Juliette Monroe, his fiancée, turned away from me. "Looks like sending her away back then really worked. She's completely changed."
"Luther, come help me pick the wedding invitations. Tell me which one looks better."
Downstairs, the joy of their wedding preparations pierced straight through me.
I was adopted by the Hawthorne Family from the orphanage, so I grew up with Luther. We were childhood sweethearts and we loved each other.
Until three years ago.
Luther saw with his own eyes when his mother and his uncle were tangled together on the bed. His eyes were red as he questioned her, asking why she would do something like that. How could a woman like her, proud and noble, fall for someone as useless as his uncle?
He begged her like a madman to tell the truth.
However, she never gave him an explanation. All he got was her cold, lifeless body the next day.
Even though his father, Luke, tried to block all the news, word still got out that she had committed incest and taken her own life out of shame by swallowing sleeping pills.
From then on, the word 'incest' or 'forbidden love' became a forbidden topic to Luther.
And from that day, he started to slowly pull away from me.
I could not accept it at the time. The pain and the heartbreak drowned me and I started coming home drunk every single day.
The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache and saw Luther lying next to me.
The messy bed and the soreness all over my body pointed to what had happened between us.
My face turned pale. I did not even have time to figure things out.
Luther was furious, demanding to know why I did that despite knowing that incest was his taboo, but I still drugged him.
The sun was shining that morning, but I felt like I had been thrown into an icy pit.
I cried, I begged. I told him I had been wronged. But that night, only Luther, his father and I were at home.
Luther stared at me, eyes full of pain and disbelief. "My father hates incest more than anything. How could he do this?"
After that, I was thrown into a mental hospital, cut off from the outside world. And it was there that I gave birth to a daughter with a congenital heart disease.
To stop the world from thinking my daughter was the result of incest, I told everyone she was someone else's child.
I laughed at myself.
All the pain would all be over soon.
I just had to find a good family for her. Once I did, I could give her my heart and finally rest.
Once I did, I could die peacefully.
I pushed open the door to the room that once belonged to me, but it was now Juliette's cloakroom.
I stood there for a moment in silence, then took my daughter's hand and turned to head toward the remote guest room. After settling in, I cleaned up the space and coaxed her to sleep.
That was when my phone rang.
"Jenna, I'm on set. My script ended up with Luther by mistake. Could you bring it to me?"
"Luther and I are waiting for you here."
I pushed open the door to their bedroom and the sight of their stuff together on the bedside table hit me like a slap in the face.
The bitterness rose in my chest as I grabbed the contract and rushed to the set.
Before I even had the chance to walk in, I was surrounded by a crowd of fans at the door.
A sharp, mocking voice cut through the air, "How dare such a shameless bitch like her show up? The Hawthorne Family raised her, yet she still had the nerve to commit incest with her brother."
Suddenly, one of the fans reached out, knocking the contract out of my hand. I bent down in a panic to pick it up.
But before I could, the fan stomped on my hand, crushing it underfoot.
"Look at you. Our Juliette is about to be happy and you're just jealous, coming out to cause trouble for her."
The crowd pushed me, trapping me in their harsh grasp.
I could feel the same suffocating panic I had suffered from in the mental hospital. Surrounded by darkness and voices, I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.
The fans around me laughed cruelly, watching as the once proud Jenna was now a broken figure, lying on the ground with tears streaming down my face and my body shaking uncontrollably.
From a distance, Luther watched with a cold expression. I could see the faintest flash of pain in his eyes as he took a step forward.
