Chapter 5

Chloe's POV

I woke up to the smell of antiseptic.

The ceiling was blindingly white. I tried moving my fingers, but every inch of my body ached, and there was a patch of gauze taped to my temple.

Two people were sitting by the bed.

Zachary was sitting in an armchair, and Claire was slumped in the chair beside him. The moment I opened my eyes, both of them stood up.

"Chloe, you're finally awake! It's all my fault. If I had just stayed behind to wait for you last night, you wouldn't have had to walk back alone and take such a bad fall," Claire spoke first, her eyes rimmed with red.

Zachary raised the head of the bed slightly. "The doctor said you hit your head. If it's late in the future, call someone to pick you up."

"It really is my fault," Claire tugged at his sleeve. "Zachary, don't lecture her. It's just that my health is so poor... I panicked you so badly last night that you couldn't look after Chloe."

"You were genuinely sick, it's not like you were faking it," Zachary patted her hand. "Just be more careful going forward."

I watched them quietly.

Last night, when I fell all alone on that empty street, the two of them were sitting in the exact same car.

I didn't bother asking where they went. Asking would only make me miserable.

Claire sat on the edge of the bed again, tucking the blanket around me. "Chloe, please don't be mad at us. We just didn't want you to worry."

"I'm not worried. I'm just tired," I said, my voice barely a whisper.

The doctor came in for rounds, flipping through the chart before suddenly pausing. "What happened to that ring of bruising around your wrist?"

I lowered my eyes.

The purple-and-blue finger marks were stark, showing no sign of fading.

"I bumped it," I said.

The doctor gave me a look, didn't press further, but jotted the bruising down into the medical report.

Zachary hired a private nurse to look after me.

He showed up twice himself, staying less than ten minutes each time before rushing off to take a phone call.

Claire, on the other hand, came by every single day, holding my hand and asking if I was still in pain or if I was hungry.

I answered her politely, not offering a single ounce of sincerity.

On the day of my discharge, I went straight back to that apartment.

I opened the closets in my room.

Over the years, Zachary had bought countless things for this room—decorative trinkets, sets of dresses—stuffing the wardrobe full.

In the past, every time something new was added, I took it as proof that he held a place for me in his heart.

Now, all I wanted was to purge every single piece of it from my space.

I packed them into boxes, hailed a delivery truck, and had everything sent directly to Zachary's corporate office.

When the delivery arrived downstairs, the driver and the boxes were turned away right at the door by Zachary's orders.

"What did he say?" I asked his assistant over the phone.

The assistant let out an awkward cough. "Mr. Walker said that if you need anything, he'll buy more. There's... no need to send these back."

"Were those his exact words?"

"There was one more thing," the assistant hesitated, looking away. "Mr. Walker said that once you're done throwing your tantrum, just come home. He won't hold it against you."

I let out a dry laugh.

What I wanted to return were his things, yet he saw it as me throwing a fit.

I turned right around, contacted a consignment shop, and sold off every single item from that closet.

Every penny I made from the sale was donated to a local charity for runaway youth.

Once that money was donated, there was one less debt tying me to him.

The day the consignment truck hauled the last boxes away, I stood in the half-empty bedroom and stretched my arms out.

A few days later, Claire hosted a gathering.

Claire stood up with her wine glass in hand, smiling brightly. "Today, I also want to give a special thanks to Chloe. She gave me an incredible gift, and I'd love for everyone here to hear a piece of it."

The guests leaned forward, full of enthusiastic anticipation.

Claire shot a look toward someone behind her, and a server brought out a stack of manuscripts, laying them out across the table.

I never imagined she would pull a stunt like this.

That was the private manuscript I had hidden away at the very bottom of my drawer for years—a full-length novel I had poured my soul into.

Over all these years, I had never shown it to anyone. I had only ever read a few passages aloud to Zachary.

I spent every spare moment I had writing that book. My plan was to finish it, bring it to an editor, and build a career out of it so I could support myself.

It was the one and only thing in my life that hadn't been tainted by anyone else.

Sitting at the table, the blood rushed straight to my head.

Claire cleared her throat, cast a warm smile my way, picked up the top page, and began reading it aloud to the whole room.

Those were sentences I had revised over and over again.

Now, they were being held in Claire's hands, read out with theatrical poise, page by page, to an audience of our peers.

Claire was completely immersed, as if reading her very own masterpiece.

Finishing a page, she deliberately looked up and asked me, "Chloe, you told me before that you wrote this stack yourself. But this is clearly the exact draft I lost a while ago. How do you explain that?"

The table went dead silent at first, followed by a wave of hushed, hurried whispers.

"Wait, she didn't write it?"

"The writing actually sounded pretty good..."

"Doing something like that is seriously dirty."

I sat there, my fingernails digging brutally into my palms.

Something I had guarded for years, tucked away at the very bottom of a drawer, and in the end, I couldn't even protect this.