Chapter 5

The week leading up to the wedding felt like a container being crushed by some powerful sense of ritual. The manor was filled with the scents of expensive perfume and an suffocating premonition. I locked myself in the study, handling documents as if performing a delicate surgery. I had managed Emma's future thoroughly and flawlessly. I had restructured the shares of my private clinic, and one of her portions was safely locked under a family trust. Even in the draft of my will—which remained unsigned—I had specifically inserted a clause: "Regardless of whether the wedding proceeds as scheduled, or in the event of any force majeure, the aforementioned interests shall be unconditionally vested in Emma Watson and shall not be subject to clawback."

The lawyer had looked at me over his glasses then, his eyes filled with professional bewilderment. "Dr. Noah, in legal terms, you are pushing your own escape route directly off a cliff."

"This is just compensation for this journey," I had simply smiled and signed my name. Compensation for what? I knew deep down. Compensation for the years I had forcibly intruded into her life, for the scar left on my collarbone, or, perhaps, for the rest of my life that was still working itself to the bone for her despite being torn to shreds.

As for Emma, she spent that week being "extremely busy."

She was always hiding in the shadows of the garden or taking secretive calls in the washroom. When I tried to approach, she would turn around, swipe her phone screen to black, and offer a smile that was incredibly sweet yet carried a sense of alienation. "Just some minor wedding planning troubles," she would say lightly, her fingertips brushing against my tie. "You know, I just want everything to be perfect."

The thing that alarmed me most was what she said two days before the wedding. She was standing on the balcony, watching the distant blizzard, her tone carrying an eerie, unreadable quality. "Noah, tell me... do people lose their right to enjoy the future because they carry too many debts from the past?"

I set down my coffee and looked into those eyes, which always resembled deep pools. "Debts always have a day of redemption, as long as you're willing to turn back and look at the person who's trying to help you pay them off."

She was silent for a long time before she finally said something I hadn't thought much of at the time: "I might be a little late on the wedding day. Don't take it to heart."

Now, looking back, that "a little late" wasn't about time at all. It was the absolute abandonment of our relationship.

The night before the wedding, the wind and snow outside the manor felt like an apocalyptic judgment. I was exhausted from surgeries during the day, my bones feeling as if they were about to shatter. The fatigue from my heart’s workload surged like a tide, nearly drowning me.

She pushed open my bedroom door late at night.

She was wearing silk pajamas, her long hair draped over her shoulders, her face looking deathly pale and fragile in the dim light of the bedside lamp. She stood there for a long time, her lips parting several times as if to speak, but finally, she just looked at me. Her eyes sparkled with a complex light I couldn't decipher—there was a mercy of parting, and a ruthlessness that shunned the consequences.

"What's wrong?" I propped myself up, exhausted.

"Nothing." She finally shook her head and leaned down, placing a kiss as light as a feather on my forehead. "Good night, Noah."

She turned and left. At that moment, I felt that if I could have held on for just one more minute, if I could have escaped this heavy weariness to ask her who that sorrow in her eyes was really directed toward, perhaps none of this would have happened.

But I was simply too tired. Just before my consciousness sank into darkness, my phone buzzed. The screen lit up—it was a voice message from Emma.

I should have listened to it. It might have been her final message of confession. But the overwhelming drowsiness made it impossible to lift a finger. I took a blurry glance: "You’ve been too good to me. I don’t deserve it."

"I don't deserve it..." the words flickered on the locked screen.

I smiled bitterly. A tactless surgeon—perhaps the role she hated most. I turned the phone face down on the nightstand, closed my heavy eyelids, and murmured to myself in my heart: Don't think about it, Noah. Tomorrow, when she puts on the wedding dress and stands at the other end of the aisle, all the uncertainties will vanish. Whatever the debts, whatever the disputes, even the suspicions born of my own paranoia—once the ceremony begins, everything will… fall into place.

That night, I slept heavily, yet with a sense of silence that felt like the approaching end. I was a man living out his final full night, yet I naively believed it was just an ordinary footnote on a long road to happiness.