Chapter 1

Sebastian's POV

When I woke up, the doctor stood by my bed and sighed as he reviewed my medical chart. "You already had a stomach ulcer. This time, it flared up and caused an acute perforation. Why didn't you come in sooner?"

After Ayla Gardner left, I had called her 26 times. Not once did she answer. In the end, I had to call the ambulance myself.

I nodded numbly.

Some time passed before Ayla finally opened the door and came in. She was still signing to me. My chest ached with a dull pain. I turned my head away and closed my eyes.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

It had been forever since she had spoken to me. It started around two months after she first met Johnny Baker.

She talked normally with everyone else. I was the only one she insisted on communicating with through sign language.

Seeing my eyes open, Ayla spoke in the same coaxing tone people used with kids. "I didn't want to leave you behind either, but I promised Johnny I'd go to the art exhibition with him today. A promise is a promise, right?"

A promise. Where was that sense of honor on our anniversary, when she stood me up to help Johnny walk his dog and left me waiting for three whole hours?

"You knew how much pain I was in. You pretended you couldn't hear me, pretended you couldn't understand me, just so you could spend time with someone else…"

As I spoke, my throat ached sharply.

Ayla frowned and withdrew her hand from my cheek. "Stop fighting for my attention with Johnny. He's deaf. Of course, I have to look after him a little more. Don't make a fuss, okay? We can just stop using sign language from now on."

"I'm not making a fuss," I clarified. "I—"

The special ringtone Ayla set for Johnny suddenly went off.

She immediately gestured for me to be quiet, then stepped aside to answer his video call.

She hadn't even propped up her phone properly before signing back and forth with him, repeating the same three things over and over.

"Don't cry. It breaks my heart to see you like this… Don't ignore me… We'll talk things through when I get there."

Every repeated gesture felt like an icicle piercing through my heart.

Back then, I gave up the promising future I had carefully planned just to stay with Ayla in Blueview. I went to five job interviews a day, running myself ragged.

My anxiety got so bad that I couldn't sleep through the night.

Finally, one day, I couldn't hold it in anymore and broke down crying in front of her. This was what she said to me then.

"Crying won't solve anything. Stop. I don't want to hear your excuses anymore. Enough with the victim complex. If you're not capable enough, who can you blame but yourself?"

She gave me a cold look and the cold shoulder.

I didn't expect her to sit down for a heart-to-heart, and I didn't expect someone as brilliant as she was—landing a job at a major company straight out of college—to understand what I was going through, but all I wanted was a few words of comfort.

Ayla had done this to me more times than I could count. She dismissed my pain and refused to communicate with me.

Yet now, she was signing so quickly that her hands became a blur, as if she couldn't bear the thought of that teenage boy feeling even a little upset.

When the video call ended, Ayla frowned and headed for the door without even saying goodbye.

Suddenly, a flash of white light split the sky outside the window. A second later, thunder roared.

When I was a child, Dad would beat me whenever it thundered and rained. That was why I had astraphobia.

Ayla knew this. Whenever a storm rolled in, she covered my ears and held me quietly.

I looked at her expectantly, hoping she would stay with me just like she always had, but to my dismay, she merely scoffed.

"You're a grown man, Sebastian. I thought we were way past this pathetic excuse. You've already thrown a tantrum once. I'm not putting up with it a second time."

In her eyes, asking her to take me to the hospital when a hole was literally tearing through my stomach was nothing more than a tantrum.

I tried to say something, but my lips trembled uncontrollably.

As she pushed open the door, I forced the words out of my aching throat. "Did you forget how I ended up with this condition?"

She froze in place.