【She's slipping into a coma. Please come back now. She's in so much pain. She says it hurts.】
My heart felt like a fist had closed around it and was twisting, wringing, refusing to let go. My brows locked tight, and no amount of willing could smooth them.
I pressed a hand to my chest and spoke to Leon, my voice shaking.
“Since you're this heartless, I'll come back another day to settle the score with you.”
“Right now I need to get back and see my grandmother off on her final journey.”
I turned and walked away.
Before I even reached the door, a figure stepped into my path, impossible to ignore.
A woman in a fitted silk dress, radiating authority.
She was around fifty, the kind of refinement that was bred into the bone, yet wrapped in an aura that was equal parts gentle and commanding.
Our eyes met.
I looked quickly at Leon.
The woman smiled at him and spoke：“Professor, someone causing trouble?”
Leon said nothing. His silence was answer enough.
The woman turned to me without a shred of courtesy and slapped me across the face, her voice dripping with contempt.
“Professor Dickerson is my husband. Do you have any idea how many children who couldn't afford school he's put through their education?”
“I was starving, all alone, when I met Professor Dickerson at seven years old.”
“He told me a woman should be strong. He didn't just give me food. He taught me to read, then sent me to school.”
“He's twenty years older than me. People say he's a dirty old man robbing the cradle, but the truth is I admired him. I married him of my own free will. His reputation will not be dragged through the mud by people like you.”
I held my burning cheek. My mind went blank.
Ellie Dickerson had just handed me too much information at once.
She met Leon when she was seven.
If she was fifty now, that meant she'd known him for forty-three years, and their bond ran deep.
Forty-three years ago, Leon had abandoned my grandmother only five years earlier.
One breath ago he'd told me he despised my grandmother's background, despised her lack of education, called himself a man of culture.
He'd looked down on my grandmother as beneath him, yet he'd poured every ounce of care onto another little girl.
So his loathing for my grandmother was pure. Absolute. Without reason.
I couldn't breathe. It was like hands had closed around my throat, and for a long moment no air would come.
Grandma. How could she have loved him that deeply?
Even now, she was holding on, waiting for that worthless man to come back.
I stared at Leon on the podium, my eyes raw and red.
What a fraud.
“Professor Dickerson, tell your wife to let me through. I need to leave.”
My grandmother was dying. I had to get back to her.
Ellie summoned two security guards to block my way.
“You want to leave?”
“You stir up trouble, ruin a man's reputation, and think you can just walk away?”
Frustration clawed at me：“Then what do you want?”
Ellie exchanged a look with Leon, then turned back to me.
“Apologize. Set the record straight. Give my husband back his good name.”
“There are too many important people here today. It wouldn't do to leave things like this.”
I had done nothing wrong. I would not apologize.
I turned to Leon：“Professor, I need to go back and be with my grandmother at the end.”
“You're keeping me trapped in this building. Do you really hate her that much? A woman who spent most of her life loving you?”
I shouldn't have come. All I'd done was waste time I could have spent at my grandmother's side.
Leon let out a sigh and spoke in the measured tone of an elder：“But you are the one in the wrong.”
My fists clenched. The last thread of reason burned away.
The pager buzzed again. Maybe because the rage was shaking through me, my fingers fumbled and I couldn't hold it steady.
I fumbled for the pager on the ground, picking it up and dropping it twice before my fingers closed around it for good.
My heart was hammering so hard I could barely breathe. I didn't dare look at the message on the screen.
My eyes skimmed the line of text, shaking, and my blood went cold……
My grandmother was gone.
