Chapter 1
Chloe McCarthy, my husband Adrian Cole’s childhood sweetheart, made a scene about jumping off a building. Then she told everyone I was the one who drove her to it.
Adrian dragged me up to the roof and clamped his hands around my throat, squeezing so hard I could barely breathe. “If you love forcing people to jump so much, then try it yourself!”
Then he shoved me over the edge.
What he didn’t know was that the inflatable crash pad set up below had been secretly removed by Chloe.
When I opened my eyes again, I was back in the year I had loved him
most.
Chloe came to my door, hysterical. “Think you can buy anything with your money? You used your money to force him into marrying you. Have you no shame?”
I looked at her coldly. “Oh, please. Whoever wants him can have him.‘
But the second I turned around, Adrian was standing right in front of me, his eyes red. “Say that again…”
***
On the roof of the psychiatric hospital, Adrian threw me to the ground. There wasn’t the slightest trace of pity in his eyes.
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I was wearing a thin hospital gown, kneeling on the concrete as I tilted my head back to look at him.
Even the weather seemed to fit the moment. The wind howled, chilling me to the bone.
Adrian brushed off his custom–tailored suit as if touching me had
tainted it.
It was the first suit Chloe had ever given him, and he never allowed me to touch it.
Even though I had made many suits for him myself, this was always the one he liked to wear.
“Tessa, from the moment you fell for me, you’ve been scheming nonstop. Don’t you ever get tired?”
I looked at the disgust on his face. He was nothing like the boy I had known in school, and yet somehow he was still the same person,
Scheming? I had never plotted against him when I treated him well. I hadn’t used any schemes to marry him. And I certainly hadn’t used any schemes against his beloved Chloe.
But he had convinced himself, with reckless certainty, that everything I had was something I had won through manipulation.
By now, I was too exhausted to explain anything.
“You’re joking. The one who knows how to scheme is somebody else.” I replied with a bitter smile. Somewhere on the rooftop, a shard of broken mirror caught my reflection.
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Even calling it a mess didn’t feel right. Ruined was closer.
“Drop the sarcasm. If you hadn’t forced Coco to jump, we could at least have stayed civil with each other.”
“If all of you insist I forced her, then fine–I did.” I pushed myself up from the ground and got to my feet, worn down and hollow.
Among the three of us, my explanations had always been useless.
Chloe had jumped to prove to me that Adrian loved her more than me, more than the woman who had already become Mrs. Cole.
And then, overnight, I became the villain who had driven Chloe to jump, even though I had done nothing at all.
At first, I thought Adrian was furious because Chloe had broken her leg–or worse, fallen into a coma.
But Chloe wasn’t hurt in the slightest. All it took was a few words from her, and I lost everything.
To punish me, Adrian locked me away in a psychiatric hospital. Every single day, he would bring me up to the roof and, in a rage, shove me off.
Again and again, it became a kind of routine in my life.
He would push me. I wouldn’t die. There would always be an inflatable crash pad waiting below, roughly six meters down.
Every time I fell, the patients in the hospital would clap and cheer, telling me to do it again.
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And the cruelest joke of all was that the power he now used to humiliate me had come from the investment I had personally handed him back when I wanted to marry him.
After everything happened, no matter how much I begged, it was useless. He had no intention of letting me go.
Today was the last day. Once I jumped today, there would be no more.
I spread my arms and closed my eyes in resignation. “Mr. Cole, hurry up and get it over with. It’s almost breakfast time.”
Breakfast? It was nothing more than a few strips of cucumber. But I had an old stomach condition, and if I didn’t eat, the pain would
become unbearable.
1
“Heh…” Adrian let out a cold laugh. “Tessa, you really are vile to the
core.”
This was the same mouth that had once told me he loved me with all
his heart.
Π
He walked over. He could have wrapped one hand around my throat, but this time he used both.
He wanted me to truly feel death this time, not act as though I had grown numb to his punishment.
I thought I really had died, my heart already had.
Once, we had loved each other fiercely. And now we had come to this.
“Just thinking about the past makes me sick. You want to die so badly,
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don’t you? Fine. I’ll make it happen.”
He showed no mercy. His eyes were nothing but coldness. With one casual push, he sent me over the edge.
The wind screamed past my ears, so hard that even my tears were torn away into the air.
Then I heard a heavy thud. There was no soft crash pad as I had expected. No familiar applause, no delighted calls for an encore.
Instead, screams broke out one after another.
Pain exploded through me as though every bone in my body had shattered. But strangely, my heart didn’t hurt anymore.
I saw Chloe hiding off to one side, covering her mouth with terrified, excited eyes. Beside her was the crash pad that had been meant to catch me.
I see. So this time, I really was going to die.
The screaming in my ears slowly faded, and I looked up to see the panic–stricken expression on Adrian’s face above.
He looked shocked.
But wasn’t this exactly what he wanted? If I died, then he would finally be free to marry the childhood sweetheart he had always chosen.
