The Day He Learned the Truth, I Was Already Dead Chapter 07

The Day He Learned the Truth, I Was Already Dead Chapter 07

It was the cemetery manager. His voice turned heavy as he sighed, almost talking to himself.

“Poor girl,” he murmured. “Late-stage brain cancer, and then her identity got wiped for offending some big shot. She couldn’t even buy a burial plot. I don’t know how she’s holding up.”

Brandon had heard too many of my “tricks.” To him, this was just another performance, another attempt to force his attention.

He stared at the jewelry box in his hands for a long while, then gave a cold, mocking snort. “Tell her this won’t make me soften. It just makes me more disgusted. And tell her not to get so wrapped up in acting that she actually gets herself killed.”

He hung up. Then, like it was nothing, he tossed the wrapped diamond set to a beggar on the sidewalk.

Brandon couldn’t understand it. Sure, I’d fought kids at the orphanage, no one had ever disciplined me.

But he’d brought me home. He’d tried to be good to me, tried to give me the best, tried to give me security.

So why wouldn’t I change?

Why was it always Ava, always some new “incident,” always another lie?

Why did I keep “bullying” her in his mind?

The helplessness sank into him like lead. He sat in the Wilcox family chapel for a long time, recalling that before his parents passed, he had promised he would find the sister they’d lost.

He had done that. But he hadn’t turned me into the obedient daughter they’d wanted. In front of the cross, guilt gnawed at him, and he swore to himself he would “set me right.” He was determined to fix me, to teach me to become the good girl they’d expected.

Over the next few days, Brandon drafted what he thought was a perfect plan, step by step, for how he would “educate” Sylvia when he brought her back.

He nodded to himself, satisfied. He was just about to tell his assistant to go find me when his phone rang again.

This time it was the police. “Are you Sylvia Wilcox’s family? She passed away on a yacht due to illness. The body has been transferred to the morgue.”

An address popped onto his screen. Brandon stared at the number for a long moment.

It was real. No one at a precinct was going to “help Sylvia act.”

His nerves tightened until his whole body felt wired. He drove to the hospital like he was outrunning something, hands clenched white on the wheel.

The whole way there, he argued with himself. She lied all the time, this could still be fake. He kept telling himself not to panic, until he saw the body under the sheet.

The face was rotting, unrecognizable, but the bracelet at the throat was unmistakable—the one he’d given her.

In an instant, Brandon’s legs went weak. He dropped to his knees with a dull thud, staring up like a lost child. “No… no way.”

He turned to the staff at a loss, voice cracking with despair and obsession. “Sylvia hired you to do this, didn’t she? Tell me the truth, and I’ll pay you ten times whatever she did.”

However, no one answered. Every head stayed down.

Then a doctor broke the silence and held out a report. “This is the cause of death.”

“Late-stage brain cancer.”

“And… there are dozens of scars across her body.”

Brandon’s hands shook as he took the paper. When his eyes landed on the words “late-stage brain cancer,” something in him finally snapped. He folded over, gripping his head, sobbing into his palms.

Why?

Why had she developed brain cancer out of nowhere?

And the injuries… why were there so many?

He had paid those traffickers a fortune. They had promised they wouldn’t hurt Sylvia, that they’d only let her “taste hardship,” nothing more.

He hadn’t even brought her home yet. Thinking of that, the sobs he’d been choking back broke loose into raw, ugly sound, echoing through the cold room.

It sounded wrong, like grief scraping bone, like it could shatter my spirit. For some reason, I felt pain everywhere.

I hovered there, confused.

I was dead. Wasn’t he supposed to be happy?

Why was he crying for me? Didn’t he hate me most of all?

By morning, Brandon’s hair looked like it had aged overnight. He seemed older by a decade, hollowed out and drifting.

He held a funeral for me in a haze. After that, he collapsed completely. Day after day, he sat with the only photo he had of me, staring at it until his eyes went empty.

Sometimes he cried. Sometimes he laughed under his breath like he’d forgotten where he was. He looked, from the outside, like a man who’d gone insane.