hotel for her between shifts of taking care of Toby. When we moved here, she’d insisted on buying the unit across the hall “just to keep an eye on him.” She’d spent the first month living over there because Toby “wasn’t adjusting well to the new place.” I’d swallowed my pride and accepted it. I told myself he was just a kid who’d lost his father. But Toby was nineteen now. When does a “kid” become a man who can sleep in a room by himself? “Still up? Don’t you have that meeting tomorrow?” Elena asked, shedding her jacket and climbing into bed. She reached out to pull me into her arms. I didn’t pull away, but I didn’t lean in either. “My mom called again. She’s asking about the wedding. Again.” Elena groaned, her body stiffening. “Miles, we’ve talked about this. I need to focus on my career, and Toby… he doesn’t even have a girlfriend yet. He needs stability. There’s no rush.” I stared at her in the dim light of the bedside lamp. “Is there ever going to be a rush for us, Elena?” She sighed, a sound of practiced exhaustion. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t get why your mother is so paranoid. If she’s worried I’m just using you, tell her I’ll sign whatever prenup she wants. I can even put down the deposit for a house in your name right now if it’ll shut everyone up.” I felt a cold flash of anger. Five years of devotion, and she thought she could settle the score with a bank transfer. “If you don’t want to marry me, just say it!” I snapped, my voice cracking. Elena’s patience evaporated instantly. She threw back the covers and stood up. “I don’t care about the piece of paper, Miles! It’s you and your mother pushing for it.” Her eyes caught the glow of my phone on the nightstand. “She’s setting you up on dates again, isn’t she?” I didn’t answer. “Go then,” she said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, confident low. “I won’t stop you. But I’m not getting married until Toby is settled. If your mom wants you to go on a blind date, go. Maybe it’ll get her off our backs once you realize you aren’t going to find anyone else you love more than me.” She slammed the door on her way to the guest room. I sat in the dark, trembling. She was so sure of me. So certain that I was a dog on a leash that would always come back for a pat on the head. She was about to find out how wrong she was. 2 Elena and I met during our sophomore year of college. It was one of those cinematic moments—a campus fire drill that turned into a real emergency in the chemistry lab. She’d grabbed my hand and pulled me through the smoke-filled hallway. Between the adrenaline and the “bridge effect,” I fell hard. Chasing her hadn’t been easy. Elena was brilliant, cold, and possessed a tongue that could draw blood without trying. I spent months trying to melt the ice. I remembered the first time I tried to be romantic. I’d worn a crisp white shirt—no coat, despite the freezing Boston wind—and walked across three blocks to get her favorite breakfast burritos, waiting outside her dorm at 7:00 AM. When she saw me, she didn’t smile. She frowned. “It’s twenty degrees out. Are you trying to get pneumonia for the sake of an aesthetic? That shirt makes you look stiff. Buy a parka.” I’d stood there, red-faced, as students hurried past us. Everyone knew I was the guy hopelessly pining for the “Ice Queen.” They told me to save my energy and study for finals instead. But I stayed. I helped her with her lab reports. I was the steady presence she didn’t know she needed. We finally became “us” in our junior year, after Toby—who was just a boy then—nearly ran into traffic while visiting her. I’d lunged for him, pulling him back just as a car screeched past. I ended up with a shattered ankle and three months of physical therapy. Elena stayed by my side through every session. Looking back, I wondered if she ever loved me, or if she was just paying a debt because I’d saved the only thing she truly cared about. When I woke up the next morning, Elena was already gone. There was a note on the kitchen island: Toby wants that seared sea bass you make. Pick some up on your way home and have dinner ready by six. I picked up the note, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into the trash. I used to cook for Toby because I loved Elena. Now that I was done with Elena, Toby was just a stranger taking up space in my life. I looked around the apartment. Every piece of furniture, every frame on the wall, I had picked out. Elena hadn’t lifted a finger. Yet, across the hall in Toby’s place, she’d spent weeks agonizing over floor samples and paint swatches. The disparity was so glaring I couldn’t believe I’d ignored it for five years. My phone buzzed. A message from Jordan Riggs. Hi, I’m Jordan. Sorry for the delay—long shift. Your mom mentioned you’re coming into the city this weekend. I’ll pick you up from the station. I didn’t overthink it. Sounds good. See you then. 3 After a quick breakfast, I opened a chat with my mentor at the firm. Two weeks ago, he’d offered me a senior consultant position at our branch in Atlanta. It was a massive promotion, but I’d turned it down because Elena didn’t want to leave Toby. I typed out a quick message: Is the Atlanta position still open? The reply came back almost instantly: I thought you wanted to stay in the city for Elena? I changed my mind, I wrote. My career is more important than a relationship that’s going nowhere. I hit send and felt a weight lift off my chest. Career, marriage, future—everything was moving forward the second I stopped letting Elena hold the brakes. I was heading out to the office to start the paperwork when I ran into Toby in the hallway. He was leaning against my door, looking as pampered and entitled as ever. “You’re heading to the market, right?” he asked, not even looking up from his phone. “Elena forgot to tell you, but I don’t want the bass anymore. Make the spicy tacos instead. With the handmade shells.” I stood there, looking at him. He was nineteen, handsome in a soft, boyish way, wearing a designer hoodie that cost more than my first car. Elena’s money. She spent eighty percent of her income on him and twenty percent on our “shared” life. I remembered the bouquet of roses she’d brought me last Valentine’s Day. I’d been so touched—until I realized she’d only given them to me because Toby thought they “smelled weird” and didn’t want them in his room. My friends called me a doormat. I’d argued that she was just practical. God, I wanted to go back in time and slap myself. Toby noticed I wasn’t moving. He flashed a new gold ring on his finger, catching the hallway light. “Elena got me this yesterday. She said I deserve the best. I’m the most important person in her life, you know?” He stepped closer, his voice dropping into something cruel. “Do you want to know why she won’t break up with you, Miles? Even though she’s so much more successful?” I stared at him, waiting. “Because in her eyes, you’re just a high-end, live-in maid who happens to pay half the mortgage. You’re convenient.” The words stung, but they didn’t break me. I knew Elena. She probably had said something like that in a moment of clinical honesty. “If you want tacos, tell Elena to make them,” I said, my voice steady. “Now get out of my way. I have a job to go to.” I brushed past him, my posture straight. Toby, used to me being the “nice guy,” was speechless for a few seconds. As the elevator doors began to close, I heard him screaming after me. “Elena said if you’re going to be a bitch about it, don’t bother cooking at all! She’s done eating your pathetic food anyway!” I smiled as the doors shut. Good. One less chore. 