Blood still trickled from my hands, yet the noise in the banquet hall continued unabated. Suddenly, Vincent rushed over with Nancy, who had fainted for some unknown reason. Weston quickly stepped between me and the paramedics, pulling me aside.
"Doctor, can you please look at her first?" he asked urgently.
My nonstop bleeding seemed trivial compared to the sudden drama surrounding Nancy’s fainting spell. The emergency doctor was immediately redirected to check on her instead. After a brief examination and a few questions, they determined she had a history of heart disease, and with the stress of the evening, Vincent insisted they rush her to the hospital.
I wrapped my bleeding hand with gauze as best as I could, offering a weak smile at the irony, then called a cab and headed to the hospital alone.
To say I wasn’t heartbroken would be a lie, but I felt an even stronger sense of chill. Twenty years of friendship discarded in favor of a graduate who’d been in the company all of two months.
I couldn’t help but think of the fortune teller my mother had brought in at the start of the year. He’d predicted that I’d face betrayal and would need to "break it to rebuild." I hadn’t believed him then, brushing him off as a fraud.
Now, I was forced to reconsider. Was this so-called "breaking and rebuilding" a sign that I was supposed to move on, to start over? And did that include accepting marriage as part of this “new beginning”?
The doctor disinfected and bandaged my wounds with meticulous care, surprised that I didn’t even flinch. I only glanced at the two figures pacing anxiously outside the emergency room and whispered, "This pain is nothing."
What really hurt was deeper—wounds that couldn’t be dressed.
When I finally finished and prepared to leave, I saw that Nancy was perfectly fine. I had suspected as much. She hadn’t “fainted” until the ambulance was about to take me away; a suspiciously convenient moment. She probably didn’t even remember telling me years ago how she’d once feigned angina to push her biased parents into letting her study. I had felt sorry for her then, even admired her ingenuity.
Now, she’d turned that same cunning on me—manipulating not only Weston and the others but the doctor as well.
As Vincent pushed Nancy past me, my phone rang.
"Little troublemaker, where are you? Weren’t you supposed to be here by now?"
I looked down at my bandaged hands and sighed, telling my mother gently, "Mom, can we postpone the wedding for a few days? Something urgent has come up that I need to handle."
Her voice immediately filled with panic. "My dear, the guests are already arriving, all waiting on you! Are you thinking of running away from this marriage? Do you not want the heir of the Brown Family?"
I hesitated, trying to find the right words to reassure her, when suddenly, Vincent and Weston—who I thought had left—spoke up behind me.
"Heir of the Brown Family?" They exchanged glances, amusement glinting in their eyes.
Seeing them, I felt a new wave of irritation and said firmly onto the phone, "No, Mom, not even a storm of knives could keep me away. I’ll be there today to get married."
After hanging up, I checked the time. I could still make it in time for the ceremony. But as I hurried off, Vincent and Weston blocked my path again.
