Chapter 3

I thought I would collapse the moment I cleared the gates. That the tears would come, violent and endless, washing me away.

They didn't.

I just felt hollow. As if someone had reached into my chest with gloved hands and scooped out everything—heart, lungs, breath—leaving only a cold cavity where the wind could pass straight through.

My phone buzzed.

A message from Marco, sent with the precision of a business memo:

"I have withdrawn our engagement announcement. The official reason cited is irreconcilable differences. Effective immediately, we are no longer affiliated in any capacity. All shared assets are frozen pending review."

Before I could process the words, another notification lit up. The family's encrypted channel—usually reserved for high-level security alerts.

My father's statement:

[My daughter Gemma has been disowned for attempted extortion and mental instability. She is severed from the Blackwell family effective now. Her actions from this moment forward are her own, and she is barred from all family properties and communications.]

Then I was locked out. The channel closed. The app icon grayed out and died on my screen.

So efficient. So final.

I leaned against a tree by the roadside, rain plastering my hair to my face. I stared at the cold white text glowing in the dark.

My heart felt like it was being shredded into strips.

The tears came then. Not sobs—just a hot, silent flood that blurred the screen until I couldn't read the words anymore.

If I had truly been the one dying of leukemia tonight, I would have died of this despair long before the illness took me.

Vincenzo. Marco.

You are so cruel.

I wiped my face with my sleeve. I called a cab and went back to my apartment—the tiny studio I'd kept in the city, the one place that was entirely mine, paid for with money I'd earned working double shifts at the hospital.

For three days, I turned off my phone. I pulled the curtains tight and lay in the dark like a wounded animal in a den.

I replayed the last twenty years.

I thought about how they sent me to boarding school in the south when I was four. How they visited once a year, at Christmas, and spent the whole time on the phone with Bianca.

I thought about how Bianca absorbed every drop of their love like sunlight, while I stood in the shadows trying not to be seen.

I thought about how Marco had knelt in this very living room six months ago, holding my hand, promising to protect me until death. Yet when it mattered, he chose her inheritance over our child's heartbeat.

I asked myself, again and again: Why?

I was a doctor. I had saved strangers in the ER, held the hands of dying patients, brought people back from the edge. But I couldn't heal my own family. I couldn't heal my own heart.

On the fourth morning, I finally dragged myself to work. I turned on my phone.

The screen exploded with missed calls and red notifications.

Something pulled me—an instinct, or a premonition—to open the family's private network. The channel I was now barred from, but could still view as an outsider looking in through cracked glass.

Bianca's feed was always active. She posted constantly: yacht trips in Monaco, limited edition handbags, family dinners where she sat at Father's right hand, the desserts Marco would have flown in from Paris just for her.

Her world had always been so bright. So golden. So full of love.

But today, the feed was silent.

All posts had stopped.

The day she went for her physical exam.