Chapter 2

2: 2

While I was still turning it over, the door swung open.

Adrian Caldwell walked in carrying a box of chocolates, set it down on the nightstand, and looked down at me with a smile that wasn't quite a smile.

"Davina, with a body like yours, how did you end up back in the hospital again?"

The tone was exactly the same as every visit he'd paid me over the past three years.

But hearing it now, that "teasing between friends" suddenly tasted different.

I stared at the box of liqueur-filled chocolates he'd grabbed from some convenience store, and said flatly,

"Where's Justin, really?"

Adrian's smile faded, slowly, as if he'd just understood something.

He leaned back and folded his arms across his chest, done pretending.

"Since you already know, I won't waste the effort hiding it."

"Take my advice and stop lying here playing sick for sympathy. Justin finally has his little family of three, and it wasn't easy. You'd be better off just being a good Mrs. Vance than anything else."

"First, I'm not playing sick."

I looked at him and said it one word at a time.

"Second, being Mrs. Vance is something he got down on his knees and begged me to do. I never asked for it."

Adrian's face darkened. He snatched up the box of chocolates and hurled it to the floor.

"From the very start, I never wanted him with you!"

"A sickly invalid, what's there to like?"

"He was out of his mind, insisting on being with you!"

"Good thing I kept something in reserve back then and funded that girl who'd always had a thing for him, or he'd have died without an heir!"

The words came down on me one after another, and a rush of images flashed through my head—

Back then, Justin had chased me hard, and his friends took turns helping him along. Adrian was the most eager of them all.

Passing along his love letters, setting up dinners for him, standing guard outside my hospital room to relay his messages when I was sick...

I used to think he was the best friend the two of us had.

So it turned out that even back then, he'd been taking Justin's side and quietly leaving him a way out.

I looked at him steadily, my chest aching, but my voice came out very soft.

"The two of you, ruining two women at once like this—doesn't your conscience hurt at all?"

"Ruin? You're the one who ruined their happiness!"

With that, Adrian slammed the door on his way out.

The room was left with nothing but the monitor's steady, unhurried beeping.

Suddenly it all struck me as absurd.

Justin, Cecily, Adrian, Ebony... together they'd woven a web so tight there wasn't a gap in it, sealed me right in the middle of it, and then told me,

"This is for your own good."

But from beginning to end, not one of them had ever once asked me whether this was what I wanted.

Not from the start, not by the end. Not a single one.