"It doesn’t matter what you want. From now on, we’re no longer a couple," Ethan said without a care.
"Wait! Why are you breaking up with me so suddenly? What happened? What is going on?" I cried out in my desperation.
I couldn’t understand him at all. What brought this on so suddenly? Yesterday, everything was still normal. Ethan didn’t reply. It was like he didn’t have anything more to say. However, I had a lot more to say.
"Did I do something wrong?" I asked in confusion.
Ethan looked at me with blank eyes as if he didn’t know what I was talking about. No words escaped his lips, and the room was dead silent save for the sound of the storm raging outside. This wasn’t the time for me to laze around in bed any longer, so I stood up and approached him.
"Ethan, please don’t break up with me..." I pleaded as I burst into tears.
I clutched at his forearm with my hands tightly, afraid that he would turn and leave. I’ll die if he leaves. I can’t imagine a life without him. Whenever I imagine a life without Ethan in it, it was like the walls of my small world would crack and come tumbling down on top of me. My world would collapse, and I would be crushed underneath it all.
Ethan turned and glanced down wordlessly at my hands that were on his arm. He cocked his head to the side as if in confusion and I wondered what he was seeing and hearing. His hand covered mine and slowly, he removed my hands from his arm. While still holding my hands in his larger one, he looked at me.
His green eyes were cold and void of emotions, but his voice was gentle and kind when he finally spoke.
"This is all for you, Lisa. Our dream world has to end now," Ethan told me softly.
I didn’t understand a word that he said, and I didn’t want to understand it. All I knew was that I couldn’t let Ethan leave this room. If he did, he would disappear and never come back.
"Ethan! Don’t go...please..." I begged him desperately.
...
**Back to the Present**
Even now when I held Ethan in my arms, I had to admit that I still didn’t fully understand him. What was clear was that Ethan knew a side of my father that I never got to know. When he was young, my father must have taken care of him as the next heir of Silva when he was growing up. I wondered what my father was like in those days and what Ethan saw in him. What kind of father was Jack to Ethan?
To me, my father was a loving and very ordinary man. He was a normal man with a common job, a common business, a common family, and common hobbies. Nothing about him stood out or attracted anyone’s attention. Looking back on it now, perhaps he had intentionally chosen to live that way to stay under the radar. I couldn’t help but wonder if the father that I knew wasn’t the real him at all.
"That night that you broke up with me. What happened? Where did you go?" I asked in a hushed whisper.
Ethan pulled himself away from my embrace and looked straight at me.
"I always thought that Jack’s death was suspicious, so I spent a lot of time investigating. The more I looked into it, the further the truth slipped away from me. It wasn’t long before I realized that a greater force was trying to keep the truth hidden. When you’re the next heir of Silva, there’s not that many greater forces than you.
Naturally, I suspected the head of Torex and then my own father, the head of Silva," Ethan said as his face darkened.
"I guess you discovered the truth," I said simply.
"I did. I found the truth and I made my father admit to it. After killing my parents, I came back to see you for the last time," Ethan said and there was a peaceful and resigned look on his face.
"Why did you decide to leave me?" I asked. Not that it mattered now but I still wanted to know.
He didn’t leave me just because his father killed my father, right? It didn’t make any sense.
--To be continued...