LOGINEmily is the adopted daughter of a billionaire family. They adopted her after the loss of their own daughter in a bid to comfort themselves. However, when she was twenty one, the original daughter of her adopted parents came back and after the DNA tests proved that she was their child, their joy knew no bounds as they began to celebrate her. Emily's fiance, Louis acted as a source of comfort to her around this time because her parents neglected her, providing their attention to their daughter instead. They were set to get married in two months but that was until she saw a post on a blog, stating that her sister and her fiance Louis, were getting married. She had an accident and nearly died but none of her family members showed up, leading her to believe that indeed they had lost all touch of love for her. She gets home to find a piece of condom in the trashcan, suggesting that her fiance has been busy while she was in the hospital. She confronted him, telling him if what she saw on the blogs were true and he finally admitted to it, saying he loved her sister more than her and he would be getting married to her.
View MoreI woke up to the beeping of the IV as the drip passes through my hands.
I did not understand where I was or what I was doing here, but one thing I did know was that I was in a hospital. How I had gotten there was what I could not remember. The nagging headache discouraging me from trying to think deeper.
A man came in, putting on scrubs and one look at him, I knew he was a doctor.
I tried to speak, but my throat felt numb, scratching the surface of my tongue, the hurt causing me to keep quiet. He looked at me with a small smile before saying
" You have been asleep for too long so it's normal that your throat might feel a bit uncomfortable than normal. I would pour you a glass of water and then I have some questions I would love to ask you" he said.
Because of the mortification I felt with my voice sounding horrible, I decided to keep silent, nodding instead to show that I understood him.
He grabbed a glass of water from the table I had not noticed before and handed it over to me.
It was at the moment I saw the water that I realized just how thirsty I actually was.
The whole glass was gone in just a moment and I felt instant relief in my throat, as though it had brought it back to life.
" I supposed you feel better now?" He asked.
I tried speaking again.
" Yes" I said, glad that my voice was back to normal.
" Do you remember anything from two days before?" He asked.
I strained my memory to think for a while.
And slowly it all started coming back to me.
The phone call, me crying my eyes out as I drove, the huge trailer that came out of nowhere and sent me driving straight into a tree.
That was the last thing I remembered until I showed up here. I had been in a fatal car accident and somehow, I had survived it.
My face paled at the thought of that.
What call? Who was I talking to on the phone that had me so distracted that I had let the wheels slip out of my hands?
I could not remember that little bit.
" Thankfully, you are okay and just gained a few scratches. You would be able to move around and it was dangerous when you were in coma but seeing that you are out now, I can tell you for a fact that you would be fit to leave here tomorrow." He said, beaming at me.
A sick bile rose up in my belly at the question I was about to ask.
" And what about the person driving the truck?" I asked him.
His smile faltered a bit and he sighed, taking off his glasses and wiping it before putting it on back.
The bile only grew.
" He was an old man in his seventies. He was bleeding extensively when they brought him in. We could have saved him if it was a younger person, but he was old and his heart was already giving up. I'm so sorry but we lost him" he said and i felt my heart break.
I had claimed the life of someone. Perhaps someone who all he wanted was to eat and provide for his family. I killed someone's husband.
He probably saw the look on my face because he turned to look at me, giving me a small pat on my hands.
" I know most of the times it's hard to hear about the death of someone. The police already concluded that he was probably driving at high speed and you were not able to swerve out of his way, you were not at fault." He said.
I appreciated his little effort at trying to comfort me, but the deed was already done, I could already feel the guilt crippling me as my mind made up different numbers of scenerios.
What if I had been more focused and not on my phone? What if I had been able to drive smartly and avoided him. He would still be alive.
I did not want to share all these concerns with the doctor because a part of me knew that he would not understand it. So instead I said.
" Thank you so much. For everything"
He gave me anotehr reassuring smile before continuing .
" Well we tried to reach your family members here in los Angeles but unfortunately none of them showed up. Your fiance gave us the number of your friend in london and she has been the one paying the bills, I'm sure she would be here very soon to check up on you" he said and i felt my heart thrum wildly.
What was that phone call that I received just before the world started spinning? Why could I not remember it?
" So none ...none of them came to visit? Including my mum?" I asked him, noticing the pain that dawned in his eyes as he slowly shook his head.
" None did." He said.
The room fell silent and he finally said again.
" I have to do a routine check with the rest of my patients, I hope your friend gets here soon enough and I will be back again to check how you have progressed and see if you are fit to leave tomorrow " he said.
As the door shut behind him, the feeling of anger washed over me. None of them came to visit. After every single night I spent with them, after my childhood with all of them, no one came to visit.
