The Night He Chose Her, I Chose My Revenge Chapter 21

The Night He Chose Her, I Chose My Revenge Chapter 21

The plane landed smoothly on a private airstrip in Austin.

The stairs lowered, and the first thing I saw was them.

Five years had passed. There were more lines on my parents’ faces.

The moment I stepped onto the tarmac, my mother rushed over and held me, tears streaming down her face.

“My baby, what have you been through?” she sobbed, her hand stroking my back as if to smooth away invisible wounds. “How could they treat you like this?”

My father stood to the side, his own emotions barely in check. He just patted my shoulder, his touch firm and steady.

“You’re home, Elara. That’s what matters.”

Later, Liam told me that Dad went to the shooting range that afternoon and fired three full boxes of ammunition, until the paper target was shredded to pieces.

My room was exactly as I had left it.

On the design table, the unfinished model of a futuristic city stood quietly, as if no time had passed at all.

Mom followed me in. “When we missed you,” she said softly, “we would come in here and clean. We pretended you were coming home tomorrow.”

My nose stung.

Sunlight spilled across the bookshelf, illuminating the books on urban design that had once been my entire world.

For one intense moment, I had the illusion that I had never loved Julian, had never left Austin.

That the past five years had been nothing but one long, cold nightmare.

I should have been here all along, finishing my degree, becoming an architect, living the life I was meant to live.

At last, the tears came.

I covered my face and crouched on the floor, five years of suppressed grief and pain bursting out of me in a single, ragged sob.

Mom didn’t speak. She just came over and held me, patting my back again and again, just like she had when I’d fallen out of a tree at five years old.