Chapter 2

### Chapter 2

"I don't want it."

Felix frowned, displeasure clear in his voice.

"Leila, Olive was out there alone late at night. It isn't safe. No matter how important the marriage license is, it can't come before a young girl's safety. Can you please stop being unreasonable?"

"But her birthday isn't even—"

"Right, yesterday wasn't her birthday."

I wanted to tear Olive's lie open, but he cut me off, his voice cold.

Under my disbelieving stare, his face darkened as he kept accusing me. "I know your parents doted on you more from the time you were small, and now you have me spoiling you too, which only makes you more willful and reckless.

"But Olive is different. No one ever looked after her growing up. She never even knew who to invite for her own birthday. For her, her real birthday was always a nightmare. Now she just likes the date she and I first met, so she moved her birthday to yesterday. What's wrong with that?"

Felix's expression was frigid, yet I still caught the flicker of ache in his eyes when he mentioned Olive.

His reasoning was so absurd it made me doubt whether last month, when the whole family spent half a day happily setting up a birthday surprise for Olive, had ever happened at all.

"Leila, all these years you've had everyone's love to yourself. Would it kill you to give a little of it to Olive?"

"Weren't you the one who told me a family should live in harmony?"

"So why is it that the moment I indulge her for a little while and skip getting the license, you can't stand it?"

"Do you have any idea how disgusting you look, pretending to be so magnanimous?"

Every word out of Felix's mouth landed like a boulder on my heart, pressing down until I couldn't breathe.

I kept my head down, my teeth clenched hard on my lower lip, and even as the taste of blood spread freely through my mouth, I felt that this small pain was nothing next to the sharp ache in my chest.

The cake dropped into the trash can beside me with a soft thud, and the instant it scraped against the garbage bag, the sound grated.

The huge mansion held nothing but silence.

Neither Felix nor I spoke, as if we would spend the rest of our lives just like this.

In the end, he silently pulled away the coat draped over me and turned and walked off without looking back.

Cold air rushed into my body all at once, freezing that battered heart solid.

After he left, I finally couldn't hold on and cried, huge tears falling to the floor, as if I meant to cry out every grievance and every tear of these past years until nothing was left.

By the end, even I didn't know when I lost consciousness.

I woke again to the ringing of my phone. The call was from Julian Harding.

Back then, no matter what they tried, my parents couldn't have children, so at last they went to an orphanage and adopted him.

Who could have guessed that the very next year they had me and Olive.

Father was overjoyed, convinced it was his arrival that let the Harding bloodline continue, and he thought highly of him.

"Felix is in the news. What exactly is going on between him and Olive?"

His voice startled me awake, and I forced my still-aching head up and sat up from the floor.

As if some unseen hand were guiding me, I opened the news app.

At the top of the trending topics was a headline I thought I'd never see in my life.

#Barnes Group CEO Felix Barnes personally designs a wedding ring for his beloved—high-society love made real?!#

I stared blankly at that glaring headline.

I tapped it open, and a familiar wedding-ring design sketch filled the screen.

In the photo, a pale, small hand rested in a pair of hands with clean, sharp knuckles, the two pressed tightly together, a gardenia-shaped matching ring on each ring finger.

In that moment, my heartbeat stopped completely, and even my breathing turned ragged.

That wedding ring—I designed it!

The two rubies set into it were my mother's only keepsake.

She had given me the engagement ring she and Father exchanged years ago, hoping I would set its stones into a new ring, a blessing for my love with Felix.

Back then, when I brought him the design I'd worked on for a full six months, full of joy, what had he said?

He sneered at my level and threw the sketches into the trash.

He said he could bring in the best designer in the country to make the wedding rings, and told me to put my mind on the recent project instead.

The sharp pain in my chest surged up, and the tears I'd just barely held back came pouring down again beyond my control.

This had once been the scene I imagined countless times, the day Felix and I would make it official.

And now it had truly arrived, only the leading lady wasn't me.

This wedding-ring design that carried everything I'd ever hoped for had instead become his offering of love to someone else.