Five Years a Secret, Now I Deny We Ever Met Chapter 18

Five Years a Secret, Now I Deny We Ever Met Chapter 18

“Chloe, are you insane?” Sebastian’s voice was twisted with shock. “We spent five years together. Our emails, all the Uffizi research in our shared cloud drive… all of it can prove it.”

“Do you have any evidence?” I asked calmly.

For five years, to maintain his image as the perfect, single heir, he had never allowed me to post a single trace of us on social media. All our photos, our travel records, our intimate emails, were stored in my private accounts.

And all of that so-called evidence had been wiped clean the night he told me he was getting engaged to Isabella.

I hadn’t even spared the cloud’s recycle bin.

“Sebastian,” I said, my voice flat, as if stating an objective fact, “we attended the same advanced seminar on Renaissance art history. That’s all. If my passion for academia led you to some misunderstanding, I apologize.”

His body swayed, as if his spine had been ripped out. Despair, like a cold tide, finally swallowed the last of the arrogance in his eyes.

With reddened eyes and a hoarse voice, he asked, “Just because I helped Isabella, for my family’s reputation, to fulfill an agreement… you’re going to erase me from your life, from our history, completely?”

Even now, he still thought he had only made a small strategic mistake.

He still saw himself as a tragic hero, bearing humiliation for a greater cause.

I looked at him and almost found it funny.

“Sebastian, since you chose to marry Isabella, then go take responsibility as a husband. All of New York society knows she is your fiancée. If you abandon her now, it will only make you and your family look like irresponsible fools.”

“But I don’t love her!” he cried out like a lost child.

I turned and placed my hand on the brass handle of the heavy study door, pausing.

I left him with one final piece of advice.

“Whether you love her or not doesn’t matter.”

“What matters is that this is the choice you made.”

When he chose to bolster his own position, to satisfy his ridiculous savior complex, and to treat our five years of love as a bargaining chip that could be sacrificed and traded at will, everything between us had already ended.

His regret and his tears were worthless to me now.

I pulled the door open. Brilliant sunlight flooded in, warm as an early taste of Florence.

Behind me lay the dead silence of an entire wealthy family.