4 The transfer paperwork went through without a hitch. I booked a one-way ticket for Saturday morning. When I got home Friday evening, tired and ready to pack, my key wouldn’t turn in the lock. I froze. I tried again. Nothing. I pressed my thumb to the scanner. Access Denied. I pulled out my phone and called Elena. Straight to voicemail. I sent a text. Did you change the locks? No reply. This is my house too, Elena. My name is on the deed. I pay half the mortgage. Open the door. Silence. My blood began to boil. I walked across the hall and pounded on Toby’s door. Toby opened it, a smug, “shocked” expression on his face. “Oh, hey Miles. Locked out? That’s a shame.” “Where is Elena?” Toby blocked the doorway, crossing his arms. “You didn’t want to cook for me, so Elena is in there making me dinner right now. She’s my sister, basically. It’s her duty to take care of me. We have a special bond. You got a problem with that?” I took a deep breath, clutching my phone so hard my knuckles turned white. “Tell her to come out. Now.” “No,” Toby smirked. I looked past him. I could see Elena’s silhouette in the kitchen, moving back and forth, humming a tune. She heard me. She definitely heard the pounding. She just didn’t care. “Fine,” I said. “What are you gonna do?” Toby taunted. “Call the cops? It’s her house.” I didn’t say another word. I turned back to my own door and dialed 911. “I’d like to report a lockout and request the fire department for a forced entry. I have the deed on my phone. My partner has locked me out of my primary residence.” The commotion of the fire department arriving wasn’t quiet. When the saw hit the lock, Toby came running out. “Elena! Miles has gone crazy! He’s breaking the door down!” Only then did Elena finally deign to appear. She stepped out, wiping her hands on an apron, her face darkened with a cold, simmering rage. She watched the firefighters finish their job and then turned to me. “This is our home, Miles. You’re making a scene.” “Oh, so you know it’s our home?” I asked, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “Funny, considering you deleted my biometrics and changed the codes. What do you call that?” Elena’s eyes flickered to Toby. He looked away, playing the innocent victim. She knew exactly what had happened, and as usual, she chose him. “Toby was just playing around, Miles. You didn’t have to escalate it to this.” She turned to Toby, ruffling his hair. “Go back inside and finish your dinner. I’ll handle this.” In the past, I would have stayed to argue. I would have demanded an apology. But I was just so tired. I walked into the apartment, ignored Elena’s lecture about “acting like a child,” and went straight to the bedroom. I grabbed my suitcase and began throwing my essentials—passport, laptop, clothes—inside. Elena stood in the doorway, her arms crossed. “Where do you think you’re going? You’re throwing a tantrum now?” I didn’t look at her. “I haven’t even gotten mad at you for destroying the door, and you’re acting like the victim? Stop packing and—” I stopped, gripped the handle of my suitcase, and looked her dead in the eye. I gave her a small, sad smile. “Are you stopping me because you’re finally ready to marry me?” The question hung in the air like a dead thing. Elena froze. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She didn’t move to block me anymore. She just stood there, her silence confirming everything I already knew. She stepped aside, letting me pass. She was so sure I’d be back by Sunday. She thought this was just another “episode” she could wait out. I walked out the door without looking back. Half an hour later, a text popped up on my phone. Elena: What time is your train back on Sunday? I’ll pick you up from the station. I didn’t reply. Usually, I was the “instant replier.” I’d text her while eating, while working, while in the shower. Her silence was a weapon; mine was a revolution. Back at the apartment, Toby lounged on the sofa next to Elena. He wrapped an arm around her neck. “Another fight? He’s so dramatic. Not everyone can be as easygoing as me.” He leaned in closer. “He’s still on that marriage thing, isn’t he? It’s been five years, Elena. If you wanted to, you would have. You can marry him if you want, really… don’t worry about me.” Elena knew him better than that. She’d seen how he reacted when she’d tried to date anyone else in the early years. He’d throw fits, get “sick,” or sabotaged the dates. She told herself she was protecting him from getting hurt again. “Should I really not worry about you?” she asked softly. Toby looked down, his eyes instantly brimming with tears. Elena sighed, patting his shoulder. “Just a little longer. Until you’re settled.” Toby looked up at her then, his gaze intense. “Elena… why don’t you just break up with him?”

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When I first entered the workforce, my mother laid down the ground rules. “I need fifteen hundred a month from you to help out with the family,” she told me, her voice brooking no argument. “We’re going to build a custom home on the family lot. When it’s done, you’ll finally have a bedroom all to yourself. Plus, I’ll be putting some of it away for your future wedding. You know you’d just blow it all if you kept it yourself.” I believed her. I believed her so completely that I practically bled myself dry trying to scrape together that fifteen hundred from my entry-level salary. More than anything, I just wanted a room of my own. My coworkers used to look at me with a mix of pity and exasperation. “Are you out of your mind, Gemma?” they’d ask. “Aren’t you worried she’s just going to use your money to subsidize your sibling?” “And so what if they build a house?” another pointed out. “It’s not like your name is going to be on the deed.” I would just laugh it off, brushing away their concerns. “I don’t have a brother,” I’d explain. “It’s just me and my younger sister. I don’t have to worry about that whole ‘saving everything for the golden boy’ dynamic. And besides, helping my parents have a better life… it’s the right thing to do.” Hearing that, my coworkers would usually drop it. A few years later, my sister, Paige, got her first job. My mother called me with an updated demand. “Your sister is contributing twenty-four hundred a month,” she said, her tone dripping with pointed meaning. “She doesn’t spend a dime on herself. You need to match that, Gemma. Otherwise, it’s going to be very tricky to divide up the space in the new house.” And so, I put my head down and worked even harder. I picked up a second job, exhausted to the bone, just to meet her quota. I did this right up until the day the new house was finished. When the time came to claim our spaces, my parents took the sprawling master suite. Paige took the large second bedroom. And the third, smallest bedroom? That was designated as Paige’s “yoga and reading studio.” 1 “Well, you’re always working in the city anyway. You hardly ever come home,” my mother said. She didn’t even blink. Her tone was as casual as if she were discussing the weather. “Giving you a dedicated bedroom would just be a waste of space. If you visit, you can just squeeze in with your sister.” Paige seized the moment, linking her arm through mine, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness. “Exactly, Gem! I don’t mind sharing with you. It’ll be just like when we were little, two sisters in one room. It’ll be so cozy! We can stay up and share secrets…” The sheer, suffocating weight of the betrayal hit my chest so hard I couldn’t breathe. The years of exhaustion, the deprivation, the hollow ache in my stomach—it all boiled over. I shoved Paige’s arm away. “Why the hell should I share a room with you?” My voice was shaking. “Why do you get two rooms, and I get nothing?” Paige stumbled back a step, catching her balance. She immediately twisted her face into a mask of tearful victimization, looking up at me with wide, wounded eyes. My mother’s demeanor flipped instantly. The casual indifference vanished, replaced by a snarling ferocity. “What is wrong with you?!” she screamed. “How dare you bully your sister!” The commotion drew my father out of the master suite. He didn’t ask what happened. He just pointed a thick finger at my face and started yelling. “Is this how an older sister behaves? Have you no shame?” Three against one. A united front, circling me, tearing me down. I didn’t back up a single inch. I looked dead at them. “If