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بيت / He Chose My Stepsister, I Left Him Forever / Chapter 2

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Chapter 2

مؤلف: Andy
The next morning, I woke to the hum of a freight unit.

When I stepped out of the guest room, hover units were already moving Sasha's luggage into the main bedroom.

Adrian stood beside the daylight panel, adjusting the room's lighting to a warm yellow glow that was supposed to help patients recover.

That room was supposed to be my studio.

One entire wall opened to real sunlight, and at night, I could watch the stars through the glass.

Just yesterday, Adrian had told me that almost everyone in this century preferred digital art. Real paintings were rare. He said that with this studio, I could create something no one else in the world could make.

Now my paint cases, the ones I'd carried 200 years into the future, sat outside the door.

He didn't turn around as he adjusted the panel. "Sasha says she's always thought of your family as her own. Now that she's sick, she doesn't want to be away from you, so I brought her here. You don't mind, do you?"

"Adrian, where am I supposed to sleep?"

He pointed toward the storage room at the end of the hall. It didn't even have a window.

"Make do with that room for a while. Sasha needs the daylight, and she should be near me in case something happens at night."

I nodded and carried my paint cases into the storage room one by one without a word.

Sasha was already in what should have been my studio, sitting at my easel with a smile on her face.

"Sorry for taking your room, Thea. Adrian says there's hardly any demand for paintings anymore. It'd be a waste to leave such a nice room empty, so I might as well use it while I recover."

Her smile made my chest tighten.

I'd been afraid of Sasha for as long as I could remember.

When I was a child, my father remarried, and Sasha and her mother moved into our house. From the beginning, Sasha kept reminding everyone that she'd joined the family later and would never truly belong. She had a bedroom just like mine. My father paid the same tuition for both of us. Still, she would cry that no matter how well he treated her, she could never have the love he gave his real daughter.

Eventually, my father gave her more and more and me less and less.

Back then, I really did throw tantrums and run away a few times. Whenever I did, Sasha would tell him, "Dad, if you keep chasing after her, she'll only keep doing it. Just leave her alone, okay?"

Eventually, he stopped coming after me.

Adrian knew the whole story.

Yet all Sasha had to do was say she was sick and didn't want to be homeless, and Adrian gave her the room he'd promised me.

I reached over and took the brush from her hand.

She gave an awkward little laugh, but the smug look in her eyes gave her away. She knew she'd won.

I didn't want to argue with her. I lowered my head and started packing.

There wasn't much to pack.

Just the canvases and paints I'd brought from my own time.

Adrian watched me roll up the canvases one by one. Only then did he frown.

"Thea Calloway, what's this about now? Sasha's only using the room until she gets better. Then she'll move out."

I looked up at him.

For the first time, I looked at Adrian and saw a stranger.

There was no love in my eyes. No anger. Not even hurt.

Nothing.

"I'm not making a scene," I said calmly. "I'm just packing my things."

"Why are you packing?"

His expression immediately changed.

"You're not planning to live somewhere else, are you? Thea, if the Bureau finds you, they'll force you to return. You know how painful that is."

He was right about one thing.

Forced repatriation wouldn't erase my memories. Instead, it would sever the neural pathway that made me love Adrian. And I'd already agreed to the procedure.

Sasha let out a laugh. "You're not going to threaten to run away again, are you? This isn't your old life, Thea. You waited 200 years just to be with Adrian. There's no way you'd walk out on him now. If you don't want me living here, you could just say so."

Adrian's face darkened.

"Sasha just got her registration approved. She's at a critical stage in her treatment. Can't you make things a little easier for her?"

I looked at him, and suddenly, the whole thing felt ridiculous.

We'd been together for three years. I'd left my friends behind for him. I'd given up the career and reputation I'd spent years building. Then I'd slept beside him for 200 years just to follow him here.

Yet when I told him I was leaving, he thought I was only trying to make him chase after me.

Fine.

Maybe leaving like this would make it easier not to look back.

That night, I slept on the narrow couch in the storage room.

In the main bedroom next door, Sasha said she was scared of the surgery. Adrian comforted her again and again, promising he would stay by her side until she recovered.

I closed my eyes. My terminal lit up with another notice from the Bureau.

