Chapter 4

Back in the SUV, my parents and Julian laid out a stack of documents, police reports, and years of SnapChat chat logs.

The mountain of evidence connected the dots of the lost years after I met Kyle.

After college, against my parents’ furious objections, I had run away with Kyle to New York and cut all contact.

They had spent months frantically searching for me.

By the time they rescued me from that club, I was completely broken. Catatonic. Hallucinating.

I had wiped Kyle from my mind and replaced him with a flawless fantasy named Lucas Sterling. I spent days screaming on street corners, attacking random pedestrians who looked like him, until I stabbed a bystander and had to be locked up.

"Summer," my father choked out, his eyes glistening with tears. "I admit it. We paid the psychiatrist to use aggressive electroshock therapy to wipe your memory."

"We were out of options! Medication couldn't touch your psychosis! The only way to save your life was to strip the trauma away completely!"

"When you were finally released, we wanted to find someone who matched the perfection of your 'Lucas' so you wouldn't relapse. But where do you find a saint like that? Nicholas Thorne was the closest match."

"We begged Nicholas to date you, but he was already engaged. In our desperation, we hired an ambitious young entrepreneur to pose as Nicholas..."

They broke down, spilling the entire story.

The man playing Nicholas was actually named Daniel Reed. He wasn't a billionaire heir, but he was a self-made tech founder worth tens of millions.

Daniel knew the truth. He agreed to play the part in exchange for multi-million-dollar contracts and resources from the Vance Corporation.

Julian swore that as long as the Vance family held power, Daniel would treat me like a princess for the rest of his life.

He would become the living embodiment of my Lucas.

"Summer, for the past two years, none of us have slept through the night," Julian whispered, his face pale. "Do we have to tear our hearts out and show them to you before you believe that everything we do is to keep you safe?"

Their tears seemed impossibly real.

The agony of Kyle’s abuse in my head was also undeniably real.

And now, every suspicious thread had a neat, logical explanation.

How could I not believe them?

I collapsed into my mother’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably. "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to hurt you. But I woke up with no memories, and those words on the wall... I was so terrified. I couldn't stop spiraling."

"Please, give me a little more time. I'll get better... I promise."

After that day, my family treated me with even more delicate tenderness.

And their surveillance grew ten times tighter.

Whenever I went out with Daniel, Vance bodyguards stood in plain sight, their eyes never leaving me.

Occasionally, when I showed signs of panic, Daniel would hold my hand and whisper, "Summer, your family is just terrified you'll hurt yourself again."

"All the misunderstandings are cleared up now. Promise me you won't overthink things anymore, okay?"

"We let you run background checks for weeks. If Lucas Sterling was real, wouldn't there be a single shred of proof?"

I nodded quietly, squeezing his hand.

"You're right. If he was real, he would have left a trace."

"Thank you for bringing me back to New York today to confront Kyle. Beating the hell out of him finally gave me closure."

Behind us, Kyle lay groaning on the floor of his apartment, bruised from my "closure."

What Daniel didn't hear was the whisper I breathed into Kyle’s ear while I was pinning him down:

"If you want to live, retrieve that old iPhone 7 I sent to the back-alley repair shop."

No one knew that I had already found the physical anchor to Lucas Sterling!

The iPhone 7. And the red heels.

Before I escaped the mental ward, I had scratched off the third line on that wall. My family had no idea those two items were mentioned.

A few days later, I pretended to wake up from a violent nightmare.

My parents rushed into my room, pale with worry.

"I had a nightmare about Kyle," I wept, gripping the sheets. "Can Daniel take me back to New York one more time? I need to look him in the eye and tell him he doesn't own me anymore."

I didn’t know how my family had erased all public records of Lucas.

All I knew was that the old iPhone 7 held the truth of who I was before they broke me.