there isn’t a room for me in this house,” I said, my voice eerily calm despite the blood roaring in my ears, “then you need to give me my money back. That is my money. The money I bled for.” My heart physically ached. For as long as I could remember, my only dream was to have a space with a door that locked. A space that was mine. Growing up, the four of us had practically lived on top of each other in a cramped, thin-walled apartment. There were nights I’d wake up in the dark, hearing the muffled, unmistakable sounds of my parents in the next bed over. I’d have to lie there, paralyzed, unable to turn on a light, unable to move. I had zero privacy. Every phone call, every sigh, every tear was audited by my mother, my father, or Paige. When I moved out for work, I could have afforded to rent a nice one-bedroom apartment. I could have had my privacy then. But my mother had dangled the promise of this house. So, I chose to split a single, cramped studio apartment with my friend, Natalie. We lived out of suitcases and slept on twin mattresses. I swallowed the hardship, believing—truly believing—that I was buying my way toward a permanent sanctuary. God, it’s humiliating to admit now. The day my parents told me the foundation was poured, I had been so giddy I pulled out a piece of printer paper and sketched out a floor plan. I drew where my bed would go. Where I’d put a bookshelf. I asked Natalie for decorating advice, talking about throw pillows and string lights like an absolute idiot. I had been bragging. And in the end, I wasn’t even factored into the blueprints. The tears finally spilled over, but my voice remained like iron as I laid out the math. “I have been working for six years,” I said, locking eyes with my mother. “For the first two years, I sent you fifteen hundred a month. For the last four years, I sent you twenty-four hundred a month. And when you told me the construction budget ran dry and you couldn’t afford the windows, the staircase railings, or the doors, I swallowed my pride, borrowed money from my friends, and sent you another ten thousand.” I took a breath. “One hundred and fifty-six thousand, four hundred dollars. Give it back to me.” My mother froze. She stared at me, genuinely aghast. “You’re… you’re keeping a ledger on your own mother and father?” Paige chimed in, perfectly on cue. “Gemma, how can you be so cold?” I laughed, a harsh, scraping sound. “You had the stomach to build a house with my money and not leave me a single square foot. You had the stomach to give the extra bedroom to your youngest daughter as a yoga studio. If you can do that, why the hell shouldn’t I keep a ledger?” 2. For six years, I hadn’t bought a single piece of new clothing. Everything I wore was from thrift stores or hand-me-downs from coworkers. I hadn’t gone out to a single restaurant. I hadn’t gone out for drinks. I survived because Natalie let me pay a fraction of the groceries in exchange for doing all the cooking, cleaning, and laundry for our shared studio. I had ground my monthly personal expenses down to less than a hundred dollars. And I had suffered through it willingly. Gladly. Now, looking at them, all I felt was a pure, blinding rage. Whatever my parents tried to say next, I shut it down. I only had one sentence for them: Give me my money. They cycled through weeping, screaming, and guilt-tripping. I watched them with dead eyes, turned on my heel, and went straight to a lawyer. In response, my parents blocked my number. When the lawyer sent a formal demand letter, they threw it away. “Ungrateful bitch,” they told the rest of the family. My lawyer was brutally honest with me. They were my parents. Even if a judge believed me, all my parents owned was this new property. The court wasn’t going to force a foreclosure over informal family transfers. “You’re going to have to find a way to negotiate with them,” the lawyer advised gently. But how do you negotiate with a brick wall? The three of them had completely frozen me out. So, I took the nuclear option. I went into the extended family group chat on Facebook and aired every piece of dirty laundry I had. I laid out exactly how they had bled me dry for $156,000 to build a house, only to deny me a bedroom. The truth was, the house shouldn’t have cost that much to begin with. My parents both had jobs. They had their own savings. Between my $150k and whatever Paige had supposedly contributed, they had vastly overbuilt. They had erected a McMansion just to flex on the rest of the family. I was more than happy to rip that facade to shreds. The public humiliation worked. My mother couldn’t hide behind her blocked numbers anymore. She came to the city to find me. When she showed up at my apartment door, her eyes were bloodshot, her face haggard. I was almost shocked to see her. She was a woman who rarely left our hometown, a woman terrified of navigating the city transit system. For a split second, a traitorous pang of sympathy twisted in my chest. She broke down crying in my living room. “Gemma, you have to understand… we don’t have a boy to carry on the family name.” “So?” I asked, confused. “So, your father and I… we’re setting things up so Paige’s future husband will move in with us. The house is an incentive. And those three rooms… that ‘yoga studio’ is eventually going to be a nursery…” The realization clicked into place, cold and sharp. The yoga studio was a lie. It was a placeholder for Paige’s future kids. Because Paige wasn’t just my sister. In my parents’ eyes, she was their son. She was the legacy. I stared at my mother’s mouth as it kept moving, spewing out rationalizations. She said no decent man would agree to live with his in-laws without the promise of a big, paid-off house. She talked about the shame of not having a son, of needing to secure Paige’s loyalty so they wouldn’t die alone. She said the house simply had to go to Paige. She talked for a long time. When she finally ran out of breath, I asked her one question. “Why does it have to be Paige? Why couldn’t I be the one to stay?” We were both her daughters. Why was I automatically disqualified? Why was I just the collateral damage? She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. I leaned forward. “Forget about a husband. I was planning on having a kid on my own anyway. I could go to a sperm bank, or find a guy, get what I need, and raise the kid myself. How about this? Give me Paige’s bedroom and the nursery. Let her go marry someone else. I won’t screw her over—tell me exactly how much she put into the house, and I will pay her back every cent. But the house becomes mine.” Under my unwavering stare, my mother finally cracked. Her eyes shifted away. “Your sister is… she’s just more affectionate,” she mumbled. “We want her close by.” 3. “Then you should have used your own damn money to buy her a house,” I snapped. “Why did you steal mine?” I went back to my one rule: Pay me back. I told her if she didn’t, I would drive to Paige’s office and make a scene in her lobby every single day. I wasn’t going to let my sister walk away with a hundred and fifty grand of my blood, sweat, and tears. My mother looked horrified. She begged. Then she yelled. “Just consider it a repayment for us raising you—” I cut her off. “You think you’re owed a hundred and fifty grand for how I was raised? I wore other people’s garbage. I barely had meat on my plate. I went to a bottom-tier public school, took out my own student loans, and worked three jobs just to eat in college. You took every penny I had to my name.” Anger makes you say ugly, permanent things. As I listed out every reason they were failures as parents, my mother’s hand shot out. She slapped me across the face. “You… you…” she sputtered. I didn’t flinch. I just stared at her with dead eyes. Then, I grabbed my coat, marched her down to the bus station, bought her a ticket, and forced her onto a Greyhound back to our hometown. There was no room for her in my studio. Once the bus pulled away, I called Natalie. “She’s gone. You can come back.” Natalie had been