Chapter 8
I waited until Serena left and the room was quiet.
Then I called his name.
“Adrian.”
He closed the laptop immediately and looked up.
I took a breath.
“You know I’m not the original Candy, don’t you?”
His whole body went still.
For a long moment, he said nothing at all.
Then, finally, he nodded.
“Yes.”
“If you know that,” I asked, “why are you still doing this? You know I don’t love you.”
He stood up slowly.
His voice when it came was unsteady.
“No. That’s not true. You do. You said you would always—”
I cut him off gently.
“That wasn’t me.”
The silence that followed was terrible.
“Maybe we have the same face,” I said. “Maybe we share the same name. But I am not the person who loved you.”
He looked like I had reached into his chest and twisted.
“You are her,” he said, but even he didn’t sound convinced.
I shook my head.
“If you truly loved the original Candy, then chasing me like this is cruel to both of us. You’re not honoring her. You’re trying to turn me into a replacement.”
His eyes reddened.
I kept going anyway.
“Maybe you regret it. Maybe you really do. Maybe you finally understand how badly you hurt her. But that still doesn’t make me yours.”
He sank back down onto the couch without a word.
I lay back against the pillows, exhausted.
Neither of us spoke again for a long time.
But I saw the tears later.
Not directly.
Only in the dim glass of the hospital window when he turned his face away.
After I was discharged, I quit the advertising company and found a less stressful job.
Life slowly returned to something simple again.
Adrian never appeared in front of me after that conversation.
The system told me he still watched from afar. That he asked after me. That he knew where I lived and worked.
But distance, at least, was something I could live with.
So long as he stayed away, I could pretend it didn’t matter.
Three years passed.
In those three years, Noah recovered well.
The orphanage got its repairs, all through anonymous funding arranged carefully and slowly.
Serena’s life became its own kind of chaos, though a brighter one.
Yufei stayed.
Not in the dramatic, confession-under-fireworks kind of way.
Just steadily.
Quietly.
He was there.
If Serena burned hot and loud, Yufei was the opposite—gentle, watchful, determined in small things.
Watching them together felt like watching someone learn a language she never expected to understand.
As for me, life remained quiet.
Then one day, out of nowhere, I got a text from an unknown number.
Candy. I’m leaving. I hope your world is kind to you. — Adrian
I stared at it for a long time.
Serena leaned over and read it too.
“I thought they would’ve gone back sooner,” she muttered.
I smiled faintly, but the feeling behind it was complicated.
I didn’t know exactly what I felt toward Adrian anymore.
Not love. Not hatred either.
Maybe something like sorrow without ownership.
The system’s voice broke into our heads one last time.
I’m leaving too.
Serena and I both went still.
“So that’s it?” I asked. “You’re going now?”
“Yes. I should have left when you returned to this world. But Heaven made an agreement with the male leads. I stayed an extra three years.”
Serena leaned back and crossed her arms.
“What agreement?”
“If the male leads successfully won you over within three years, they could stay. If they failed, their memories would be erased and they would be returned.”
I let that settle.
For someone who carried precious memories, losing them might be a punishment worse than death.
“What happens to them now?” I asked quietly.
The system answered at once.
“The original novel world will restart. The real Candy and Serena of that world will be reborn with memories of their past lives. It is both Heaven’s compensation to them and punishment for the male leads. What comes after will be determined by the characters themselves.”
I closed my eyes for a second.
That really was probably the best ending.
The real girls would get another chance.
And Adrian and Ethan would have to live through a world where love was no longer guaranteed to them by fate.
“Goodbye,” I told the system.
“Goodbye,” Serena echoed.
The voice softened, just a little.
“Goodbye, hosts.”
And then it was gone.