The Wife He Tried To Erase Chapter 14
On a winter night in Zurich, Emilia’s apartment was located in the old town.
Zachary escorted her downstairs, holding an umbrella for her. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go up with you? That lunatic is still nearby.”
“No need.” Emilia smiled, her face a bit pale, but her gaze was resolute.
“Zachary, thank you for taking care of me this past year. But I have to face it myself, I’m not afraid of him.”
Zachary sighed and rubbed the top of her head. “Alright, call me anytime if you need anything.”
Watching Zachary’s car drive away, Emilia turned around and swiped her card to enter the building.
Just as the unit door opened, a dark figure darted out from the shadows nearby.
“Emmy…”
Carrying a chill, Nicholas blocked the gap of the door just as it was about to close.
He was drenched, his expensive handmade suit wrinkled and clinging to his body, water still dripping from his hair.
Emilia instinctively stepped back, her hand pressed against the alarm.
“Don’t call the police, I won’t go in.”
Nicholas’s voice was hoarse, tinged with the sound of a severe cold. He clung desperately to the doorframe, his fingers turning white from the force. “I just want to say a few words to you. I’ll leave right after, I promise.”
Emilia looked at him.
The man who once stood so high above now begged her with eyes so humble they seemed to sink into the dust.
“What do you want to say? How you drove me mad for Valentina? Or how you stopped my mother’s medication?”
Emilia’s tone was calm, but every word struck deep.
“No… I didn’t know stopping the medication would…”
Nicholas tried anxiously to explain, stepping forward, instinctively reaching for her hand.
“Emmy, trust me just this once…”
The moment his fingertips touched the back of Emilia’s hand.
Suddenly, everything changed.
Emilia reacted as if burned by a red-hot iron, violently shaking off his hand, her whole body trembling.
“Don’t touch me!”
She screamed, her face turning deathly pale in an instant, a wave of nausea surging up from her stomach.
“Ugh—”
Emilia leaned against the wall, bending over as she dry-heaved violently.
It was a deep, physiological disgust etched into her bones, a conditioned reflex from those one hundred electric shocks.
Whenever she got close to him, whenever she smelled his scent, her body would automatically sound the alarm.
“Emmy!”
Nicholas was terrified, wanting to help her but afraid to touch her, frozen in place, helpless.
“What’s wrong? Are you feeling unwell?”
“Go… go away!”
Emilia vomited as she retreated, tears streaming down her face from the intense physical reaction.
“Don’t come near me… dirty… too dirty…”
“Nicholas, you truly disgust me.”
These words were harsher than any slap.
Nicholas stood in the rain as if struck by lightning, his face pale and rigid.
He looked at his hand suspended in midair, then at Emilia curled up in the corner, trembling.
So, her rejection of him had reached this level.
She didn’t even need to speak; her body had already made the choice for her.
At that moment, a car screeched to a halt by the roadside.
Zachary rushed out, shoved Nicholas aside, wrapped Emilia in his arms, and turned to Nicholas, shouting angrily, “Are you even human?! The doctor said you’re her allergen! Will you only be satisfied when you drive her to death?”
Nicholas staggered back two steps, his back hitting the cold wall.
“Am I… the allergen?” he thought.
“Am I the one who drove her to death?”
The rain poured harder, icy water sliding down his cheeks, indistinguishable from tears.
“I didn’t mean to drive her…” Nicholas muttered to himself.
“I just want to make amends, I just want to give her my life…”
“Who wants your life!”
Emilia caught her breath in Zachary’s arms, raised her head, her face streaked with tears but her gaze sharp as a blade.
She pushed Zachary away, stood shakily upright, and pointed at the disheveled man before her.
“Nicholas, do you think you look deeply affectionate right now?”
“You come here, standing in the rain, waiting downstairs for me, pretending to have repented. Who are you trying to move? Yourself?”
Nicholas opened his mouth, his voice broken. “Emmy, I am sincere…”
“Sincere?”
Emilia let out a derisive laugh, full of desolation.
“Your sincerity was accompanying Valentina to pick out dresses while I screamed on the operating table?”
“Your sincerity was pulling out my mother’s oxygen tube to vent for Valentina when I begged you to save her?”
“Your sincerity was pulling out my mother’s oxygen tube to vent for Valentina when I begged you to save her?”
“Nicholas, belated affection is worth less than grass.”
She took a deep breath, her gaze turning icy cold, as if she were looking at a pile of garbage.
“The way you look now, like a dog wagging its tail and begging for pity, only makes me feel even more nauseated.”
He looked at Emilia, at the woman he loved to his very core yet destroyed with his own hands.
Suddenly, his knees bent.
With a heavy thud.
Those knees, which had never bent for anyone, crashed onto the muddy ground.
Nicholas knelt in the rain, raising his head.
“Emmy…”
His voice was hoarse, mixed with the taste of blood.
“I know I’m dirty, I won’t touch you.”
“I kneel here to atone, I don’t ask for your forgiveness, I only ask you… don’t drive me away, let me look at you from afar, just once, even if it’s only once…”
“Mr. Gallagher!”
Elroy ran over with an umbrella, shocked to the core by what he saw.
Elroy ran over with an umbrella, shocked to the core by what he saw.
“What are you doing! You still have a fever! Get up!”
Nicholas pushed away Elroy’s umbrella, stubbornly kneeling in place, his gaze locked on Emilia.
He was gambling.
Gambling that she might still have a shred of compassion.
However, Emilia simply looked at him quietly, her gaze colder than the rain of this winter night.
“Nicholas, even if you die kneeling here, I won’t feel a bit of pity.”
She turned away, her voice devoid of any warmth, slamming into Nicholas’s heart with the sound of the closing door.
“Because the dead feel nothing.”
“And the Nicholas in my heart died completely at the hundredth electric shock.”
The door closed with a thunderous bang.
All light and warmth were shut inside.
He laughed, a laugh both fierce and mad.
“Dead, huh…”
“It’s alright, Emmy.”
“As long as you’re alive, even as a ghost, I’ll haunt you.”