Chapter 2

I only found out three months ago that Zach was from the Stein family, one of the wealthiest families in Ashton City.

When I realized he had been lying to me about being poor, every ounce of humiliation and heartbreak came crashing down.

I lost it. Completely. I tore the whole place apart, smashed everything that reminded me of him, and told him it was over.

He dug through piles of trash in the pouring rain to retrieve everything that held a trace of our shared memories. He cleaned them up and pieced them back together.

Then he painstakingly taped the photos that I had torn to pieces back together, and brought them to me. There were tears in his eyes as he apologized to me in a trembling voice. He said he could not live without me.

He even promised to hand over all his fortune to me and begged me to be his wife, his one and only, if only I would stay.

When I looked into those tear-filled eyes, I wavered.

At that moment, the man standing in front of me felt like the same one who used to wait up late when I worked overtime and clumsily tried to make me dinner.

There was a time when he really loved me. When I had a fever, he would stay up all night while fumbling to take care of me. He would softly hum my favorite songs with his completely tone-deaf voice just to soothe me.

After we got back together, when he broke down crying and begged me to humor his mother’s demand to attend the finishing school and learn how to be a proper wife, I said yes.

However, after scrolling through Jenna’s posts from the past three months, all I could think about was that all my sacrifices had been an absolute joke!

While I was being humiliated by his family, who constantly whipped, slapped, and even electrocuted me, Zach was out horseback riding and chasing fireflies with Jenna. He lied that he was busy preparing for our wedding.

When he was with Jenna, he was smiling without a care in the world.

As I scrolled through Jenna’s feed, every photo of them together felt like a stab in the chest, each swipe a fresh wound.

When I saw Jenna’s old post from five years ago, the one she posted while Zach was supposedly in the hospital, I could no longer hold back. My body was shaking as tears streamed down my cheeks.

It turned out that the “critical illness” he told me about was nothing but a lousy cover story so he could sneak around with his precious first love, Jenna, who had just come back from abroad. He just did not want me to get in the way.

What a fool I was back then. I was even working three jobs a day to earn his surgery fee. I did not even dare to take a day off when I was burning with a fever caused by exhaustion.

I smiled bitterly. Oh, Zach, was any of it ever real?

Those fleeting moments of tenderness used to be the only things that kept me believing we would last.

That faith had just shattered into dust.

Alone in that empty apartment, I stood surrounded by ghosts of us, each memory a knife twisting deeper.

I could not take it anymore. The tears, the hurt, the humiliation were all too much. My hands trembled as I pulled out my phone and typed a message.

[We’re done.]

I did not want to marry him anymore.

He replied almost instantly.

[Stop joking, Cathy. We’re meeting my parents tonight to go over the wedding details. Just be good.]

His tone was condescending, laced with open impatience. He did not see anything wrong with what he had done. He believed that all he had to do was to snap his fingers and I would come crawling back, like always.

I did not reply. Instead, I followed the address on that note to a beautifully renovated house I had never seen.

Among the things he had taken was something important to me.

As soon as I stepped inside, something caught my eye as I scanned the place. In the corner of the living room sat that old wooden box he had always kept locked, the one he never let me touch.

The lid was wide open.

Something pulled me toward it.

It was filled with proof of his ten years of unwavering love for Jenna.

Faded love letters, each one signed the same way: Love, your Zach.

Photos from over the years that showed them together from awkward teenagers to the polished adults they were.

There was even a carefully preserved hair clip, which she must have worn back when she was just a girl.

My belongings which he had hauled from our old apartment with such “care” were dumped in a dim corner. Dust was already settling over them like discarded trash.

Just like me, something he had used and tossed aside.

Even the platinum necklace I had scrimped for months to buy for him as a token of love sat abandoned on the cold surface of the coffee table.