I Craved Crawfish, but He Fed It All to My Sister Chapter 08

I Craved Crawfish, but He Fed It All to My Sister Chapter 08

Three months later, I met Derek at a law firm.

It was the only meeting I agreed to.

He’d lost a lot of weight. His eyes were sunken, and his left hand was wrapped in gauze.

He didn’t come close. He just placed a manila envelope on the table.

Inside were road rescue records from ten years ago, a rural clinic registry, a missing persons notice, and a

yellowed photograph.

In the photo, I was seventeen, wrapped in a blanket, both legs bandaged.

On the bed beside me lay an unconscious teenage boy.

The boy was Derek.

Ten years ago, on a snowy night, I was traveling with a school volunteer team along a mountain road.

A car had slid into a snow-filled ravine.

The others went to find a signal. I wrapped my only coat around the injured boy and carried him on my back

through most of the night.

By dawn, we made it to a rural clinic.

My legs were badly frostbitten, and I collapsed with a high fever.

I never saw the boy’s face.

When I woke, my diary and the copper tag I’d picked up from the snow were both gone.

Local communications were down, and the paper records were later sealed away when the clinic was shut

down and consolidated.

The Sterling family had only advertised in the papers to find their son’s rescuer. Maren stole my diary and the

tag.

She memorized every detail in that diary, showed them the scar on her leg from an old fall, and successfully fooled the entire Sterling family.

All these years, she claimed it was frostbite.

But the registry didn’t lie. Female, approximately seventeen. Carried the injured party on foot to seek help.

The emergency contact listed was my father’s number.

The medical staff from back then recognized me in the photograph too.

Derek looked at the faint white frostbite scars along my legs, and his eyes slowly turned red.

“I had the wrong person.”

“For ten years, I repaid a life debt to a fraud.”

I closed the file. “So?”

He clearly hadn’t expected that response. “Is the reason you crushed our baby’s test results that you had the

wrong person?”

“No.”

“Is the reason you melted my ring that you had the wrong person?”

“No.”

“You forced glass down my throat. You locked me in that bathroom. You took my blood behind my back.”

“And now you want me to believe it was all because you had the wrong person?”

Derek’s lips moved. I didn’t let him speak.

“Who you mistook me for was never an excuse to hurt me.”

“I thought I owed her my life.”

“But you used my life to pay your debt.”

He went rigid. Several pages slipped from his hands. He bent down twice before he managed to gather them.

“Her leg injury was fake too.”

“After she stole the diary, she fell from the attic and hurt her knee.”

“The Sterlings arranged rehab for her. She recovered years ago.”

“Tell that to the police.”

“I already have,”

Derek pulled out a signed statement.

Inside, he admitted to unlawful confinement, violent assault, unauthorized testing of my blood samples, and providing false bail support for Maren.

“I’m not running from what I did. And I’m not saying any of this to make you come back.”

Finally, he didn’t mention compensation.

I looked at him. “Derek, the way you treated me before was real.”

“I really did love you.”

His eyes went red instantly. “But the baby isn’t coming back.”

“And I’m not coming back either.”

He sat there, motionless, for a long time.

Before I left, he took an old ring box from his pocket.

Inside was a plain silver band.

The camellia brooch had been melted down again and remade into a ring based on the old photos.

The scratch on the inside was gone.

In its place was a seam that couldn’t be hidden.

“It’s not the original anymore.”

Derek’s voice was hoarse.

“I know.”

I didn’t take it. “Things that have been melted can be reshaped.”

“But they’ll never go back to what they were.”