The Fiancée He Forgot Chapter 08
I turned and walked into the apartment building.
The security door closed behind me with a dull thunk.
I didn’t look back to see his face.
I didn’t need to. And I didn’t want to.
The elevator rose slowly. I watched the floor numbers tick up, and inside I was calmer than I’d ever been.
So this is what it means to truly let someone go—not screaming matches, not tearful accusations, but a quiet evening when, faced with him trying to win you back, you realize you don’t have the energy left to even be angry.
The next morning when I went to the lab, the street was empty.
The doorman handed me a paper bag. Inside was the box Ethan had been carrying around for days, and a half-open bouquet of white roses.
There was a card tucked into the bouquet. Four words: One last time.
I stood there holding the bag for a moment.
I opened the box. The glittering Minnie earrings lay inside, like a piece of old time perfectly preserved.
I set them, along with the flowers, on the bench in the building’s common lounge.
A little while later, a blonde girl passed by, spotted the earrings, and her eyes lit up.
She glanced up at me shyly.
I smiled. “Go ahead. Take them.”
She picked them up carefully and ran off, skipping into the sunlight at the corner.
That was the last object between Ethan and me that had anything to do with love.
Later, news of Ethan and Claire trickled in from time to time.
I heard Ethan became a different person after coming back east.
The Whitmores fretted themselves ragged, arranging dinner after dinner with matches they considered suitable.
Claire, naturally, was the top prospect.
Two well-matched families, childhood sweethearts, both sets of parents thought it was a match made in heaven.
But Ethan turned them all down.
He took over the family’s Whitmore Biotech.
Once a leader in East Coast biotech, the company had been slow to react to the rise of gene editing, mRNA therapies, and AI-driven drug discovery. Its market share was eaten away by newer companies.
The century-old family firm that had once shaped the industry began to slide.
That was when the Whitmores remembered me and began to regret.
If they’d only held on to their would-be daughter-in-law with her top-tier research credentials, maybe they’d still be riding the wave. Maybe the company could have climbed to another level.
Claire had cut ties with Ethan.
Maybe because I’d left. Maybe because Ethan refused every match she and their families had lined up.
Her parents sent her abroad for an MBA. In Europe she met the well-bred son of a banking family. They married, had children, settled into a respectable house in the London suburbs.
As if the past had all been packed away, as if none of it had ever happened.
Years later, a research project I led on mRNA vaccine delivery systems achieved an internationally recognized breakthrough, and was awarded the Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award.
That same year I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences—one of the youngest members ever in my field.
At an awards banquet in Washington, D.C., I ran into Ethan and Claire again.
Ethan had lost a lot of weight. His eyes were sunken, his cheekbones sharp.
He wore a dark grey suit, tie knotted perfectly, but the whole of him carried an air of exhaustion, as if life had worn all his edges smooth.
He stood at the edge of the crowd, holding a glass of champagne he barely touched, his gaze flicking toward me and then away, never meeting my eyes.
Claire had changed too.
She wore a champagne-colored dress, her hair up, makeup impeccable, but her eyes had lost their spark.
She wasn’t the flashy, confident girl I remembered. She stood quietly in a corner, like a flower that had wilted.
The two of them stayed apart. Not a word between them. Not so much as a glance.