Chapter 10
If I had to sum up the whole thing, it would be simple.
My best friend and I were dragged into a cruel story, used as stand-ins for two doomed girls, and told to love men who only learned our worth after losing us.
So we left.
That’s the heart of it.
Not forgiveness. Not fate. Not grand romance.
Leaving.
Serena chose first.
She chose in the most violent, heartbreaking way possible inside that world, and I carried her to the edge of the river and let her go.
Then I chose too.
I walked into the sea and closed that story behind me.
Back in the real world, we got another chance.
Not because the world was kind. Not because men changed fast enough. Not because Heaven apologized properly.
We got another chance because we took it.
We held onto each other. We held onto home. We held onto the children who needed us and the lives waiting for us outside the script.
The men followed.
Of course they did.
Men like that always mistake regret for devotion.
But regret is not love. And being late is not proof of depth.
The original girls in that world deserved better.
We did too.
Maybe that’s what I’ve learned most clearly through all of this.
Love, if it’s real, doesn’t need captivity. Doesn’t need obedience. Doesn’t arrive only after destruction.
And if you have to die just to make someone notice your pain, then whatever they feel for you was never worthy of your life in the first place.
These days, when I visit the orphanage and see Noah running around with a little scar and a huge smile, when I watch Serena pretend she isn’t soft while Yufei quietly hands her the things she forgot, when I walk home under streetlights with no one tracking my phone and no one waiting to command where I go next, I feel something I once thought only existed in fantasies.
Peace.
Real peace.
Not the kind promised by control. Not the kind begged for inside a cage.
The kind you build yourself out of ordinary days and honest choices.
Sometimes I still hear Serena’s voice from that first terrible phone call.
Candy, I’ll wait for you in the next world.
She did.
And I made it.
Not just to the next world.
To the rest of my life.
And that, in the end, is the only ending I wanted.
Not tragedy.
Not reunion with the wrong people.
Not being remembered by men who came too late.
Just this:
My best friend alive. My name my own. My future unwritten by anyone but me.
That is enough.
More than enough.
And if somewhere, in some other world, two men wake up beside the consequences of their own choices and finally understand what they lost, then good.
Let them.
We already moved on.