Chapter 1

My childhood friend was a tech prodigy.

To comfort his influencer girlfriend who was suffering from period cramps, he wanted to forfeit the National Hackathon we had spent the entire year preparing for.

I tipped off his father.

Consequently, he was dragged to the competition, won first place, and secured a straight path to Stanford.

Years later, his startup succeeded, making him a billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

While I was nothing but his employee.

In the dimly lit basement server room, peering down at me like a god, he plunged a knife into my only seeing eye.

"Chloe, you are a vicious bitch. This is your retribution."

When I opened my eyes again, I was back to the moment before everything fell apart.

......

"Liam is absolutely unreal. It's not just that he's hot, his dad is on the school board. He's basically a walking ATM. I'm dying."

"The way he looks over here is just killer."

In the hallway of Oakridge High, Mia, wearing her drastically shortened uniform skirt, pouted her lip-gloss-covered lips at her phone screen, currently live-streaming.

"The chat is blowing up with bets! Mia, do you dare to bag Liam tonight?" a classmate yelled, egging her on.

Mia tossed her blonde hair and winked at the camera. "Is that even a question? This weekend, I'll have him swiping that limitless black card and driving me to LA in a sports car."

The crowd's cheering almost blew the roof off. "Whoa! Our campus influencer Mia is personally taking down the school board's prince!"

"Chloe!"

Mia suddenly turned around, yanking me right into the live stream frame. "You're Liam's most loyal 'little sidekick.' You know him best. Tell us, do I make the perfect girlfriend for him?"

The glaring ring light was shoved right in my face.

My brain went blank for a few seconds. Then, a tearing, needle-like pain shot through the depths of my right eye.

I wasn't blind. I was still standing here.

I had come back.

Mia was the new transfer student at Oakridge High this semester, and she was also my roommate.

In my past life, Mia had snatched my diary and flipped it open in front of everyone.

It was filled with all my secret feelings for Liam.

She read it out loud in front of tens of thousands of viewers on her live stream.

I was nailed to the pillar of shame, becoming the school's running joke—the pathetic, poor girl trying to use our childhood friendship to trap the school board's son.

Back then, my face burned beet red, and I was so mortified I couldn't even form a complete sentence.

Under the gazes of the whole school and the internet, my pathetic secret crush was stripped bare for all to see.

That was why later, when I tried to stop Liam from giving up the National Hackathon finals for her and reported them to his dad, everyone assumed I was just acting out of twisted jealousy.

The stupidest thing I did in my last life was breaking up those two pieces of trash.

A chill shot up from the bottoms of my feet.

The darkness, the suffocation, the phantom pain of a sharp blade piercing my eyeball still lingered in my nerves. I couldn't stop a shudder from wracking my body.

I dug my fingernails fiercely into my palms.

"I wish you both a long and happy life together. A perfect match," I heard myself say.

When Liam and I were ten, an out-of-control truck barreled into an intersection.

I shoved him out of the way, and the right side of my face slammed into the gravel, damaging my optic nerve. From then on, looking through my right eye was always like looking through frosted glass.

Looking at me with my eye bandaged, he sobbed until he nearly passed out, swearing he would marry me when we grew up.

He once said to me, "Chloe, let's win the National Hackathon together and get into Stanford together, okay?"

I took those words as an unshakable religion. To fulfill our promise of getting into the same top university, I worked myself to the bone.

I thought we were walking toward the exact same future.

Until Mia showed up.

She was an influencer who built her following on suggestive videos.

Mia's thirst for clout, thrills, and internet fame held a fatal attraction for Liam's otherwise structured, by-the-book life.

After meeting her, Liam learned to skip class, hit underground parties, and smoke weed.

Right before the Hackathon qualifiers, Mia had severe period cramps. Liam actually wanted to forfeit the competition just to keep her company.

I was the one who tipped off his school board director father.

Mia was dragged away by her parents and forcibly transferred out.

Liam was marched to the arena by his dad, took first place, and secured a straight path to Stanford.

Years later, he became a billionaire Silicon Valley star.

Mia, on the other hand, hit rock bottom after graduation. She was played by countless men and eventually hopped up on drugs, jumped off a building to her death.

It was pouring rain the night Liam found out about Mia's death.

Under the pretext of a system fix, he tricked me into going down to the company's basement server room, where there were no security cameras.

He choked me with a death grip, his eyes bloodshot like a wild beast.

"Chloe, you killed Mia! You vicious bitch!"

Pinning me down, he raised a knife and, without a second of hesitation, plunged it into my seeing left eye.

He completely stripped away all my sight.

I called the police.

But before the forensics report even came out, his father's power and elite legal team swept in. With no cameras and a clean crime scene, my injury was ruled as "insane self-mutilation."

The boy who had once knelt beside my hospital bed and sworn to be my eyes for the rest of his life, was the very one who personally ripped away my light.