Chapter 3

Everyone on the rooftop terrace panicked.

Tiffany screamed out, "Zachary, what are you doing?"

I smiled at her. "If I die again, you'll finally believe that I want to leave, right?"

Mom clung to my leg and begged me, "Please, for the love of God, stop making me worry about you, okay?"

That was what Mom had said to me more than anything else.

One winter, I helped her run her street stall. She had complained, "Among your siblings, you're the one who worries me the most."

Yet as she said it, she kept warming my frozen hands between her palms.

When I started high school, she practically forced me to enroll. "Don't worry about the tuition. If you can just give me one less thing to worry about, I'm happy."

Yet when I was unconscious, she told me, "If you wanted to die, you should've just died alone. Don't make me spend every day worrying that you'll wake up and hurt Dominic."

In the end, Tiffany gave in. She prepared a car for me.

Dominic held onto the car door, his voice full of provocation.

"When the baby is born, he'll still have to call you Uncle Zachary. Are you really going to throw away ten years with Tiffany just because you can't swallow your pride?"

He walked to the front of the car. "I won't live much longer anyway. Just wait a little while. I'll leave Tiffany and the baby to you."

I honked the horn. "Move!"

He spread his arms, forcing me to get out. They were all counting on the fact that I had always been the loyal one, the kind of idiot who would risk his life as long as it meant they didn't have to suffer.

The engine roared as I stepped on the gas.

In the glare of the headlights, Dominic's pale face overlapped with the timid, gentle boy he had been when he first came to my house.

I wrenched the steering wheel. The car swerved around him and shot forward.

Dominic stumbled backward and hit the ground with a heavy groan. Tiffany screamed and rushed to help him up. The originally open gates slammed shut in an emergency, and the car crashed straight into them.

All the tenderness in Tiffany's eyes shattered, leaving only heartache and disgust. "Your emotions are too unstable. Letting you out would be like leaving a ticking time bomb next to Dominic."

The crash left me with a concussion, but she didn't send me to the hospital. Instead, she had a doctor prescribe mood-stabilizing medication.

After that, she locked me in my room and had a housekeeper keep watch over me.

Whenever Dominic had some free time, he would come by to chat with me. He would pretend to sip from a glass of liquor while watching me.

"This stuff is strong, man. Tell me, how did you get so lucky? Some poor kid like you managed to win Tiffany's heart and live off her for all these years. You deserved those three years in a coma.

"Otherwise, she couldn't have slept with me for three whole years without any issue."

The medication had made my mind sluggish. I reached out and caught his wrist. "That's my cufflink."

Tiffany and I had once gathered a bag of stones by a river in Bolorado. She designed and polished them herself, then made them into a pair of cufflinks for our tenth anniversary.

Dominic slowly surveyed the room with his glass, his eyes sweeping over everything. "Tiffany said I can take anything I want from this house."

As he spoke, he pulled a silver chain from his pocket and stuffed it into my hand. "I had that old dog of yours put down yesterday."

It took me a long moment to process his words. I stared at him blankly. "My dog was only ten years old. He was perfectly healthy."

"Oh, but he only follows his owner. There's no point keeping a dog I can't make my own, right?"

He smiled calmly, as if he were getting rid of an old piece of furniture.

When Tiffany and Sophia came in, they happened to see me with my hand clamped around Dominic's neck.

Sophia grabbed me and slapped me across the face. The headache that had finally subsided came roaring back.

Tiffany held Dominic in her arms and said coldly, "Have the bodyguards take Zachary back to the psychiatric hospital. Tell the doctor to increase his dosage."

As she was about to walk out, I let out a hoarse laugh.

"I've been asleep for three years, Tiffany. My brain is already damaged. If you increase the dosage, I'll spend the rest of my life bedridden. Unless you take my brain out, I'll never be able to control myself.

"Are you really okay with that? Consider everything my fault. I just want to leave. Why won't you just give me that?"

Her back stiffened for a moment. But as she glanced at the two dark bruises around Dominic's neck, her voice turned ice-cold.

"Zachary, if you must spend the rest of your life bedridden, I'll take care of you for the rest of mine."

At that moment, something inside me felt hollowed out.

After Tiffany left, Sophia tossed a motorcycle key onto my chest. "You want to leave, don't you? With you around, Dominic has to live in fear every day."

I scrambled off the bed on my hands and knees, blood running down my face as I stared at her in silence. She grew irritated under my gaze and moved as if to kick me.

"Get lost, you jinx. You've never let Mom have a peaceful day in her life, and I've had nothing but troubles because of you."

Three years ago, after I fell from the building, Sophia had a falling-out with her boyfriend's family and broke up with him. Ever since then, she had blamed me for it.

I rode the motorcycle onto the road and kept going until I reached the highway entrance. When I looked back, the whole city was shrouded in gray, as though buried beneath a nightmare.

I texted Tiffany, "I don't love you anymore. Please believe me this once."