Normally, the students would never have dared to make this much of a scene.
As everyone stood there awkwardly exchanging looks, Cheryl suddenly rose onto her tiptoes and licked the cream off Zack's face.
The entire room froze.
Zack himself went still for a brief moment before calmly wiping away the smear with his hand, his tone carrying a helpless sort of indulgence.
"I know you're greedy when it comes to sweets, but that doesn't mean you have to taste everything you see."
Only then did Cheryl seem to realize what she had done. She stuck her tongue out shyly, then turned to explain herself to me, though there was a faint trace of provocation hidden in her eyes.
"Sorry, Ms. Hemingway. I just really love sweets, so I lost control for a second. You're not upset, are you?"
Slowly, I stood up.
Under everyone's gaze, I walked to the dining table and, without warning, flipped the remaining half of the cake onto the floor.
The heavy thud echoed through the room.
I looked at Cheryl, whose face had instantly stiffened, and smiled faintly.
"Don't you love sweets?
"Go on then. Lick the rest off the floor too."
The girl said nothing, but her eyes reddened almost instantly.
Zack's expression darkened at once. He strode over and grabbed my wrist.
"That's enough, Joanna! She's still just a young girl. She's naive. Do you really have to humiliate her on her birthday?"
The other students quickly stepped in to ease the tension.
"Ms. Hemingway, Cheryl just likes to snack, that's all. She didn't mean anything by it. She used to steal bites from Mr. Fenton's lunchboxes all the time. She got so hooked she'd try to mooch food every day."
"Yeah, she's just childish. There's no bad intention behind it."
The moment I heard the words lunchbox, I froze.
Then a wave of bitter irony surged through my chest.
Ever since discovering that Zack suffered from a rare illness, I had spent countless nights buried in ancient medical texts, learning to prepare medicinal meals for him by hand.
But he was always busy. The lunchbox would come back untouched again and again.
Right when I was about to give up, one day, the lunchbox suddenly came back empty.
That day, Zack had even made a rare request of his own.
"Can you make it for me every day from now on? I want to bring it to school."
At the time, I had been overwhelmed with joy. I thought he had finally learned to appreciate my feelings, finally accepted my clumsy way of caring for him.
Turns out the truth was far uglier than I imagined.
I stared into Zack's eyes, catching the flicker of guilt hidden inside them, my voice turning cold.
"Tell them all to get out."
He met my gaze head-on, his eyes filled with disappointment and confusion.
After a long silence, he finally gave in with a weary sigh.
"Everyone, head back first."
As the footsteps gradually faded away, Cheryl's voice drifted back softly.
"Sir, has Ms. Hemingway always had this kind of temper?"
I held my breath.
Then I heard Zack answer with tired resignation.
"She wasn't this strange when she was younger."
The sentence echoed in my ears over and over again.
When I was younger, I had once been the prodigy.
At seven, I could already perform emergency care.
At ten, I could identify hundreds of medicinal herbs.
By fourteen, I was sitting beside my father during consultations at our clinic.
Everyone said the Hemingway family had produced a genius daughter. And I had proudly believed that there was no one in this world I could not save.
Until that day.
Zack was pulled from the river and brought to my family's clinic.
He was still breathing, but the handsome young man lay there with the face of a dead man, refusing to open his eyes no matter what we did.
Furious, I drove everyone out of the room, pried open his mouth, and forcefully breathed air into him.
Sure enough, he woke up immediately, his face flushing bright red with anger.
"Men and women shouldn't touch like that! H-How could you kiss me!"
I planted my hands on my hips and saw straight through him with a single glance.
"You don't want to live anymore, is that it?
"Well too bad. As long as I'm here, nobody I want to save is allowed to die."