crashing on a friend’s couch to give me space to deal with the fallout. When she rushed through the door, I was in the kitchen, aggressively dumping all the “gifts” my mother had brought—jars of homemade preserves, dried mushrooms, baked goods—straight into the trash can. Natalie didn’t say a word. She just walked over and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. I dropped the trash bag, buried my face in her shoulder, and finally broke down, sobbing until my throat bled. The next day, my father called. “Alright, alright, enough with the dramatics over a tiny room,” he said, using that tired, patronizing tone he always used when he thought I was being hysterical. “I talked to your sister. We’re going to knock out the walls of the extra half-bath downstairs. We’ll put down some flooring. You can use that space as your bedroom. Happy now? Making a mountain out of a molehill…” Live in a converted bathroom. And he was offering it to me like he was bestowing a royal decree. They say that when you hit absolute rock bottom, you don’t cry. You laugh. A manic, breathless laugh bubbled out of my chest. My father took my laughter as a sign of relief. “We don’t have the cash to finish it out, though,” he added quickly. “You’ll have to pay for the drywall and paint yourself.” And then he hung up. I was staring at the blank screen of my phone, thumb hovering over the redial button, when Natalie gasped. She walked over, holding out her phone, her expression a mix of pity and disgust. “Gem… you need to see this.” It was Paige’s Instagram story. She had posted two photos. One was a picture of the deed to the new house. The second was a close-up of the ownership block. It had her name on it. Sole ownership. The caption read: Owning a custom home in my twenties debt-free! Couldn’t have done it without the best parents in the world! #blessed #homeowner The house. Was already. In her name. Maybe the previous days had just broken my capacity to feel, because a strange numbness washed over me. I wasn’t even surprised. Natalie grabbed my shoulders and gave me a shake. “Gemma, wake up. Think about this. I know Paige. She’s a receptionist. Does she really look like she has the kind of money to drop twenty-four hundred a month on construction costs?” I blinked at her. “And,” Natalie continued, her voice rising, “my dad is a contractor. I saw the photos you showed me of that house. It’s a standard suburban build in a low-cost area. It didn’t cost half a million dollars. They probably built the whole thing for a fraction of what you gave them.” The math finally clicked. Paige hadn’t paid a dime. She got a brand-new house handed to her on a silver platter. And I, having bled out over a hundred and fifty grand, was being told to pay for the privilege of sleeping in a gutted downstairs toilet. And I had to wage a war just to get that. A violent tremor wracked my body. I bit down on my lower lip so hard I tasted copper. Right at that moment, my phone buzzed in my hand. It was Paige. I stared at the caller ID, my throat seizing up. “Answer…” I croaked out to Natalie. “Answer it.” Natalie swiped the screen and put it on speaker. Paige’s voice came through, shrill and venomous. “Are you out of your mind, Gemma? Have you no shame? Mom and Dad gave this house to me, and you’re throwing a tantrum trying to steal it?” I didn’t say anything. I just listened to her breathe. “I’m the one staying here to take care of them. I’m the one keeping the family together. Everything in this family belongs to me,” she sneered. “You’re lucky I didn’t ask you to buy me a car for my wedding present.” She paused, lowering her voice into a vicious hiss. “I’m warning you. If you come back here and try to take what’s mine, I will make you regret it.”

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The new CEO was making his rounds. I stood with a group of young women in the hallway, waiting to greet him. He stopped directly in front of me, leaning in just a fraction. “I want in.” His voice was a low, gravelly murmur. My face instantly burned. Years ago, on a narrow mattress in the back of a rented Airstream, holding onto me with scalding skin and ragged breaths, those were the exact words he used to beg me with. 1 Every eye in the corridor snapped toward us. I froze, the air leaving my lungs. The tall, broad-shouldered man standing before me merely looked past my face, his gaze flat as he gestured to the space behind me. “Excuse me. Do you mind?” Reality crashed back down. I realized I was blocking half the doorway to the executive suite. Heat flooded my cheeks, and I quickly took two steps back. Roman Wyatt—wait, no, just Roman—gave me a polite, curt nod. His expression was completely unreadable as he strode into the Chairman’s office. I retreated to the breakroom and aggressively brewed a cup of black coffee. Did he recognize me? Or not? And those words… Deliberate, or a terrifying coincidence? I turned my head and caught my reflection in the glass cabinet doors. Staring back at me was the blurry, unremarkable outline of a thirty-three-year-old woman. A sharp, practical bob. Minimal, lifeless makeup. Thick black-rimmed glasses. Because I’d been pulled away while auditing expense reports, I was still wearing a pair of ugly, frayed sleeve protectors over my cardigan. I looked absolutely nothing like the wild, sun-kissed girl who had driven down a desert highway five years ago. We were two completely entirely different people. …It was a coincidence. I let out a shaky breath, settling on that conclusion. 2 When I returned to the Finance department, my two youngest subordinates were practically vibrating with gossip about the new boss. “He’s ridiculously gorgeous. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was an A-list actor! If I knew the new CEO looked like that, I wouldn’t have stressed about the buyout at all.” “I heard he’s only twenty-eight. Built his own tech startup, sold it, and now he’s taking over his family’s corporate empire. It’s literally a romance novel come to life. I’m updating my Instagram story right now.” “Oh my god, calm down…” “Hey, if Maddie—the most strictly-business, stone-faced finance director alive—can be so starstruck she literally blocks his path in the hallway, why can’t I? Ow, why did you kick me—” I walked to my desk, my face an emotionless mask. “Keep the gossip off company time, ladies.” They fell silent instantly, their heads ducking behind their monitors. The sharp clack-clack of heels echoed from the hallway, growing louder. Viola marched into the room. As always, the marketing assistant was perfectly contoured, poured into a skin-tight tailored suit. She slammed a stack of receipts onto one of the junior accountants’ desks. “Why were the Marketing department’s expense reports rejected?” The recent grad flinched, stammering, “V-Viola, this doesn’t comply with the new corporate policy. Anything exceeding the per diem by fifty percent requires the General Manager’s signature—” Viola cut her off with an impatient eye roll. “Our department is out there on the front lines, fighting for market share. You guys just sit comfortably in your cubicles trying to find ways to drag us down, is that it?” I looked up slowly. My voice was ice. “Viola. The new expense protocols were distributed company-wide a month ago. We even held a mandatory training session. If you don’t understand it, go back and read the manual. If you have a problem with it, take it up with executive leadership. Do you think raising your voice in my department makes you look competent?” Viola turned to me. She blinked slowly, feigning a look of sudden realization. “Maddie. You wouldn’t happen to be… letting your personal grudges affect your professional judgment, would you?” I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose and met her stare head-on. “And what personal grudge would that be, exactly?” She let out a breathy, condescending little laugh. “Well. I suppose Cameron will just have to come down here and explain it to you himself. After all, you two used to be married.” 