Yates Donovan fiddled with the lighter in his pocket. The cold touch of the metal cleared his head a little.
He laughed, his shoulders trembling slightly. "Are you sick in the head?"
"Even if I didn’t care about my own life, I wouldn’t drag her down with me."
"You think I’m like you guys?"
"Don’t you dare tarnish my love for her. Even if I were turned to ash, I would want her to live a good life. If she wants to date a few boyfriends, she can date a few boyfriends. As long as she’s happy."
"I’m not selfish and heartless like the rest of you."
A dull ache started to throb in Yates’s head.
After his check-up in the afternoon, he had been sitting outside Mia Grant’s hospital room, smoking.
Visitors came to see her one after another. He watched the men currently surrounding her, so full of life, and couldn’t help but think of the images that flashed through his mind. A sense of melancholy washed over him.
In those fragmented memories, Kian Keller, who could now stand and walk, never left his wheelchair until the very end of his life.
Silas Grant seemed to have aged years overnight. In the beginning, he was the epitome of hypocrisy, always putting on the airs of an elegant, aristocratic gentleman wherever he went. But in the end, he became the very thing he despised most: a disheveled, listless wreck, like a walking corpse.
Hayes Hughes died on the spot, leaving no last words. No one knew what he was thinking in the final moments of his life. Did he feel relief, or sorrow?
Felix Sinclair had controlled the system with him, but after just a few years, the young man’s numb heart stopped beating. He quietly departed from that place on a loud, rainy night.
Ian Sinclair grew up overnight, forced to abandon his dreams to prop up the crumbling Sinclair Family.
In one of the chaotic fragments, the last time he saw the young man, Ian was grabbing him by the collar, screaming that he was a liar and demanding to know why she was still gone.
’Gone?’
’What did he mean, gone?’
Yates blinked. Oh, right. The "her" from the original world had disappeared.
’How strange.’
’Why did she still die?’
’How could she be so fragile...’
Lost in these reflections, he saw himself—already thirty years old—sitting dazedly by the window, chain-smoking, unable to figure it out all night.
In the dream, it seemed everyone’s life after the "ending" had become a complete mess.
Seeing each other now, so polished and bright, truly felt like a world away.
It was like waking from a short nightmare.
But he knew it wasn’t a dream.
In the last world, it seemed no one paid much mind to this minor character who had suddenly appeared.
It wasn’t until they had lost her completely that they slowly came to understand their own feelings.
She was like Jynsia’s fleeting spring, sandwiched between winter and summer, trying hard to minimize her presence, as if her appearance were just a collective illusion.
But the drifting willow catkins and the clouds of pollen left an indelible mark deep in their memories.
And so, on the first day after she left, no one acted particularly sad. No one noticed any change in their own mood.
It was as if some irrelevant person had simply died.
That made sense. She was just a minor character.
Just a small, pitiful minor character who occasionally appeared in their world, seemingly malicious but actually clumsy and pathetic.
Life went on as usual.
A day, a week, a month...
Until the next spring.
Someone would be standing under the willow trees, sneeze unexpectedly, and look up to find tears welling in their eyes.
Only then would they vaguely recall why their hearts had felt so heavy all this time. It was because the girl they liked was gone.
Yates thought that the luckiest one of them all must have been Hayes Hughes.
He was the only one who witnessed the final moments of the girl he loved.
Jealousy grew like wild summer weeds. In the dream, he swore that he absolutely had to see her again.
—
In the stairwell, Yates nonchalantly lit a cigarette.
Just moments ago, Silas Grant had dragged him over and shoved him against the wall. Too lazy to move, he decided he might as well lean in the corner and have a smoke.
Seeing his posture, Silas understood at once. He definitely knew many of Mia Grant’s secrets.
"She’s been in contact with Simon Adler recently. Did you know?"
"Oh, you know about that?" Yates raised an eyebrow, finally glancing at him.
Silas unlocked his phone and tossed it to him.
Yates caught it steadily, swiped casually at the screen a few times, and then clicked his tongue. "Tsk. I knew I couldn’t hide it from you."
On the screen were some falsified medical reports that Simon Adler had helped Mia Grant create.
"But I’m curious. Since you knew she was planning something like this, why didn’t you try to stop her?"
"Stop her? And then what?" When Silas first found out what Mia was planning, his mind was buzzing.
He didn’t know her motive for doing this.
But he also knew he couldn’t pry the truth from her.
So, he had tripled the number of people assigned to watch her. To avoid alerting her, he had resisted contacting her.
He was wary of the Grant Family and other unstable factors from the outside, but he never expected Yates to become her accomplice.
"I want to know her reason for faking her death this time. Since the two of you put on this little show today, you must be well aware of her objective."
When the actors take the stage, it means the audience is in their seats.
He had been thinking about today’s drama the whole way here, but he still couldn’t figure out who her intended audience was.
Yates looked troubled. "How am I supposed to answer a question like that?"
"I promised her I wouldn’t tell."
"You’re so capable. Why don’t you investigate it yourself?"
Yates was just trying to provoke him.
Silas stared at him for a long time before speaking in a low voice, "You chose to hide this for her. Are you confident you can protect her all by yourself?"
"I don’t know why you two hit it off and decided to pull a stupid stunt like this today. But search your heart—don’t you feel a lingering fear?"
"She dared to do this with you today; tomorrow, she’ll dare to take the same risk with Kian Keller, or with anyone."
"Today, you were confident you could control the steering wheel and keep her from getting hurt. But are you so sure nothing will happen to her when she’s with someone else?"
"She talks about cherishing her life, but when it comes to hurting herself, she never holds back."
"You think indulgence is love, that freedom is love. You think your love is so grand that no one else’s can compare."
"Don’t you find that foolish?"
"..."
Yates’s dark eyes narrowed slightly, then he smiled and flicked the ash from his cigarette.
The ash fluttered down, quickly swept away by the draft in the corridor.
The surroundings were dim. Aside from the exit sign, the only light was the scarlet glow at his fingertips, pulsing faintly.
"I don’t know what she’s planning, so stop asking." Yates forcefully ground the cigarette butt out under his foot.
"You’re selfish."
"Maybe I am." Yates asked himself, ’Is my love really as free and easy as it seems on the surface?’
Tch.
He really wanted to laugh.
If he hadn’t remembered those fragments this afternoon, he would still believe his love was grand.
But now, he wasn’t so sure.
Because in the last world, the one who had been determined to imprison Mia Grant wasn’t Kian Keller, nor was it Silas Grant—
It was him.
It was the him who had set his sights on that beautiful girl at first glance, wanting to possess her for himself.
The thought grew stronger and stronger, and even when his heart began to tremble, he never gave up on it.