" Oh my baby!" A voice cried out as the door banged open, my friend, Tasha coming in.
She pulled me into a hug and I obliged, breathing in her earthy scent to comfort me.
" I'm so sorry about what happened. And also about your marriage. Louis is a real jerk" she said, her eyes sympathetic.
" What did he do?" I asked her and her face contorted in shock.
" You don't remember?" She asked.
And as though that was the only question I needed to hear, the bit of that accident that I missed came roaring back to me. I had called Louis to confront him, to ask him why he would want to marry my sister.
Emily's POVJune came the way June came in Los Angeles — not suddenly, not with announcement, but as the natural arrival of something that had always been coming, the warmth deepening from the provisional into the committed, the city settling into the version of itself that it wore for the long months of summer.The roses on the back wall at Cheviot Hills were extraordinary.Anna had said they would be. She had looked at the trained canes in March and said: in June that wall will be extraordinary, with the certainty of someone reading a visual language they understood. She had been right. My mother had sent photographs in the last week of May — the buds swelling, the first blooms opening — and Anna had sent back: I'm coming on the fourteenth. I already have the flights.She came on the fourteenth.I picked her up from the airport. She came through the arrivals door with the carry-on and the dark coat she didn't need because it was June and looked at me with the ease of someone arrivin
Emily's POVSunday was the day Anna had asked for.Not at Cheviot Hills — just the two of us, as she had said when she confirmed the visit. The ordinary time, the time where nothing particular was happening. She had said she wanted to see the consultancy on Friday, which she had. She had said she wanted the garden on Saturday, which she had received beyond what she had anticipated. Sunday, she had said, I want with you.I had been thinking about what Sunday should be since the visit was confirmed.Not an itinerary — she had been explicit about not wanting that. But a shape. The right shape for a day between two people who were still learning each other in the ordinary way, the accumulation of hours and observations and small exchanges that built a relationship into something durable.I had decided on walking.Los Angeles was a city that revealed itself differently at walking pace than at the car pace that most people used — the pace at which you caught the scale but missed the detail.
Chapter 94Emily's POVThe Karen sentencing came on a Thursday.The last week of March, as scheduled. One week after Anna had flown back to Phoenix with the Cheviot Hills mud still on her boots and the photographs of the garden on her phone and the particular quality of someone who had arrived at a place and found it to be what they had hoped it would be.I did not attend the sentencing.Neither did my parents. Neither did Anna. We had all, separately and then together, arrived at the same decision — that the verdict had been the necessary thing, the naming of the true shape of what had happened, and the sentencing was the legal system completing its own work, which it did not require our presence to do.Sarah Mitchell attended. She had offered to — she had been present at the trial, had provided testimony about the records and the investigation, and she said she would go and report back. I had said yes, thank you, the same thank you I kept giving her and which she kept receiving with
Chapter 92Emily's POVAnna arrived on a Thursday evening in the second week of March.I picked her up from the airport alone. Alexander had offered — the same offer he had made for Catherine, the generosity of a man who understood that arrivals mattered and wanted to contribute to them — and I had said yes this time, come with me. He had driven while I sat in the passenger seat and watched the freeway doing its evening thing, the particular Los Angeles rush hour that moved in its own logic, stopping and releasing in patterns that felt random but probably weren't.We parked in the arrivals structure and waited by the doors.Anna came through at seven forty-three. I saw her before she saw us — the dark coat, the single carry-on, the self-contained quality of her movement through a crowd. She was looking at her phone and then she looked up and found us and her face did the thing it did when something landed — the brief adjustment, the composed receiving."You brought Alexander," she sai
Emily's POVThe celebration turned out to be pancakes.Not champagne at some rooftop restaurant, not a reservation at the kind of place where the menu had no prices. Just Alexander standing at the stove in his shirt from yesterday, sleeves rolled to his elbows, making pancakes from scratch while I
Emily's POVI didn't sleep well.I lay in the dark staring at the ceiling, listening to the city outside the window, turning the phone call over and over in my mind the way you turn a strange object in your hands, trying to find the angle that makes it make sense.Someone who was involved. Someone
Emily's POVI woke up the morning after the wedding with sunlight pouring through the curtains and Alexander's arm draped heavy and warm across my waist.For a moment, I just lay there and breathed.No phone ringing. No crisis. No Marcus Stone. No SEC investigators. Just the sound of Alexander's st
Emily's POVThe drive home was quiet in the way that only comes after something enormous.Not empty quiet. Full quiet. The kind that doesn't need to be filled because everything that needed to be said has been said and what remains is simply the fact of it, sitting solidly in the space between two






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