Chapter 4

My mind went completely blank. I couldn't bring myself to read another single word.

The entire world felt like it was spinning violently off its axis, a bone-chilling cold seizing every limb.

Losing all composure, I stormed into the living room, grabbed Chloe by the arm, and slammed the diary down in front of her.

"Chloe Stone! I taught you how to read, I gave you an education, I gave you a future—did I do all of that just so you could seduce my boyfriend?!"

Chloe’s face drained of all color, her eyes locking onto the diary in my hand.

The timid, subservient girl was gone. In her place was a reckless, desperate woman backed into a corner, ready to burn everything to the ground.

"Claire! Yes, you did so much for me! You gave me a second life!"

"But does that mean I owe you my entire existence for the rest of my days?!"

She whipped around, pointing frantically out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the glittering, multi-million-dollar skyline of the city, screaming at the top of her lungs.

"You gave me a name meaning 'new beginnings,' but all you ever did was remind me of the dirt and poverty I came from! You constantly pressured me to go back! But I’ve tasted this life now! Why the hell should I crawl back into a destitute, forgotten wasteland?! I have the right to chase my own happiness too!"

I stared at her in utter disbelief, my voice shaking with raw betrayal.

"I told you to remember where you came from so you wouldn't lose your humanity! I wanted you to build yourself up so you could reach back down and pull other helpless young girls out of that hell! I didn't give you a future just so you could—"

"Pull them out?!"

She cut me off with a piercing, hysterical laugh, tears spilling over her cheeks coated in bitter mockery.

"You just wanted me to live under the shadow of your charity forever! You wanted me to be permanently inferior to you! Ethan can give me everything I’ve ever dreamed of! He can erase my disgusting, impoverished past once and for all!"

Alerted by the screaming, Ethan came rushing into the room. Seeing the vicious fight between us, his immediate, instinctive reaction was to step forward and shield Chloe behind his back.

That single motion drove a rusted blade straight through my heart.

I choked back the agony in my throat, glaring at him.

"Ethan... even now, are you still going to lie to my face?"

"Are you really so pathetically desperate that you’d settle for a cheap shadow... a puppet trying to dress and talk like me?!"

Ethan took a deep, shuddering breath, finally dropping all pretenses.

"Yes! I admit it! In the beginning, I only helped her because her eyes looked so damn much like yours!"

"But she isn't overbearing like you! She isn't fiercely independent! Chloe needs me, Claire! She needs me with her whole heart and soul! I was the one who molded her piece by piece—I taught her how to speak, how to carry herself in society, how to be the woman she is today!"

"Needs you?"

I repeated the words, a low, hollow laugh escaping my lips, utterly choked with absurdity.

"So that's what it was. Ethan, you never loved me at all."

"You just loved the idea of a weak, helpless 'Claire Jenkins' who needed you to save her."

I shifted my dead, unblinking gaze to Chloe, my restrained emotions shattering into absolute disgust.

"And you, Chloe Stone. You took the golden ticket I handed you and turned it into a stepping stone to climb into a man's bed."

After that catastrophic night, I locked myself inside my apartment, feeling as though the sky had collapsed on top of me.

A few days later, I desperately tried to gather the broken pieces of my sanity to rebuild my life, but before I could take a breath, my phone rang. It was my father.

"Claire... the company is gone. The business went under. Dad is so, so sorry..."

Fate’s cruelty far exceeded anything I could have braced for.

The sudden bankruptcy triggered a fatal heart attack in my father; the paramedics couldn't revive him. Overcome with grief, my mother followed him into death shortly after.

In the span of days, I became an orphan. Crushed under a mountain of suffocating grief, I was simultaneously hunted down by vicious creditors banging on my doors. I liquidated every asset I owned just to settle debts, ending up so desperately broke that I couldn't even scrape together enough cash to cover the basic funeral costs for my parents.

Exhausted in body and soul, pushed to the absolute brink of a breakdown, I swallowed every shred of my pride and dialed Ethan's number, clinging to a final, desperate thread of hope.

Each ring of the dial tone felt like a sledgehammer pounding against my skull.

Finally, the line clicked open. But the voice on the other end belonged to Chloe.

"Hello? Claire?"

"Ethan's in the shower right now. If there's something you need, I can pass along a message."

My throat constricted, my voice coming out raspy and broken.

"I need to talk to him. It's an emergency. My parents... they..."

Chloe cut me off, her tone airy, distant, and devoid of the slightest hint of sympathy.

"Oh. We heard about your parents. Our condolences."

"But Claire, Ethan is incredibly busy right now. We're currently in Europe on vacation trying to clear our heads; it took him so much effort to move past all that ugly drama from before. How about you handle your own problems for once?"

"After all, everyone has to learn how to stand on their own two feet eventually. Relying on other people your whole life isn't a sustainable strategy, you know?"

Without waiting for another word, she hung up.

Not long after the line went dead, a notification popped up on my phone. It was an alert from PayPal—Chloe had transferred an amount just barely enough to cover the bare-bones costs of a cemetery plot and two cheap caskets. Attached was a two-line note:

"Claire, it isn't much, but consider this payback for the tuition you sponsored all those years ago."

"From this moment on, we are completely even."

I stared at the words "completely even."

Humiliation burned through my veins like poison, yet the cruel reality of my situation forced me to swallow my dignity and accept the money.

I had lost my "sister." I had lost the man I loved. I had lost both of my parents.

At twenty-two years old, my entire universe went pitch black.

Thank God my aunt living abroad caught wind of the disaster in time. She flew in, helped me tie up the remaining loose ends, and brought me across the ocean to start over from scratch.

Five years passed in the blink of an eye. I never intended to return to this city of painful ghosts. But with my wedding to Raymond drawing near, I knew I had to stand before my parents' graves and share the joyous news with them in person.

"Knock, knock, knock."

A gentle rap on my studio door pulled me from the dark abyss of my memories. It was already dusk outside.

Someone knocking at this hour... could Raymond have caught an earlier flight?

An involuntary smile tugged at the corners of my lips. I reached for the door handle, pulling it open as I laughed,

"How did you manage to get back so—"

The words died instantly in my throat.

Standing on the other side was not a windblown, affectionately smiling Raymond Fletcher.

It was Ethan Vance.

He offered a faint, pathetic ghost of a smile, his eyes hollow and dead.

"Claire... I'm divorcing Chloe."