chapter 7
But if this were truly the end, I don’t think I would still sometimes wake in the middle of the night with tears on my face and no reason I can explain.
There are moments—small, strange moments—when I feel like I’ve forgotten someone.
Not the man in my arms.
Not the husband who loves me.
But someone else.
A shadow of him.
A version of him.
A man with sharp eyes and a ruined heart who stood in the dark and looked at me like warmth was something he had no right to touch.
The details are gone.
The system made sure of that.
Still, sometimes, pieces drift up from nowhere.
A plain bowl of noodles eaten down to the last drop.
A bloodstained gift box checked before wounds.
A look across a kitchen that carried all the pain in the world without saying a word.
And once in a while, when Ethan isn’t paying attention, I catch him looking at me with an expression that feels deeper than this life alone should allow.
As if somewhere beyond memory, beyond timelines, beyond the ruins of stories that should have collapsed, something still remains.
The original Ethan Reed had been the perfect tragic villain.
Alone from childhood.
Rejected by everyone.
Called cursed.
Thrown away by his parents.
By the time he grew up, the entire world had already decided what he was supposed to become.
Cold-blooded.
Selfish.
Cruel.
A monster.
The book said he loved the heroine deeply because she once gave him food.
But now, though I no longer remember the details clearly, I don’t think that was true.
I think he mistook repayment for love.
I think he was searching for someone else all along.
Someone important.
Someone he couldn’t name.
Someone whose face stayed just out of reach no matter how many lives he crossed.
In the original world, I had been written as a cheap, greedy woman desperate to climb upward through Noah Parker.
A woman who would wear the shortest dress, the brightest lipstick, the sweetest fake smile, and present herself to any man with power if it might buy her a better future.
I know that was the role I was supposed to play.
But somehow, somewhere, the story changed.
And because it changed, he changed too.
The villain who was meant to lose himself in darkness found his way, for a brief and impossible moment, to me.
Maybe that was enough.
Maybe that was mercy.
Maybe that was tragedy.
Or maybe love was never as simple as the original plot claimed.
Sometimes I think stories lie.
They tell you the hero and heroine are destiny.
They tell you side characters exist only to make the leads shine brighter.
They tell you villains are born that way.
But I lived inside one of those stories.
And I know better.
I know that a neglected boy can become tender if someone teaches him how to be loved.
I know that even a man written to fall into darkness can still, somehow, in some timeline, hold out a ring with trembling fingers and ask if you’ll choose him.
I know that memory can be erased while feeling remains.
And I know this:
No matter which timeline he came from, Ethan Reed loved me.
That much, even the system could not fully delete.
So I stopped asking whether the ache in my heart belonged to grief, guilt, or a forgotten goodbye.
I stopped chasing the edges of vanished memories.
I just held on tighter to the man in front of me.
To the life we had fought for.
To the version of him who stayed.
And every time Ethan pulls me into his arms, presses his lips to my forehead, and asks in that low, soft voice if I still want him, I answer the same way.
Yes.
In this life.
In any life.
Yes.