"You're not that kind of person. I believe you."
Right now, I needed to do everything in my power to save myself, even if that meant groveling.
He lunged forward and seized my throat. "Even now, you still don't understand why?"
"You vicious bitch. Cutting you into a thousand pieces wouldn't be enough."
I looked up at him through my tears. There was a time when my tears alone could undo him. He'd hold me, ask me what was wrong. He would have moved heaven and earth to make me smile.
He once told me he'd make me the happiest woman in the world.
Now my tears meant nothing to him. If anything, they made him angrier.
"You still have the nerve to cry."
Just as the edges of my vision started to go black, Thaddeus released his grip.
"Geraldine was right. Letting you die this easily would be too good for you."
There was a time when anything I said carried weight with him. Now it was Geraldine's words he treated as gospel. If she told him to take my life, he'd do it without blinking.
"Your funeral's already been held. As far as the world is concerned, you're dead. From now on, you'll spend every single day drowning in despair."
Thaddeus left those words hanging in the air and walked out.
Shortly after he left, Geraldine appeared in the hospital room.
She had been my closest friend. We'd known each other since middle school. Same high school, same college, same major. We never ran out of things to talk about.
When I married Thaddeus, she was my maid of honor.
After I married into the James family, I helped her find a job.
I once believed our friendship would last forever.
Now I saw that for what it was: wishful thinking. She was the real reason Thaddeus had turned on me.
I met Geraldine's mocking gaze head-on. "Geraldine, I don't know what I did that wasn't good enough. I don't know why you hold such a grudge against me."
"For the sake of what we used to be, can you let me go?"
"Please."
Right now, all I wanted was to survive. I had to survive.
Geraldine sat down. She lowered her eyes and traced her left ring finger with a slow, deliberate touch.
The wedding ring that belonged to me was on her hand.
After a moment, she looked up.
"I came here today to tell you the truth."
"It's not that you didn't do enough. It's that you did everything too well."
"Since middle school, you've been better than me in every way."
"I was already exceptional. But next to you, I was nothing more than a leaf making the flower look prettier."
"You don't understand what that feels like. You don't understand that kind of hatred."
"As long as you're alive, I'll never have peace."
"Jealousy turns people into monsters. And I'm the one who's been jealous all along."
"So I spent years thinking about how to destroy you. How to make you die in the most hopeless way possible."
"I waited a very long time for this. And then fate handed me the chance."
She leaned in close and whispered, "Aren't you curious how I pulled it off?"
"Do you remember Dominic Ashford?"
Of course I knew Dominic Ashford. He was the golden boy of our college years, the prince charming every girl dreamed about.
He was also one of Geraldine's admirers.
I'd read every single love letter Dominic wrote to Geraldine. Every one of them was deeply moving.
And Geraldine had me write her replies. I knew every twist and turn of their love story intimately.
They'd been inseparable through those letters, burning with passion on the page. That was why I could never understand why, in our final year before graduation, Geraldine rejected him.
It drove Dominic to leave the country entirely.
What I understood even less was why, when someone as extraordinary as Dominic was pursuing her, she still felt the need to compete with me for Thaddeus.
Geraldine continued. "The truth is, Dominic never wrote a single love letter to me."
"Every one of those letters was written to you. I was just the messenger."
"I was the one who told him you didn't want your name appearing in the letters."
