Chapter 3

I held on in the ICU for two days.

Keith tried every resuscitation procedure he could. But I had been deprived of oxygen for too long, and the lung infection kept getting worse. Every breath was agony.

When I was occasionally lucid, I would look toward the door.

Jane thought that I was waiting for Alden. She held my hand and comforted me softly, “We’ve called your family several times already. They may just not have made it here yet.”

I actually knew they had not failed to get here. They simply did not believe that I would really go through with dying.

When I was a child, I fell off a horse and broke my leg. I called Solana in tears. She was competing in an equestrian event at the time. She said, “Sofia, stop hogging the spotlight every time I have a big moment.”

Later, I passed out from the pain, while Solana won the championship.

The first thing I did after waking up was ask the nurse to save the competition video for me. I was afraid of missing her most dazzling moment.

But she did not know that. She only remembered that I had an accident on the day she won the championship.

Jane wiped my tears. “Just hang in there a little longer. You’re young. There’s no way your family would give up on you.”

I wanted to tell her that was not true and that they had already given up on me.

On the other side, my father had his secretary, Nikki Smith, freeze all my bank cards.

“The only way she can survive out there is if she has money. Freeze her cards, and she’ll come crawling back within three days.”

My mother had my room cleared out.

Solana stood at the doorway and watched the servants haul away the strawberry dresses in the closet, the riding gear, and the photos of us two. Everything was thrown into cardboard boxes.

Then she found a photo of when she was thirteen, and I was eight.

She had taken a bite of strawberry cake, and I had immediately dug out a spoonful, too.

She stared at it for a long time, then said in a serious tone, “She even had to watch me eat cake.”

My mother hugged her heartbrokenly. “It won’t happen again. When Sofia gets back, we’ll make her get rid of all this stuff. She has to learn that she’s not you.”

Solana tossed the photo back into the box. “Don’t let her set foot in my room again.”

Just then, the landline at home rang.

After the servant picked up, her expression changed. “Sir, it’s the hospital. They say, Ms. Darnell—”

My father snatched the phone away. “How much did Sofia pay you?”

Taylor suppressed her anger and said, “She still hasn’t woken up yet. How could she have bribed us? She has multiple organ failures in her heart, lungs, and kidneys.

“She’s in the final stages, and may not make it through the night. Please, at least come and see her one last time.”

My father fell silent for a moment.

Solana’s face went pale.

Alden, however, took the phone and spoke coldly, “Tell her she can drop the act and come home right away so she can apologize to Solana. If she’s not back by midnight, I’ll have my lawyer send over the divorce papers.”

Taylor’s voice trembled with anger. “She’s dying!”

He scoffed. “Then call me when she’s dead.”

After the call ended, the living room fell into an eerie silence.

Solana stood up and said, “I’m going to the hospital.”

My mother blocked her way. “You can’t! This is the most critical moment. If you go now, she’ll never change.”

Tears welled up in Solana’s eyes as she asked, “But what if something did happen?”

My father said in a cold and firm voice, “There is no ‘what if!’ She can’t even bear to lose to you in life, so how could she bear to die?”

At 11:47 p.m. that night, my heart stopped.

Keith resuscitated me for thirty minutes.

At 12:17 a.m., the curve on the monitor flatlined completely.

Jane removed my tubes and wiped the water from my face.

She noticed that my hand had been clutching a soggy, wrinkled piece of paper the whole time. It was Solana’s suicide note.

At the very bottom was a line of text blurred by the river water. I had circled it in red ink. [Solana is dead.]

Little did Jane know that this was the only part of the entire note that I wrote that was still readable.

I had actually written. [Solana is dead. So I have to die, too.]