Chapter 5

I knew exactly what Sienna wanted to say.

If it weren't for her, I would have dropped out of school and been working a dead-end manual labor job.

I was once a nobody. A beggar at the very bottom of society.

My parents divorced when I was a kid. My mother didn't want a financial burden like me, so she packed her bags and left without looking back.

I lived with my father, who eventually drowned his sorrows in gambling and racked up massive debts. In the end, he even stole the meager tuition money I had saved from working part-time jobs.

Later, he lost our house.

The two of us ended up living in an abandoned, drafty warehouse, begging for food, waiting for death to take us.

My father’s wish came true. During a brutal winter storm, he froze to death.

And I didn't even have the money to cremate his body.

Who could imagine that in this modern world, someone could be that desperately poor?

But that was my reality.

I sat on the icy curb, reading discarded textbooks while begging for change, trying to raise enough money to cremate my father.

And then, like a scene out of a movie, Sienna appeared.

She took me back to the Vance estate as a charity project. Her family paid for my father's cremation and sponsored my education, letting me act as her personal tutor and study partner.

That was the only truly kind thing she had ever done for me, and I had remembered it my entire life.

So later, when my startup succeeded and I repaid every single penny her family had spent on me, she told me she liked me.

And I, without hesitation, chose to be with her.

I felt eternally indebted to her.

I did everything to treat her like a queen. Even when I noticed her suspicious behavior, I kept quiet.

I told myself that this was the price I had to pay.

Sienna thought so too. Whenever we had a disagreement, she would throw the past in my face:

"If it weren't for me, would you have this company today?"

"If it weren't for me, you would’ve frozen to death on the streets!"

"If it weren't for me, your father would still be rotting in an unmarked grave!"

I could never argue back because she was right.

And every time she said it, my guilt deepened, and I tried even harder to please her.

Sometimes, I couldn't even tell if what I felt for her was love or just a heavy, suffocating sense of obligation.

But now, seeing her pregnant with another man’s child, I finally got my answer.

I had loved her.

Perhaps on that cold winter day, when she stood before me in her beautiful, warm designer coat, smiling as she handed me a hot baked potato and said, "Come on, let's go home."

That walk home lasted fifteen years.