Chapter 3

Laura Nie POV

Back at the villa, the house was as pitch-black as a dry well.

I didn't turn on the entryway light, relying on muscle memory in the dark to drop my bag onto the shoe console.

The splint on my right wrist knocked against the cabinet's brass handle, sending a sharp throb of pain through me that made me gasp, though I swallowed the groan back down.

This single-floor penthouse was massive; my solitary footsteps echoed across the hardwood.

Holding onto the handrail, I went up to the second-floor study.

Pulling open the bottom solid-wood drawer, I retrieved a blue velvet box from beneath a stack of documents.

Holding the box, I sat on the edge of the master bed, lifting the lid in the glow of the streetlight filtering through the window.

Inside lay a vintage mechanical watch.

That was from many years ago.

When Frank closed the studio's very first deal, after deducting the upfront pay for the workers, he was left with just a thin stack of cash in his pocket.

He dragged me along to browse department store counters all afternoon, finally buying an entry-level couple's watch set.

He slipped the one with scuffs along the casing onto his wrist right there on the spot, declaring that a man doing business needed a proper watch.

The matching women's watch was packed into the box and handed to me.

From that day on, the watch on Frank's wrist never came off.

Even later, when he upgraded to a Rolex, that old timepiece remained locked in the top tier of his office safe.

I took out the women's watch, grazing my thumb across the pristine, unscratched sapphire caseback.

I had once treated this watch as a beacon of hope.

Enshrined in a dark drawer for all these years.

Waiting for the day he might remember, so we could wear them together for a proper, decent dinner.

An identical pair of watches.

One person wore his as a lucky charm all the way to becoming a prominent figure, while the other let hers collect dust at the bottom of a drawer.

This was our ending; there was no need to confront him face-to-face about anything anymore.

Neither of us had anyone to lean on growing up.

Before he turned sixteen, Frank lived crammed in a storage room at his aunt's house.

For six years, I hauled slop buckets at my uncle's place in a remote town.

It was pouring rain the day we met at the labor market. With empty pockets, we leaned over the same damp plywood table, filling out job registration forms.

Later, that eighty-square-foot room became our nest.

When it poured outside, it drizzled indoors, and I placed basins on the floor to catch the drips.

Frank would hold up a torn sheet of plastic above my head, his own tank top soaked through on the left side.

During our harshest winter, Frank rode a beat-up electric scooter halfway across the city just to deliver blueprints.

When he returned in the dead of night, a thin frost dusted his eyelashes. Unzipping his down jacket, he pulled out a piping-hot bundle tucked against his chest.

Doughnuts.

Sniffling, he grinned, saying he had waited in line to buy them and kept them pressed against his bare skin the whole ride back so they wouldn't get cold.

I unwrapped one and took a bite, tears welling up from how hot it was, asking indistinctly if he had eaten yet.

Rubbing his chilblained knuckles, he shook his head vigorously. "Not hungry. You eat. It's all for you."

Back then, when he said he wasn't hungry, his eyes burned like fire.

Later, once the books turned a profit, he secretly saved his cigarette money for four whole months to buy that leather purse in the department store lobby—the one I had stopped to look at three times.

It wasn't a crazy expensive luxury brand, but when he pushed the paper bag into my arms, he puffed out his chest and said, "Laura, from now on, we won't have to envy what other people have."

Every single one of these moments was etched into my mind.

And then, more and more women began appearing around him.

At first, I didn't believe it. Whatever half-hearted excuse he offered, I took at face value.

Until late one night, when I caught a sharp, fruity-floral perfume on the collar of his discarded white dress shirt. He claimed clients dragged him to a club to entertain, and the hostess threw herself at him—he couldn't dodge in time.

I tossed the shirt into the washing machine that very night, without asking a single follow-up question.

After that, his phone calls grew shorter, his arrivals home grew later, and whenever he walked through the door, his phone was always placed face down on the table.

In my heart, I kept a running ledger of every single slight.

Once, I got up in the middle of the night to grab water from the kitchen. The side of the master bed beside me was stone cold.

In the corner of the living room, a faint glow from a screen reflected off the sofa. Frank was hunched over his phone, the corner of his lips curled into a boyish, smug grin—an expression I hadn't seen in years.

I stood leaning against the doorframe for two minutes, not disturbing him, and crept quietly back under the covers.