Chapter 6

Lila had no idea what was happening when she was brought in.

It wasn’t until Nolan pinned her with his gaze that she felt a chill unlike anything she had ever known.

“Uncle Nolan, w-what’s wrong?”

She edged behind Bryce, who had been brought in with her, still trying to maintain her innocent act.

Nolan picked up my red hair ribbon.

“What is this?”

What was it? How was she supposed to know?

Confusion flickered across Lila’s face. Then, quick as ever, she remembered what Nolan had told her before.

“Oh, isn’t that my old hair ribbon? I had it when I was little. I can’t believe you remembered it all this time,

Uncle Nolan.”

“Yours? You’re sure?”

Nolan cut her off.

His voice was quiet, yet everyone in the room fell silent.

“Then why is the initial A stitched into it?”

Lila opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

“Uncle Nolan, let me explain-”

“Oh, right. There was something else I almost forgot.” Nolan smiled. “Where did you get the small silver

pendant I gave to the girl who saved me-the one you used to prove you were her?”

The color finally drained from Lila’s face.

Bryce stepped forward with a frown.

“Uncle Nolan, what are you implying? Lila would never lie-”

“Shut up.”

Nolan didn’t even look at him.

He merely ordered someone to bring out another file.

Lila and her mother had indeed been living in Minneapolis. But that Christmas, Victor had sent Lila to stay

with her grandfather and win his favor. She didn’t return until Christmas Eve.

My mother took me to Minneapolis two weeks before Christmas.

On the night of that blizzard, when I found a boy starving on the street, Lila hadn’t even returned to

Minneapolis.

She couldn’t possibly have been there.

The timeline didn’t work.

Nolan hurled the file at Lila’s face, sending pages scattering across the floor.

She stumbled back, panic spreading across her delicate features.

“Uncle Nolan, this happened more than twenty years ago! How could anyone possibly investigate it that

precisely? I really was the girl who saved you!”

It was a pathetic lie.

Nolan stopped listening.

He turned and walked toward the ICU, then sank to his knees outside the doors. A line of blood-tinged tears

ran down his face.

I was on the other side of those doors.

I was covered in blood, hovering between life and death.

I was the girl who had truly saved him.

And I was the woman he had pushed into the abyss with his own hands.

No one there had ever seen Nolan cry.

Not once.

Even when he had been a starving child abandoned on the streets, he hadn’t shed a single tear.

Now he knelt outside the ICU, his face streaked with blood and tears.

He finally knew what regret felt like, but it was too late to change anything.

My consciousness sank into an endless darkness, and I didn’t know whether I would ever wake again.