I Died In His Arms Now I’ll Marry Another Chapter 20
Callum would never forget that day.
He had returned home with a border medal, thinking that at last, he might earn a word of approval from his father.
Instead, his father, Frederick, slapped him hard across the face.
“You went to the front lines behind our backs. Do you have any idea how many times your mother thought you were already dead?”
Callum had seen war, yet he had never felt a wound as deep as the one that opened in that moment.
He drove out of the house in a rage, swearing he would never come back and never call Frederick “father” again.
It was the decision he regretted most in his life.
A blizzard sealed off the mountain roads. Callum’s car skidded on a sharp bend. Frederick, who had come after him, dragged him from the crushed vehicle—only to fall from the cliff himself.
Callum’s right leg was shattered. His father never came back.
After the funeral, Callum went to Summit Ridge alone.
He stood at the edge of the cliff, looking down at the mist-shrouded valley below, and thought he might as well jump.
Just as he was about to step forward, a small hand tugged at the hem of his coat.
He thought the girl with the unevenly hacked-off hair was going to try to stop him.
Instead, I pointed at the firewood basket on my back and asked, “Can you help me carry this back?”
“I’m busy jumping off a cliff. Find someone else.”
“There is no one else here. Can’t you stay alive a little longer, help me carry this back, and then die?”
We glared at each other.
In the end, Callum still used his temporary brace to drag the wood back to the storage shed behind the school for me.
He set it down and started to leave, but I grabbed him again.
“Can you split it for me, too?”
Callum laughed in disbelief.
“No.”
“But I’m really hungry. I don’t have the strength.”
In the end, he still picked up the axe.
I sat on a little stool beside him, gnawing on a frost-bitten apple.
He frowned. “Is that all you eat?”
Afraid he would take it, I immediately stuffed the rest into my mouth.
“Not every day. I had to search in the snow for a long time to find it.”
Callum went to his car and brought back the snacks and energy bars his mother had packed for him.
As I ate until my cheeks puffed out, I said enviously, “Your mother is really good to you.”
“And yours?”
“She’s in the capital. I broke the piano, so she shaved my head and sent me here. She said she didn’t want me anymore.”
I said it very calmly.
But Callum couldn’t comprehend what kind of mother could be cruel enough to throw her own daughter into a place like this.
The harshest punishment he had ever received was that one slap from his father.