3 Cameron didn’t take long to arrive. Viola immediately dropped her voice, calling him “Boss,” before biting her lower lip and staring at her shoes. She played the part of the bullied, innocent victim to perfection. “There’s no need to make things difficult for my girls, Maddie,” Cameron said. He frowned slightly, his tone as casual as if we were discussing the weather. Ah. I knew this scene well. Before I divorced Cameron, he had said similar things to me more times than I could count. We were married for three years. When he was promoted to VP of Sales, the boundaries between him and his assistant, Viola, became incredibly blurred. I had asked him to transfer her. He thought I was being archaic and ridiculous. “You sit in a sterile office all day,” he had argued. “Sales is out there entertaining clients. We look out for each other. You don’t have to be so threatened by a twenty-something girl.” Then came the night he got too drunk at a client dinner. I drove to pick him up. Viola was in the backseat, “taking care” of him. On the ride back, she suddenly let out a sharp, breathless “Ah.” When she got out of the car, I saw her short skirt had ridden dangerously high, exposing a flash of pale, bare thigh. I am a low-energy person. I didn’t have the energy to play detective, and I certainly didn’t have the energy to scream and shout. I simply handed him divorce papers. Cameron had been dripping with sarcasm. “Maddie, if this is some manipulative tactic to get me to beg, you’ve miscalculated. I don’t respond to threats.” “You’re a divorced woman in her thirties. You’re rigid, you’re boring. If you can find a man who has even half my credentials, I’ll get on my knees at the front door of this building and grovel.” The divorce was finalized quickly. Unfortunately, we still worked for the same conglomerate. I had to see him every day. He and Viola moved as a unit. He would purposely dote on her in front of me, playing the white knight at every opportunity. His excuse? “She’s my team. Of course I protect my own.” I knew people in the office whispered about me. They marveled at my tolerance. They wondered why I didn’t just quit. If this were five years ago, I would have. I would have felt too humiliated, too suffocated, and I would have run away. But I was thirty-three now. Age had gifted me a certain kind of grounded resilience. I had bled to climb the ranks to Director of Finance. Why the hell should I be the one to leave? They were the ones who should be embarrassed. Not me. Now, Cameron tilted his head, that familiar mocking smile playing on his lips. “Whatever issues we have between us, dragging my innocent staff into it is just petty. Don’t you think?” I kept my face perfectly blank. “Enforcing company policy is being petty? The entire financial structure of this corporation was designed just to bully your assistant? Cameron, are you losing your grip on reality?” He stared at me for a few seconds, then chuckled. “Fine. We’ll let the new CEO make the call at tomorrow’s executive meeting. But Maddie…” He lowered his voice, dropping it into a register that was dripping with arrogant certainty. “Trying to use this kind of pathetic stunt to get my attention? Honestly, it’s beneath you.” 4 The next day. The executive board meeting. When Roman walked into the conference room, the collective posture of every person at the table straightened. I observed him from safely behind my thick lenses. His posture was immaculate, his features sharp and striking. As he sat down with fluid grace, his unbuttoned suit jacket brushed against the mahogany table, revealing the crisp, subtle folds of his white dress shirt near his waist. The lost, broken boy I once knew had grown into a dangerously composed man. He listened to Cameron deliver the Sales report. He rested one hand lazily on the table, nodding occasionally, his expression completely neutral. Then, without warning. He turned his head and looked directly at me. I didn’t have time to look away. My heart skipped a violent beat. But it seemed to be just a casual glance. He looked away just as quickly. “Regarding this expense report from Marketing,” Roman said. His voice wasn’t loud, but the room instantly fell dead silent. “We’ll make a one-time exception. Approved.” Across the table, Viola shot me a triumphant, venomous smirk. After the meeting, Cameron stopped me in the hall, a smug smile plastered across his face. “Policies are rigid, but people are flexible. You’ve lived this long, yet you’re still so stubbornly inflexible. Haven’t you suffered enough for that yet?” I clutched my files against my chest. “Cameron. Me rejecting you was standard procedure. The CEO making a special exception is also standard procedure. As a VP, is that really so hard for your brain to process?” He scoffed. “Maddie, you and I both know…” “Director.” A voice cut through the air behind us. Roman stood in the middle of the hallway, hands in his pockets, his face devoid of any excess emotion. “My office. Now.” My stomach tightened. Inside the CEO’s office, a massive, imposing desk separated me from Roman. “The transition to the new financial systems will put the most pressure on your department. Friction is inevitable, but you need to manage your boundaries.” His tone was entirely flat, the pure, sterile cadence of a superior speaking to a subordinate. He outlined a few more directives, his pacing steady, his logic flawless. He radiated an aura of untouchable distance—so completely different from the young man in my memories who always spoke to me with a rough, needy edge. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Understood, sir.” His secretary came in to drop off coffee. Roman looked down, opened his desk drawer, and pulled out a slim, midnight-blue velvet box. He slid it across the desk toward me. I didn’t move. The secretary smiled. “It’s a welcome gift from the CEO to all the department heads, Maddie. An engraved fountain pen. You’re the last one to receive yours.” Roman took a sip of his coffee. His long, pale fingers tapped once against the velvet box. “Do you want it?” He murmured the words low. I don’t know if it was because he had just taken a sip of hot coffee, but the words came out slightly breathy, carrying the damp heat of his mouth. Wet. A violent, familiar shiver traced its way down my spine. Suddenly, my mouth felt entirely dry. 5 “Do you want it?” “Tell me you want it, Roxy.” Five years ago. A blistering highway stretching across the Mojave Desert. My brief, six-month memory of Roman was entirely consumed by the absolute entanglement of our bodies. I had always been the quintessential good girl. My father was a high school teacher; my mother taught elementary school. In everyone’s eyes, I was obedient, quiet, low-maintenance. The perfect daughter. But only I knew the truth. I was a coward. I had no opinions of my own. I echoed whatever people wanted to hear. I was terrified of conflict, terrified of disappointing anyone, terrified of stepping out of line. I was slowly suffocating to death. I hated myself more with every passing day. So, at twenty-eight, I made the first rebellious decision of my entire life. I quit my soul-crushing corporate job. I traded my sensible haircut for wild, unkempt waves. I ditched my heavy prescription glasses for contacts. I bought cheap floral sundresses that showed too much skin. I rented a vintage Airstream and drove off into the American Southwest, completely alone. And on an endless stretch of red-dirt highway, I picked up Roman. He was twenty-three then. He had wiped out on his motorcycle, sitting alone in the dirt of nowhere, Nevada. He looked ragged, defeated, with a heavy, dark storm brewing in his eyes. Like a trapped, wounded animal. I pulled over, dragged my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose, and flashed him a brilliant smile. “Hey. Need a ride? I can get you to the next town.” He gave me a silent, stony rejection. He forced himself up, limping as he tried to push his busted bike down the shoulder of the road. I drove