Chapter 3

“You’re transferring all the shares your parents left you in their shipping company to Adrian? This is practically your entire inheritance!”

I felt calm about it. “My parents also left me a trust fund. It’s enough to cover my treatment. And there’s a house here they left me. I’ll give it to you to make up for this.”

“I’m… never coming back.”

“As for the shares, think of them as my way of thanking Adrian for taking care of me all these years. I caused him a lot of trouble when I didn’t know any better.”

Feelings were strange. Something that had once hurt so deeply could now leave me perfectly calm.

Suddenly, I remembered how devastated I had been by Adrian’s coldness six months earlier.

I remembered what he had said.

“Lily Hayes, can you have a little self-respect? You’re so damn annoying.”

At the time, those words had cut into my heart like a knife. Now, remembering them, I barely felt a thing.

Maybe this illness wasn’t only taking pieces of my memory. Maybe it was taking the feelings that had burned too fiercely, the pain I had thought I could never forget, and… the deep, forbidden attachment I had to Adrian.

I asked Julian, “His wedding is the day after tomorrow. He probably won’t want to see me there. Would you mind giving him this for me?”

The document transferring my shares and trust interests was the second wedding gift I had prepared.

Julian solemnly agreed.

After thanking him, I returned to the Blackwood estate’s guest wing.

I packed the few belongings I had left. All I wanted now was to see Adrian one last time.

But he was too busy preparing for the wedding with Vanessa and taking their wedding portraits.

When their wedding photographs were hung in the house, I was coughing so hard I thought I would cough up a lung.

The noise naturally drew Adrian’s attention.

Panicking, I shoved a handful of cough pills into my mouth.

But the instant he opened the guest wing’s door, I coughed up a mouthful of blood.

White pills scattered across the floor, mixed with red.

My heart lurched, and my face went pale.

When I was first diagnosed with lung cancer, I had imagined countless times how Adrian would react if he found out.

But since deciding to go to Iceland, I no longer wanted him to know.

He couldn’t cure me, after all. Knowing would only give him another problem.

I was desperately trying to think of an explanation.

But he curled his lips in a mocking smile. “I thought you’d changed. Turns out you’re still exactly the same. You haven’t learned a thing. You’re still pretending to be sick to get my sympathy.”

I froze for a moment, then smiled through the tears in my eyes. “That’s right, Adrian. I just wanted you to come see me.”

His expression grew darker. His gaze moved over the thin frame beneath my loose clothes, and he frowned.

“Stop saying things like that. I told you we need boundaries. And has this family ever deprived you of anything? Do you really need to make yourself look like this?”

He glanced around the guest wing. With most of my personal belongings packed away, it looked much emptier.

“And why is it so bare in here? There’s no life in this place.”

My heart gave a small, painful twist. I avoided his sharp gaze, my voice hoarse from coughing blood day and night.

“I have to move out eventually. Maybe you can use this place for storage.”

“Adrian, I hope your wedding goes beautifully tomorrow. I hope you and the woman you love have a happy life together.”