"Time remaining until targeted nerve excision and temporal return: 48 hours."
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  • He Chose My Stepsister, I Left Him Forever   Chapter 10

    50 years later, the Shared Light returned.Adrian stood alone on the viewing platform at Polaris.One gold ring and one blue ring hung on the horizon. Without a partner to share what he saw, the two colors stayed separate until they faded.Around him, people cheered and held each other close.Through their partners' eyes, they saw the two colors merge into one. Then they tucked that memory away somewhere safe. It belonged only to the two of them.All Adrian could think about was how badly Thea had once wanted to stand here beside him.But he'd given that chance away with his own hands.The light over Polaris grew brighter, but the two colors never merged for Adrian.More than two centuries earlier, one winter in Finland, I carried my paint box out into the snow.Travelers from all over the world sat around a fire in the open countryside. Wood crackled in the flames. Someone pressed a hot drink into my hands. Another traveler threw back their head and shouted something in a language I d

  • He Chose My Stepsister, I Left Him Forever   Chapter 9

    Adrian left Polaris that night and raced back to Skyhaven alone.When the door slid open, the only sound inside was the hum of the air system.The storage room was empty.He yanked open every cabinet anyway, then pulled up the apartment's entry log.In the final recording, Thea stood in the living room with her paint box in her arms. She stared out the window for a long time, then shut off her terminal and stepped into the repatriation pod sent by the Bureau.She never looked back. Not even once.The paints she'd brought from 200 years ago were gone. So were the old brushes bearing her teeth marks. Even the sketchbook filled with drawings of him was gone.Yet the master bedroom still glowed with the warm yellow light Sasha liked, and her blue roses were blooming in the growth tank.Only then did Adrian remember that the last thing he'd asked Thea to do was take care of Sasha's flowers.He stormed into the Temporal Immigration Bureau and slammed his highest-level clearance down on the c

  • He Chose My Stepsister, I Left Him Forever   Chapter 8

    Adrian kept his eyes fixed on Sasha."Did you know Thea had filed for repatriation?"Something flickered in Sasha's eyes, but a second later, she put on a wounded expression."She's only doing it to scare you. She's been like that since we were kids. Whenever she doesn't get her way, she threatens to run away.""Did she submit an application to the Bureau or not?""How would I know?" Sasha grabbed his hand. "Adrian, my stomach hurts again. Let's go back to the room, all right?"She pressed his hand against her belly, as if the mind-link could prove she was in pain."Then why did you keep these?"He turned the terminal toward her.One photo after another appeared on the screen, each with Thea deliberately cropped out. Sasha went pale, and pure panic flooded through the mind-link.For the first time, Adrian didn't mistake it for fear of dying.He remembered the joy that had flooded through the link during the Shared Light, her racing heart whenever she got close to him, and the jealousy

  • He Chose My Stepsister, I Left Him Forever   Chapter 7

    The night before they left Polaris, Adrian and Sasha were resting at the viewing camp.Not far away, an elderly couple sat beside a fire, looking through their photos.The man added a photo of the two of them beneath the Shared Light to their album and laughed. "50 years from now, we'll come back and see it again. Just you and me."The woman smiled and nodded. The mind-link on her wrist gave off a soft glow.Just you and me.Adrian's cup hit the table with a thud.200 years ago, Thea had said almost the same thing.She'd covered the walls of her studio with everything she could find about Polaris and spent days deciding which paints to bring. She'd been so excited. She'd said the Shared Light was something you should see once in your life with the person you loved most. No one else should be part of it.He'd wrapped his arms around her from behind and made that promise without hesitation.But in the end, Sasha was the one who had seen it with him.Adrian opened his terminal and sent Th

  • He Chose My Stepsister, I Left Him Forever   Chapter 6

    When the Shared Light appeared over Polaris, the whole sky seemed to fall silent.Adrian stood at the edge of the viewing platform.The grass beneath his feet glowed faintly blue, while a river in the distance flowed upward into the sky, defying gravity. Thousands of visitors from across the star systems had gathered to witness the event that came only once every 50 years.Thea used to watch videos of this place over and over.She used to say that when the Shared Light appeared, she'd use Earth's oldest paints to capture the universe's newest color.Two rings of light rose above the horizon, one gold and one blue, like two rivers destined never to meet.All around him, couples reached for each other's hands. One by one, the mind-links on their wrists began to glow. Through their shared vision, the two rings merged into a single color that had never existed on Earth.Adrian saw it too.The color was impossible to describe. Blue seemed to burn inside it while gold sank through it like li

  • He Chose My Stepsister, I Left Him Forever   Chapter 5

    When the white light faded, the first thing I smelled was turpentine.The paint-stained wooden floor stretched beneath my feet. Outside, a car horn blared from the street. September sunlight filtered through the plane trees and spilled across my easel.I was back in my own studio.The calendar on the wall showed a date 31 days after I'd entered the pod.200 years had passed in the future. Here, only a month had passed.[Forced repatriation complete.][Host's memories of the future preserved in full. The neural pathway linked to her love for Adrian Marsh has been severed.]After the voice faded, I still remembered Polaris, the Shared Light, and every word Adrian had said when he registered Sasha as his partner instead of me.But those memories couldn't hurt me anymore.They felt like an old painting I'd once poured my heart into but no longer cared about.A key turned in the door.My grandmother came in carrying the gown I had never finished painting, and froze when she saw me."Thea?"

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