off. But not even ten miles later, I turned around. He still ignored me. I drove at a crawl behind him, alternating between coaxing and teasing. “Come on, kid. I’m not a serial killer. I’m just trying to get my good karma in for the day.” “Looks like a storm’s rolling in. You’re going to freeze out here.” “I heard there are skinwalkers in this desert…” He stopped abruptly. He turned his head to glare at me, his face deadpan. “You never shut up, do you?” “Is that a yes?” I smiled until my eyes crinkled. He got in. I knew he was probably walking through the darkest chapter of his life, but I didn’t ask a single question. Anyone who comes out to the desert alone is running from something. I dragged him out of the van during a windstorm, making him spread his arms and scream into the gale. I pulled him down beside me to lie on the hood of the Airstream under a canopy of violent stars, talking absolute nonsense until dawn. We spent an entire afternoon helping a local rancher look for a lost calf. I cooked him half-burnt chicken in the cramped little kitchenette. Out there, under a sky that demanded nothing of me, I naturally morphed into the exact opposite of “Maddie.” I was free. Passionate. Fearless. I was “Roxy.” A fun, slightly feral older woman. I was always smiling brightly, my voice always loud and uninhibited. Partly to save him. Partly to save myself. Slowly, the storm in Roman’s eyes cleared. His smiles became sharper, more real. The way he looked at me shifted from cold indifference to a focus so intense it burned. I discovered that beneath his brooding exterior was an incredibly fierce, resilient, deeply arrogant young man. Roman was my mirror opposite. On nights illuminated by millions of stars, in the dead silence of the desert, we tangled together on that narrow camper bed. It happened so naturally. Like sleeping when you’re tired, like drinking water when you’re dying of thirst. The most primal desires melding into one under the raw power of nature. There was no age gap. No corporate titles. No pasts. Just scalding skin. Heavy, desperate breathing. All the rules of society were crushed to dust. Our hunger was magnified to infinity. Our joy was magnified to infinity. We drowned in it, unable to pull ourselves out. Like two starving children who had just discovered sugar, desperately tasting, constantly demanding more. He loved to trail his index and middle fingers slowly across my skin, tracing lines until he stopped at a very specific place, his voice dropping into a ragged, ruined gravel. “I want in, Roxy.” “Do you want it?” “Can you take one more? Let’s find out…” That road trip lasted six months. We were drifters, stopping wherever the wind took us. One evening, as the sun set over the canyons, painting the world in soft, bruised purples, we sat by the window eating cheap takeout. “Wait for me, Roxy. Give me one year. Let me go back, fix the mess with my family, and I’ll come find you in your city. Okay?” His expression was terrifyingly serious. “No way,” I laughed it off, waving my fork. “Why not?” “I’m five years older than you, kid. I don’t have time to wait around. Besides, younger guys and older women never work out. By the time I’ve got gray hair, you’ll still be in your prime, and I’ll turn into some paranoid, bitter housewife. Hard pass.” I was talking absolute nonsense, just like I had a hundred times before. But he froze. He looked completely devastated. My chest tightened. I relented, giving him a soft smile. “Alright, humor me. What exactly do you like about me?” He thought about it for a moment, then spoke with absolute reverence. “I like that you’re so wild. You’re so free. You’re completely fearless. You live exactly how you want to.” I lowered my eyes and shoved a piece of food into my mouth. A few days later, in a dusty border town, I left a note on the counter. And I ran. The woman he saw in his eyes… wasn’t me. We were just two passing storms that happened to collide on a lonely highway, briefly tangling together under the right temperature, the right atmospheric pressure. Eventually, the winds had to blow in different directions. I returned to Chicago. I put my glasses back on. I cut my wild hair. I bought safe, neutral cardigans. I went back to being the Maddie everyone expected me to be. 6 I spent a long time agonizing over whether he had recognized me. Five years of zero contact. A brief six-month fling. When I started that road trip, determined to sever ties with my old life, I used a fake name from day one. When I rented the Airstream, the guy at the lot offered me an “employee discount” if I paid him in cash and let him rent it under his name. I was lazy, so I agreed. Two years ago, I fell down a flight of stairs and shattered my nose, requiring minor reconstructive surgery. Even old college friends barely recognized me after that. In short: by looks, by aura, by status, by name… I was a fundamentally different species from the girl he knew five years ago. He couldn’t have recognized me. As for those vague, terrifying phrases he used. If I looked at them objectively, they were perfectly normal corporate speak. I was just projecting. …And it seemed my logic was sound. Over the next few weeks, everything was perfectly normal. I gave Roman my routine financial reports. He would occasionally call me up to his office to clarify a budget detail. My interactions with him were strictly contained within the absolute, rational boundaries of a CEO and his Director of Finance. Strictly business. Polite. Cold. Slowly, I relaxed into this new reality. During meetings, I could argue a data point with him without my heart hammering in my chest. When others cracked jokes, I could even manage a relaxed, professional smile. I thought to myself: That burning, fleeting road trip was just an anomaly outside of our real lives. Like a desert tornado. Violent and chaotic when it touches down, but dissipating into thin air, leaving no trace it ever existed. One morning, I walked into the Finance department to find a young woman standing by the desks. Long, pin-straight black hair. A white eyelet dress. She was the picture of pure, untouched innocence. She offered a polite, sweet smile. “Hi, Maddie. I’m Harper. I’ll be interning here for a while. I just wanted to come over and introduce myself.” I gave her a professional nod. She smiled shyly and walked away. My two juniors immediately swarmed me, desperate to spill the tea. “Maddie, whatever you do, do not get on her bad side! We just asked her how she got the internship, and she said her brother got it for her. And her brother is the CEO! She’s an orphan his family took in when she was little.” “Now it makes sense why the CEO left the corporate headquarters in New York to come all the way to the Chicago branch! He’s just here to babysit his little sister and clear the path for her!” “Oh my god, I am so weak for the ‘adopted siblings’ trope. And honestly, they look so good together!” “Right?! I ship it so hard…” Their voices dropped to frantic whispers. I frowned, looking down at my sleeve. My new cardigan had somehow picked up a smudge of red ink near the elbow. I sighed, opened my drawer, and pulled out those ugly, frayed sleeve protectors. I slipped them on. Later that morning, Roman called me up to his office. Harper was there again. She was sitting curled up on his leather sofa, sipping a green juice, chatting with him in a soft, melodic voice. The sunlight pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows hit her perfectly, highlighting her vibrant, youthful energy. Roman waved me over. After formally introducing Harper’s background, he leaned back in his chair. “She has two options for her rotation: Sales or Finance. Considering the toxic drinking culture in Sales, I’d prefer she join your team.” I listened carefully, trying to read between the lines. Was he asking me to actually mentor her, or just rubber-stamp a nepotism hire? “What do you think?” He paused. Then, he looked up, his dark eyes locking onto mine. “Can your department fit one more in?”

