Alle Kapitel von Echoes of Tomorrow: Loving You Was Just a Detour: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 8

My phone slipped from my hands and clattered against the floor, but I didn’t even notice.The name my future self mentioned—Seraphina Carter—belonged to my absolute best friend from college.With trembling hands, I picked up the phone, my chest tightening as I stared at those terrifying timestamps. I quickly typed out a response.“Who are you? And who is he?”The reply came almost instantly, still carrying a timestamp from five years in the future.“I’m thirty-year-old Alivia Sinclair. And he is Ethan Cross.”And right now, I was a twenty-five-year-old Alivia.The man I had loved for five entire years was currently in the kitchen. The sheer absurdity of the situation made my head spin.As if terrified that I would let my hopeless romantic tendencies blind me, the future me fired off a few more messages in rapid succession.“He only picked up your coffee every evening because it gave him a convenient excuse to drive Seraphina home first.”“He never walked away from his father’

The person who walked through the door wasn’t Ethan, but Seraphina’s young assistant. She had been sent to deliver a container of fish chowder to me.As it turned out, Ethan had accompanied Seraphina to the neighboring city to scout locations for her new boutique bakery franchise.I hated seafood. Ethan, on the other hand, loved it. They really were thoughtful, always remembering each other’s favorite things.The rich, fishy aroma drifted up to my nose, and a wave of nausea hit me instantly. I lurched toward the sink, dry-heaving as though my stomach were about to turn itself inside out.I glanced out the window. Dark, heavy storm clouds blanketed the sky, threatening a massive downpour.By the end of the afternoon, every single item in the bedroom belonging to me was completely packed away. My phone remained dead silent; neither of them had sent a single text.However, Ethan did post an update on his social media feed.In the photo, he was sitting in a café, looking down as he

The atmosphere in New York City was incredible, and when things got busy, it was easy to completely forget the pain of the past. I even came to fully understand the saying that love, at its absolute best, should only account for ten percent of a person’s life. I used to revolve my entire existence around Ethan, which had delayed so many things I truly wanted to achieve. Now that I had settled my mind, I realized I possessed quite a bit of potential. Several of my projects in a row had already received top evaluations.I rented a beautiful ground-floor apartment with a private garden patio. Living right upstairs from me was Lane Walker—the very man who had held the umbrella over my head in the pouring rain that night.Recently, our old university had been organizing a class reunion, and Priscilla Morgan, our former class president, started keeping in close contact with me. She was one of the rare people who wholeheartedly supported my breakup with Ethan.“Liv! I’m so glad you dumped

I pieced together the aftermath of Ethan’s ruin mostly from financial news articles online.The boutique bakeries, dining brands, and investment holding firms under Cross Enterprises were systematically liquidated and auctioned off one after another. The sheer volume of their total outstanding debt was staggering. His father had fled the country, never to return, dumping the entire crushing burden squarely onto Ethan’s shoulders.The court froze every single asset under his name, including the luxury car that had carried me through the city countless times. Priscilla told me that Ethan had even sold his apartment, moving back into a cramped, rundown rental unit in the old historic district. It was the same three-hundred-square-foot studio apartment we had rented right after our college graduation—where the kitchen and the bedroom were squeezed into a single suffocating room, with a north-facing window that let in a bone-chilling cold all winter long.“His life is a total disaster ri