He Mistook Her for Me, Now He Regrets

Chapter 4

"Ethan."

My voice was hoarse and heavy with despair.

He tilted his head and looked at me.

"I hate you. Why don't you just die?"

No matter how cruelly Ethan had treated me over the past three years, I had never once told him I hated him.

I had believed I owed him.

My father had caused Margaret Reed's death, and I had humiliated Ethan by ending our engagement in front of everyone.

I had carried that guilt for years.

But now, I truly hated him.

The cemetery fell silent. The bodyguards lowered their heads, and even Vanessa didn't dare speak.

Then Ethan began to laugh.

The sound was so unsettling that everyone around us went still.

His eyes were bloodshot as he lifted my chin.

For a moment, I thought I saw tears glinting at the corners of his eyes.

He leaned in with one eyebrow raised, his expression vicious.

"You hate me? So what? I'm not going to die, Claire, and neither are you. We'll be stuck with each other for the rest of our lives. I'll never let you go."

I didn't argue. I simply lowered my eyes to the broken pieces in my hand.

His composure shattered. He started shouting again, apparently threatening Owen's life, but his words barely reached me.

But he couldn't stop what was coming.

'In two days, I'll be dead. He can't stop me.'

Then I thought of Owen Dawson.

'What will happen to him after I'm gone?'

I fell into a long dream.

In the dream, my father held me and said, "Claire, you'll always be Dad's most precious girl."

My mother smiled. "Claire, someday we'll find you a man who loves you more than anyone else in the world."

Owen came running to tell me that the neighborhood bully was picking on him again and asked me to stand up for him.

Everything changed on my 20th birthday.

My father had engineered the Caldwell family's bankruptcy, and the shock caused Margaret's fatal heart attack.

To convince my father I had turned against Ethan and keep Ethan alive, I broke off our engagement in public, broke one of his legs, and forced him to leave Crestmont.

I should have hated my father for stopping at nothing and destroying everything Ethan and I had.

Yet I couldn't hate him.

Thomas Dawson had always treated me as the center of his world. Before jumping to his death, he made one final call to Ethan and begged him to spare me.

My father stood on one side, the man I loved on the other.

I couldn't hate my father, but I had no right to keep loving Ethan. In the end, I turned all that hatred on myself.

As I slept, someone wiped the tears from the corners of my eyes. Warm arms slipped around me from behind and held me as though I might break.

A trembling whisper repeated near my ear.

"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry... Please don't hate me."

When I woke, Owen was beside me.

He had fallen asleep with his head resting beside my hand, his eyes swollen from crying.

The pampered boy he had once been had learned to hold back his tears.

I didn't want to wake him, so I gently stroked his hair.

At that moment, the hospital room door was kicked open.