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They always said the female navigators at the yacht club knew how to throw the wildest parties. I bought out her schedule for the entire year, and we spent our days blurring the lines of reality out in international waters. My business partner, took one look at me lounging with a bikini-clad model and nearly dropped his glass of bourbon. “Are you out of your damn mind? Evelyn’s private jet just touched down!” I took a long pull directly from a bottle of vintage champagne and laughed, the sound harsh against the ocean breeze. “Who gives a damn about that bitch? I dumped her weeks ago.” “Say that again,” my business partner’s voice suddenly went tight, jumping an octave. The entire deck of the yacht fell dead silent. Every single person was staring at a spot just over my shoulder. I turned slowly. Evelyn stood there, the veins in her forehead pulsing, her eyes bloodshot as she gripped a champagne flute so hard the crystal shattered in her bare hand. I just scoffed, pulled the girl closer by the waist, and turned my back on my wife, heading straight for the lower cabin. You see, my wife was a living legend in the medical field. She used to be one of the most brilliant neurosurgeons on the East Coast, but five years ago, she stepped down from the OR and never picked up a scalpel again. Billionaires and politicians had begged her to come out of retirement. She never even blinked. When my own younger sister, Sophie, needed surgery for a spinal tumor, I pleaded with Evelyn to be the lead surgeon. She just shook her head, her expression entirely unreadable. “I have my principles, Chester.” But this time, she broke her golden rule. For a twenty-six-year-old, fresh-out-of-med-school intern, she personally scrubbed in to operate on his mother. The kid had the nerve to post a smiling post-op selfie with her on Instagram: “Beyond grateful to my mentor for stepping in to save the day. Mom is finally out of the woods!” I stared at that post for a long, suffocating time before finally leaving a comment: “Principles. I guess they can be bent depending on who’s asking.” My phone rang almost instantly. Her tone was absolute ice. “Delete that. Don’t make a scene.” “He just started his residency, Chester. His mother was critical. I couldn’t just stand by and watch her die. If you are so small-minded that you can’t understand basic human empathy, then there’s really nothing left for us to talk about.” Fine, I thought. Let’s see who regrets it more when the dust settles. … 1. What Evelyn didn’t know was that on the very day she refused to operate on my sister, I had my lawyers draft the divorce papers. That night, she had come home from a grueling shift, exhausted, mindlessly signing a stack of corporate paperwork I had left on the kitchen island. The final decree of our divorce was slipped quietly into the very back of that stack. And now, the state-mandated waiting period was finally up. I drove my Aston Martin straight to her corporate office. As the CEO and primary financial backer of Vanguard Therapeutics—the biotech firm she ran after stepping back from surgery—I had every right to know what was bleeding my accounts dry. But nothing could have prepared me for what I walked into. She was touring the primary R&D labs, and that kid—that intern—was glued to her side. The real kicker? She stood in front of my entire executive board and announced, clear as a bell: “Effective immediately, Mason will be stepping in as my personal executive assistant. He’ll be point-man on all of Vanguard’s core projects.” Dr. Barnes, the head of R&D, was the first to kiss the ring. “Dr. Mason is a prodigy! He published a tier-one paper last year. Makes us old guys look like dinosaurs.” “Absolutely,” another board member chimed in. “I heard he assisted on three Level-4 surgeries during his rotation. Much better to have real medical blood leading us than some layman who only knows how to push spreadsheets.” “With someone this young and talented, Vanguard is going to hit new heights. Not like certain people who just throw money at the wall but don’t know the first thing about actual science.” The boardroom was a nauseating echo chamber of sycophants, all orbiting Mason. But the most piercing words came from Evelyn herself: “Mason’s grasp of clinical applications is undeniably more refined than businessmen who buy their way into the medical field.” I quietly backed out of the boardroom, the muffled sound of their laughter following me down the hall. If they despise my money that much, I thought, the coldness settling deep in my chest, then I suppose they don’t need it. I had barely sat down behind my own desk when Dr. Barnes came bursting through my door, out of breath. “Mr. Chester, why haven’t you signed off on the R&D grant extension? Today is the absolute deadline.” Barnes pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose, his tone dripping with entitlement. I took a slow, deliberate sip of my black coffee. “The project is suspended.” Barnes’s face lost all its color. “You can’t do that! We’re in Phase II of clinical trials! Evelyn explicitly ordered—” I cut him off with a harsh, barking laugh. Weren’t they just mocking my lack of medical pedigree? And now they were here begging for my checkbook? 2. “Are you trying to use my wife to pressure me? Tell Evelyn she isn’t getting another dime.” Barnes lost his temper, slamming his palms on my mahogany desk. “Chester! Are you trying to tank this entire company? That’s a thirty-million-dollar budget allocation! It was locked in last quarter!” “Plans change, Barnes. Just like certain people’s principles.” Barnes stormed out, slamming the door so hard the glass rattled. Less than ten minutes later, my cell phone vibrated across the desk. “Chester, what the hell are you doing?” Evelyn’s voice was a whip crack. “This is Vanguard’s flagship project. What gives you the right to pull the plug?” I looked out at the sprawling city skyline, my voice dead calm. “The fact that I own the board. If you remove Mason from the team entirely, I’ll consider reinstating the funds.” “Chester! Are you insane? I did a single surgery for his mother! Are you really going to hold this petty grudge and jeopardize a medical breakthrough over jealousy?” “Jealousy?” The word tasted like ash in my mouth. “When my sister was lying on a gurney, terrified and waiting for the anesthesia to hit… where were your principles then, Evelyn? Where was your Hippocratic Oath?” I could hear her erratic breathing through the receiver. “That was completely different! Mason’s mother had a one-in-a-million vascular anomaly! I was the only specialist on the Eastern seaboard who—” I cut her off, the ice in my veins freezing solid. “Sophie’s tumor was your exact specialty. Evelyn, your moral high ground is incredibly flexible.” She suddenly snapped, her voice rising to a hysterical pitch. “Are we really dragging up ancient history? Sophie is alive, isn’t she? So what if she has a little residual nerve damage? Yes, if I had operated, I could have prevented it, but—” A little residual nerve damage. That’s all my sister’s agony meant to her. A passing inconvenience. “Fine,” Evelyn spat. “If you want to freeze the accounts, go ahead. I’ll secure my own VC funding! With my reputation in the medical community—” I hung up. Three years. This oncology R&D project had been a black hole for three goddamn years, swallowing nearly half of my conglomerate’s annual profits. A revolutionary new cancer drug? Please. Mega-pharma giants with billion-dollar infrastructures were failing at this exact hurdle. What made our boutique biotech firm think we could crack the code? But Evelyn had insisted. “This drug will save lives, Chester,” she had told me, standing right here in my office three years ago, her eyes burning with that brilliant, intoxicating fire. “Do you have any idea how many people die every year because…” Of course I knew. My sister was almost one of them. So, even when my board of directors screamed at me to cut our losses, I grit my teeth and poured millions into her dream. Because it was her obsession. Because I loved her, and I thought the money was worth seeing her shine. And now? Now she wanted a twenty-six-year-old intern to lead the project I had bled for? I grabbed my keys. It was time to find the only person who actually deserved to run this lab. My phone was having a seizure in my pocket. Notifications from the Vanguard executive Slack channel were blowing up. [Mr. Chester, if you pull funding, what happens to our data sets?] [Some people just can’t stand seeing real genius at work. Dr. Mason’s protocols are groundbreaking!] [We should have put Mason in charge ages ago. Corporate suits don’t understand the scientific method.] The most pathetic message was from a junior lab tech: [Dr. Evelyn, maybe we should restructure the corporate hierarchy? Let the real medical professionals handle the business side.] I let out a dark chuckle. This entire department had suffered collective amnesia about who actually signed their paychecks, and whose tolerance had kept their sinking ship afloat. My phone rang. It was my CFO. “Chester, we have a massive problem. Vanguard R&D just finalized a purchase order for imported German medical equipment. Twenty-three million dollars. The cargo is already at the port. How are we structuring the payout?” I slammed on the brakes of my car, tires screeching against the asphalt. “Who authorized that?” “Evelyn. She used her executive override. She told the vendors you had already greenlit the capital.” Incredible, I thought. She had the audacity to bypass me entirely. 