Chapter 12
The hospital reeked of disinfectant.
Claire’s eyelids fluttered and lifted.
Everything was white—
the ceiling, the walls, the sheets—cold and blank.
A nurse approached with a clipboard, footsteps light.
“Miss, you’re awake…” Her voice was careful. “I’m sorry—your baby… we couldn’t save it.”
Claire’s eyes went hollow, fixed on nothing.
"We need to perform a uterine curettage on you now, and require the signature of your family."
Claire turned her head. Her voice was dry, oddly calm.
“I’ll sign. I have no family.”
“Your husband…?”
“Dead.”
She cut the question off without a ripple.
The pen pressed cool against her fingers.
She signed her name—Claire Lane—stroke by stroke, so hard the paper nearly tore.
A declaration with no retreat.
Her hand drifted to her flat belly.
Empty.
Nothing there anymore.
A fruit of love? Maybe the rotten one.
A breath slipped out of her—strangely, a shred of release inside.
Maybe this was better.
The child was never meant to come.
They rolled her into surgery.
The lights above blurred her vision.
Metal instruments chimed—
bright, cold, and cruel to the teeth.
She shut her eyes—and saw Zane Lane.
The man who had once been gentle and careful.
The man she’d dragged from a burning wreck with her life on the line.
Why? Why did the man who regained his memory
become someone else entirely—
cold, ruthless, heartless?
She couldn’t understand.
Ice anesthesia surged into her vein,
a tide that swallowed thought in an instant.
Darkness rushed up.
She sank like a stone in the deepest sea.
When she woke, it was over.
Her body felt hollow. So did her heart.
She turned her head toward the window.
A plane carved a white line across a blue sky.
Free.
She would go, too.
Her lips bent into a curve.
She smiled.
And then the heat of tears rolled down—scalding.
How ironic.
She had saved a life—and earned pain that flayed her to the bone—
and a man who was cruelest to her.
“Ethan Vance.”
His name was a poison thorn vine, barbed deep in living flesh.
Poison spread.
Every thought of him twisted into pain.
She had to rip him out root and stem—even if it shredded her to ribbons.
He did not deserve it.
He did not deserve her love.
He did not deserve to be the father of her child.
Tears blurred her sight again.
Her phone lit up.
A new message: her emigration paperwork—approved.
Good. Finally, good.
She could go. She must go—now.
Leave the city that had chewed her to pieces.
Leave the man without a heart.
From now on—mountains high, waters far—never see him again.
The next day, she checked herself out.
Her steps were unsteady, but her will was iron.
At the immigration office, she took the manila envelope—
thin, but heavy with a new life.
She bought the earliest flight to Italy.
It left at night.
Her uncle was waiting in Florence—childless his whole life; she was the Lanes’ only blood.
The airport blazed with light.
At the gate, she stopped.
She took out her phone and typed one last message
to Ethan Vance:
[Ethan Vance, I won’t call you heartless or ungrateful. I’ll only say this:
it isn’t that I wasn’t worthy—it’s that you weren’t.
Goodbye—never again. The one I hate most in this life.]
Send.
Her fingertips were cold, steady.
She pried out the SIM card—that tiny chip holding their entire past—
and tossed it into the trash without looking.
A soft clink.
Cut clean.
She turned toward the jet bridge.
She did not look back.
Not once.
The plane gathered speed, lifted, and knifed into the night.
The lights of the city shrank in the window,
until the clouds swallowed them whole.
The cabin lights were dim.
Claire leaned on the window and closed her eyes.
A single tear slipped, silent as a secret.
