“What happened after that?”
“You lost your job. Lost the baby. I took all the money when I left.”
“You had nowhere to turn, so you ended up working at a nightclub……”
“But with a murder charge hanging over you, you were pushed out everywhere you went.”
My family had always been clean. Respectable.
I graduated top of my class from a prestigious school.
And in the end, I was reduced to pouring drinks and smiling for strangers.
I forced myself to breathe evenly.
I would not break down in front of Cedric.
“After you found out what was happening to me, did you come forward? Did you clear my name?”
“You staged all of it. Every bit. All you had to do was show up, and everything I was drowning in would have disappeared overnight.”
“So? Did you do anything?”
Cedric hesitated for a fraction of a second.
“I wanted to help you.”
“But Evelyn was up for a UN goodwill ambassadorship at the time.”
“I couldn't tarnish her image at such a critical moment.”
“So……”
So, once again, I was the one who got thrown away.
I lifted my head. My eyes burned with tears I refused to let fall.
“Did you know that becoming a UN diplomatic ambassador was my dream too?”
Cedric couldn't meet my eyes.
But he still answered, his voice low and unclear.
“I knew.”
“But I didn't have another choice……”
I didn't want to hear his hollow excuses. I cut him off.
“Cedric, I know myself. No matter what I went through, I would never let myself stay at the bottom forever.”
“So what happened after that—what made you willing to confess everything now just to pull me back?”
I knew myself.
And I knew Cedric just as well.
If I had simply accepted life as a nightclub hostess, Cedric would have sighed about it and moved on. Nothing more.
There had to be something else.
Cedric was quiet for a moment, then let out a slow breath.
“You're right. You didn't give up.”
“You worked your way through school and got accepted to an elite overseas university.”
“The police dropped the charges too, because they never found any real evidence.”
“If things had just kept going that way, you would've started your life over.”
“But……but……”
His lips trembled.
“The school you applied to happened to be near where Evelyn and I lived.”
“I was afraid you'd find out the truth about what really happened, and destroy the life Evelyn and I had built.”
“So I forged a tip-off letter and pressured the university board members into blacklisting you.”
“And just like that, I destroyed the last hope you had.”
Through Cedric's cold words, I could almost see her—the version of me from that future, lost and alone.
She was holding her breath, bent over her books under a single lamp late into the night.
She was carrying all of it on her back, trying to prove herself one more time.
And in the end,
all that effort, all that hope—
erased by one word from Cedric, light as nothing.
How was she supposed to face the rest of her life after that?
How was I supposed to face the man standing in front of me now?
I stood up. Shook my head, unable to believe what I'd heard.
“You're terrifying, Cedric.”
“You're a monster.”
Cedric grabbed my shoulders, trying to steady me.
But his own eyes were glistening now too.
“Hailey, don't get upset. Just hear me out.”
“Later on, I realized what I did was… a bit wrong.”
“My conscience wouldn't let it go. I went back to see you.”
“I left you money—enough that you'd be comfortable for the rest of your life.”
