Chapter 3
When I woke, rain was pouring outside.
Adrian and Vivian were gone.
I didn’t care where.
I took every last thing left in my room, stuffed it into bags, dragged it downstairs, and dumped all of it into the trash outside in the middle of the storm.
The sheets. The blankets. The pillows. The scraps of a life I had never truly wanted.
The rain hit the trash bags and washed over them in violent, muddy streams.
Good, I thought.
Let it all disappear.
Let there be no trace of me left in this house.
Afterward, I took a cab to the ocean.
The air smelled of wet salt and cold wind.
I took Serena’s phone out of my bag and switched it on for the first time in days.
It lit up instantly with missed calls and unread messages from Ethan.
Serena, why haven’t you come yet? Where are you? Why aren’t you answering? I’m giving you one last chance. Come to the villa now.
One accusation after another.
One command after another.
I read every word with a perfectly blank face.
Then I sent him the final call recording—the one from the night Serena died.
The one where she asked only to hear his voice before she jumped.
When the file finished sending, I threw the phone into the sea.
I wondered, briefly, what his face would look like when he listened to it.
Then I stopped caring.
Serena would never see his reaction.
And I wouldn’t live long enough to hear about it.
Games like this weren’t meant to be taken seriously.
The wind off the water cut through my clothes and chilled me to the bone.
I took out my own phone and posted one final message.
I bury myself in the sea. Scatter into green mountains. I will not enter the family record. I will not enter the family funeral hall. This is Candy Hale’s last word.
Then I called Adrian.
Maybe because people are weak at the very end. Maybe because no matter how badly someone hurt you, you still want one last answer from the person who marked you deepest.
He didn’t pick up.
Not once.
Just like Ethan hadn’t answered Serena.
I laughed under my breath, though it didn’t sound much like laughter.
Then I switched to video.
The camera faced me.
On the screen, my face was pale, hair blown wild by the ocean wind, eyes strangely calm.
“Adrian,” I said, “I came to the Hale family when I was three. That means we’ve known each other for eighteen years.”
My voice caught, but I kept going.
“When I was little, you always said you’d protect me. That you’d be my umbrella when the weather turned bad.”
“In high school, when boys wrote me love letters, you took people to school and blocked them in the hallway. You said no one was allowed to look at your sister.”
“You took me on carousels. You took me to Disney. You took me to fireworks shows.”
“All the romance a teenage girl could dream about, you gave it to me first. You were the one who filled my head with it.”
Tears blurred my vision, but I didn’t stop.
“Adrian, you were the one who started it. You gave me everything a girl could want, and then the second you found out I loved you, you turned cruel. You hated me. You looked down on me. You let people humiliate me over and over again. You said my love was disgusting. Dirty. Shameful.”
I drew in a shaking breath.
“But my love was honest.”
The tide rose and fell behind me.
The phone grew hot in my hand.
The red recording light kept blinking.
“Adrian, I didn’t get to choose the past. But now I do get to choose this.”
“From today on, there will be no more Candy Hale.”
“You’re free now.”
I ended the recording and sent him the video.
Then I tossed my phone onto the wet sand.
And stepped into the sea.
The first wave hit my knees.
The second hit my waist.
The third rose over my head.
Cold water filled everything.
Then there was nothing.
On the shore, my phone vibrated violently until a wave swept it away.
Far across the city, Adrian watched my video over and over again and tried to call me back until his hands shook.
At first he told himself it was another stunt.
Another dramatic scene. Another threat. Another manipulative game.
He called his assistant and barked, “Go to the beach. Bring her back.”
He told himself I was fine. That I was too afraid to die. That I would come home the second someone found me.
But when he got home and found my room stripped bare, when the housekeeper told him I had thrown away everything over the past several days, something in him gave way.
He called Ethan.
He asked if I was with Serena.
That was when Ethan told him Serena was dead.
And Adrian, hearing that, understood all at once that I had gone to the sea with a plan.
He went to the shore himself after that.
Search boats covered the water.
The current was rough.
There was no sign of me.
Only the last place the cameras caught me sitting. Only the video. Only the ocean.
And so he sat there for hours, staring at the waves, while the realization slowly carved itself into him.
I had really left.
Not just the house.
Not just the family.
His life.
Completely.
He had no body to bury. No grave to visit. No proof except absence.
And maybe that was the cruelest thing I could have done.
Because even in death, I had denied him closure.
I had become exactly what I asked to be.
Gone.