3. The irony was sickening. I glanced at the group chat, still scrolling rapidly: [Mason is a godsend! He got the German suppliers to expedite the shipping with one phone call!] [While some people freeze our budgets, our Queen Bee gets it done~] [Exactly! Vanguard would be bankrupt if Evelyn wasn’t running the show.] “If our esteemed Queen Bee is so capable of ordering twenty-three million dollars in tech,” I murmured into the phone, my voice lethally soft, “she can pay the invoice herself. Decline the charge.” I hung up and pulled into the VIP parking at Memorial Hospital. The “little residual nerve damage” Evelyn had so casually dismissed meant my sister would never walk again. A brilliant, beautiful girl in the prime of her life, permanently confined to a bed. As the elevator doors chimed open on the private suite floor, a figure scrambled backward, nearly tripping over his own feet. “M-Mr. Chester? What are you doing here?” Mason dropped the insulated thermos he was holding. Hot, organic bone broth spilled across the pristine linoleum. He shrank back against the wall, looking like a cornered rabbit. I didn’t even dignify him with a response, attempting to step around the mess, but he suddenly lunged, grabbing the sleeve of my Tom Ford suit. “I know you’re mad that Evelyn operated on my mom, but please don’t take it out on her! She’s recovering, she can’t handle the stress!” His fingers were trembling. Tears were pooling perfectly in his wide eyes, threatening to spill over. Rapid footsteps echoed down the hall. Evelyn rounded the corner and instantly shoved Mason behind her back, shielding him. “Chester! Tracking us down to a hospital ward? Have you completely lost your mind?” “Evelyn, don’t,” Mason whispered, playing the victim flawlessly. “Mr. Chester is probably just here to see his sister.” Evelyn sneered, glancing at the empty visitor log on the nurse’s station iPad. “His sister? No one has visited room 302 in three days. You expect me to believe you suddenly care today?” Mason suddenly bowed deeply at the waist toward me. “I am so sorry. My mother had no idea the surgery would cause issues in your marriage. I’ll process her transfer papers immediately.” Evelyn gripped his shoulders, pulling him upright, her eyes flashing with pure venom as she glared at me. “You’re just intimidated by him. You’re jealous because he’s younger, he’s brilliant, and you realize I don’t need your dirty money to change the world anymore.” I looked at the two of them standing there—the arrogant fallen surgeon and her manipulative parasite—and I just felt profoundly tired. Did she honestly forget how things worked? Did she think those German suppliers expedited that shipment because of Mason’s charm? They did it because of the global supply-chain network I had spent a decade building. Every “independent” dollar her lab spent was siphoned from my empire. I let out a short, hollow laugh. I was done explaining the real world to her. “By the way,” I said casually, adjusting my cufflinks. “Make sure you settle the invoice for those new centrifuges.” Evelyn’s head snapped up, her pupils dilating. “What are you talking about?” “The German import. Twenty-three million dollars. The vendor’s legal team just sent the collection notice.” Mason panicked, his carefully crafted fragile persona cracking as he yanked on Evelyn’s cashmere sleeve. “Evelyn, what are we going to do?” She shook him off, forcing a haughty posture. “Stop panicking. We are married. This is community debt. He’s bluffing—he legally can’t let it default. He’ll pay it.” She looked at me, a smirk playing on her lips. “And even if he throws a tantrum, with my status in the medical community, I can easily negotiate terms with the supplier.” I stared at her unshakable delusion, finding it genuinely comical. “The subpoena should be on your desk right now. I’d hire a good defense attorney if I were you.” I turned on my heel and walked away. Behind me, Evelyn let out a mocking laugh. “Let him sue! He’s just throwing a tantrum. A few sweet words and he’ll come crawling back. Hell, I’ll offer to do two rounds of physical therapy with his sister—he’d probably drop to his knees in gratitude.” … I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows of my penthouse office, looking out over the city lights, while Dalton, my lead counsel, laid out the asset division portfolio. Every piece of real estate, every stock option, every trust fund in her name was meticulously cataloged. But beneath that was a second, much thicker file. A horrifyingly clear paper trail of Evelyn’s financial recklessness. Dalton pushed his glasses up, his voice actually shaking. “Chester… is she out of her mind? Does she realize this isn’t just a marital dispute? She’s openly committed corporate embezzlement.” 4. Twenty-three million in unauthorized hardware acquisitions. Millions more re-routed from shell projects to cover her R&D deficit. Forged executive signatures. Every single line item was a felony waiting to happen. The ultimate irony? The vendors who had kissed the ground she walked on were now aggressively turning on her. With my corporate shield gone, the demand letters were flooding in. Evelyn was now personally liable for the debts, and staring down the barrel of multiple federal fraud charges. The evidence was airtight. She was dead in the water. Over at Vanguard R&D, the multi-million dollar equipment she had so proudly ordered was sitting in the loading dock, wrapped in police tape. Her vanity project was officially a pile of inaccessible scrap metal. And naturally, her loyal team—the ones who had mocked me hours ago—were jumping ship. Resignation letters were pouring into HR. Nobody wanted to be in the blast radius of a federal indictment. “Was it worth it?” Dalton asked quietly, gathering the files. “Burning down a brilliant career for a twenty-something intern?” I froze. I genuinely didn’t know the answer. Looking at my reflection in the dark glass of the window, I remembered the very first time I saw Evelyn. It was at an Ivy League medical debate. She was wearing a simple, slightly wrinkled white button-down, utterly destroying her opponent’s argument. She was so luminous, so impossibly sharp, I couldn’t look away. I found out later that she hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours because she had stayed up all night pulling medical journals to find a loophole for a pediatric heart patient she didn’t even know. That little boy lived. And I fell hopelessly, irrevocably in love with her. When Sophie was diagnosed with the brain tumor, Evelyn was my only hope. Even knowing she had sworn off surgery, I thought—I prayed—she would scrub in for family. But… “Sir?” Dalton’s voice pulled me out of the ghosts of the past. “Dr. Claire called. She said the new protocols are showing massive breakthroughs. She asked if you wanted to…” “Tell her I’ll be by the lab tonight to see it myself.” “Should I notify Evelyn that she’s been officially replaced as the lead researcher?” I flipped open Claire’s preliminary data packet. “No rush. Let her live in her fantasy for a few more hours.” Dalton hesitated, shifting his weight. “And… about the lawsuit, Chester? Do you want us to push for…” “Annihilation,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, yet absolute. “I want her dismantled legally and financially. Leave nothing.” Dalton stared at me, stunned. I suppose he remembered the man who used to write blank checks just to see Evelyn smile. He didn’t recognize the man standing before him now. Evelyn still thought she held the trump card. She thought that piece of paper binding us in marriage meant I would always sweep up her broken glass. “I’ll have the filings expedited,” Dalton said softly. “Oh, and the ‘gift’ you requested has been delivered.” I checked my Rolex. Less than an hour until the final decree landed on her desk. I found myself morbidly curious. What would her face look like when the illusion finally shattered?

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “414027”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel