I Begged The Real Heiress To Take My Life Away Chapter 07

I Begged The Real Heiress To Take My Life Away Chapter 07

“I can’t keep up with you.”

“I don’t want to try anymore, either.”

He couldn’t get another word out.

Right then, his phone rang.

I couldn’t hear the other end, but Sebastian’s expression turned colder by the second.

He hung up and looked at me.

“Josie’s at the office.”

I blinked. “That’s good news.”

“She took the merger proposal Mom spent six months preparing and rewrote it into a pitch for entering the metaverse funeral services market.”

I said nothing at all.

Sebastian closed his eyes briefly.

“The board is losing their minds right now.”

I said quietly, “I mean, that’s a pretty forward-thinking direction.”

He said, flat and cold:

“Mom wants you back.”

“Now.”

I panicked.

“What good would I even be? I don’t know the first thing about mergers.”

Sebastian looked at me.

“You can calm her down.”

I panicked harder.

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because when she sees you, she feels like the Sterling family hasn’t completely lost its mind yet.”

I said nothing.

Thanks.

I’d rather have gotten no review at all.

By the time Sebastian dragged me back to the Sterling house, Josie was already in a standoff with Eleanor in

the living room.

She had on the white suit I used to be terrified of wearing, her hair combed without a single strand out of

place.

Gorgeous. Genuinely gorgeous.

And genuinely falling apart.

Eleanor slapped a stack of documents down on the table.

“Josie, do you have any idea how much capital this proposal involves?”

Josie’s eyes were red.

“I just wanted to prove I could do it!”

“I’m your actual biological daughter.”

“I’m a hundred times better than Daisy Sterling.”

“Why does she get eighteen years in this family doing nothing at all, and you all just tolerate it?”

I caught that sentence the second I walked in and quietly started backing out the door.

Sebastian grabbed the back of my collar.

“Get in there.”

I lowered my voice.

“Bro, I will die on that battlefield.”

“You’ve died plenty of times already. You’ve got experience.”

My own brother.

Ex-brother, I mean.

Eleanor spotted me, and her brow furrowed.

“Daisy Sterling, why are you standing in the doorway?”

I straightened up instantly.

“Reporting for duty, Mrs. Sterling. Just passing through.”

Josie’s eyes turned razor-sharp the moment she saw me.

“Why’d you come back?”

“Didn’t you love that little diner so much?”

I raised a hand.

“I do, actually.”

“They dragged me back here.”

Sebastian released my collar and said mildly, “Please, go on in.”

I shot him a look.

“You call that being polite? You handled me like a sack of rice.”

Josie let out a cold laugh.

“Playing the innocent act again?”

“Daisy Sterling, did you already know I was going to mess up?”

“You warned me about all those ridiculous house rules on purpose, just to scare me and set me up to

embarrass myself!”

I was truly out of arguments.

“Sis.”

“I warned you about the five a.m. lesson because it’s a real lesson.”

“I warned you my brother quizzes people on the news because he genuinely does.”

“I warned you that Newton looks down on people because that dog really is a snob.”

Newton, sprawled on the rug, lifted his head and glanced at me.

Then turned it right back away.

See.

Still looking down on me.

Josie pointed at me, her voice shaking.

“Stop acting!”

“You’ve clearly been living it up this whole time at the Sterling house!”

“Do you have any idea what my life’s been like these past years?”

“Up at four a.m. kneading dough, hands cracked open in winter, coming home from school just to help close

up the shop.”

“No designer clothes. No driver. No private tutors.”

“I got to first in the entire district all on my own.”

“So why does someone as useless as you get’to keep my life?”

The living room went silent.

This time, I didn’t try to joke my way through it.

Because what she was saying was true.

She’d suffered.

She’d been wronged.

She had every right to be furious.

But something in my own chest ached too.

I looked at her and said quietly:

“Josie, do you think I was happy at the Sterling house?”

She scoffed.

“Weren’t you?”

“Mansion. Couture. A black card in your pocket, and you’re still complaining?”

I let out a small laugh.

“When I was seven, I got put on time-out backstage at a gala for three hours straight because I couldn’t recite

an English speech.”

“My heels tore up my feet, and I didn’t dare take them off.” ·

“Because my mother told me a Sterling daughter doesn’t lose composure in public.”

Something flickered across Eleanor’s face.

I kept going.

“When I was nine, I scored a sixty-two on a math test.”

“My father taped the test to the study door so I’d see it every single time I walked past, to remind myself how

far I still was from good enough.”

Weston sat on the couch, his fingers going stiff.

“When I was eleven, Sebastian took me to a youth finance forum.”

“A speaker on stage asked me what compound interest was.”

“I said it was interest that lived in a gated compound.”

“The whole room laughed.”

“When we got home, my brother made me copy out an entire financial dictionary by hand.”

Something moved in Sebastian’s throat.

“I wasn’t trying to…”

I didn’t look at him.

“When I was thirteen, I loved drawing comics.”

“I drew a monster that ate money.”

“My mom called it low-class.”

“My dad called it a waste of time.”

“My brother said the composition made no sense.”

“The next day, every comic I owned was gone.”

Eleanor finally spoke.

“That’s because your finals were coming up.”

I nodded.

“Right.”

“You always had a reason.”

“My grades were bad, so I couldn’t play.”

“My posture was bad, so I couldn’t lie down and rest.”

“I was slow, so I had to practice more.”

“I wasn’t articulate, so I had to talk less.”

I turned to Josie.

“You say I took your life.”

“I admit it.”

“If I could choose, I’d wish we’d never been switched at birth eighteen years ago, too.”

“You’d have come home to be the brilliant Sterling daughter.”

“I’d be at the diner kneading dough, running the register, eating sausage biscuits.”

“You think I stole your wealth.”

“But I also got stuffed into a shell that never fit me. Not for one single day of those eighteen years.”