"Dawn, please don't agree to my mom's request."
I smiled and nodded.
"All right, I won't. Don't worry."
Joel was so thrown off he forgot to keep coughing.
He didn't get it.
This playing-hard-to-get routine had kept me on the hook for over twenty years. How had it stopped working all of a sudden? It took him a moment to recover before he shot Naomi a look.
Naomi gritted her teeth and dropped straight to her knees in front of me.
"Dawn, the liver regenerates."
"You'd only lose a small piece of yours, but Joel is losing his whole life."
"Joel would die for you, and you can't give up even a sliver of your liver for him? Or was all that talk about loving Joel a lie?"
"And I raised you from a child. I may not be your real mother, but I'm half a mother to you. Whether it's for Joel or to repay what you owe me, you have to save him!"
I looked at the two of them, mother and son, one playing the villain and one the sympathetic wretch.
I fought hard not to laugh out loud. But the real joke was me, that I'd let people like this con me out of my liver and my money, only to end up so wretchedly.
Their makeup was starting to run, and I decided I'd held back long enough.
"Half a mother?"
"Naomi, you're my housekeeper. Yes, you looked after me from the time I was small, but my family paid you generous wages for it. If that makes you half my mother, then I've got so many mothers I couldn't even count them all."
"And Joel? My family bankrolled him his whole life. A housekeeper's son gets to live like some rich heir out there, and that was all because of me."
"Even his surviving this long after getting sick was because of me. Whichever way you slice it, I owe you nothing."
"But you haven't got a shred of gratitude. Instead you put on a little double act in front of me, trying to force me to donate my liver. How are you two any different from a pair of ingrates?"
Naomi and Joel were both drenched in sweat, unable to work out how I'd turned into this.
But I wasn't about to give them time to think it through.
I called for someone and had the two of them "shown" out.
Joel took it fine, but Naomi couldn't swallow it, couldn't keep up the act any longer. She glared at me viciously, and before she was "shown" out, she left me with a threat.
"Dawn Coleman, just you wait. This isn't over."
"That liver of yours, I'm having it. And not only that. I'll have you begging to give it to me."
The days that followed.
Naomi's threat didn't affect me in the slightest.
She started harassing me around the clock too, sending me all sorts of messages. Some were about the good she'd done me, some were the sweeter moments Joel and I had shared.
Whatever she sent, back and forth, it all came down to one line.
"Dawn Coleman, you can't be this selfish. You have to save Joel."
"There's no need for us both to end up losing. Just save Joel, and I'll treat what happened that day as if it never happened!"
I didn't feel annoyed.
If anything, I read every single message over and over.
I even used AI to generate an image of myself as an old woman and set it as my wallpaper.
Because only that way could I remind myself how foolish I'd been, letting people like this guilt-trip me for so many years.
I threw myself into work. Naomi went on making her scenes, hounding me at every turn.
After about a month of this uproar, Naomi finally went quiet.
But I knew in my heart it wouldn't end this cleanly. They were saving up for something big. Even if they couldn't get my liver, they meant to make me pay a price.
Sure enough.
On the day of my company's product launch.
Somehow Naomi, Joel, and Victoria slipped past security, rushed the stage, and raised a banner in front of the reporters.
【Dawn Coleman leads a man on and throws him away, abandons her cancer-stricken lover. She doesn't deserve to be called human!】
