I Cared For Him Twenty Years, Only For His Love Letters To Belong To Another Girl Chapter 01

I Cared For Him Twenty Years, Only For His Love Letters To Belong To Another Girl Chapter 01

My boyfriend Thorne Whitmore was a physics prodigy with emotional dysfunction. After he died, he left behind a hundred love letters that went viral worldwide.

At first, everyone assumed those letters were written to me—his girlfriend who’d stayed by his side and cared for him for twenty years without complaint.

But then people realized every single letter was addressed to someone named Vivian Prescott.

I went from “the woman behind the genius” to “the genius’s free housekeeper.”

The internet compared photos of my swollen joints and bent, exhausted body to Vivian’s slim fingers and flawless, untouched face.

They tore me apart. By the end, I felt like nothing.

I sat staring at stack after stack of letters, unable to believe he hadn’t left me a single word. That’s when Vivian showed up at my door with a crew of reporters, eyes red and glistening.

“Thorne left me the house. Everything. I just want to be somewhere that still has him in it. I hope you understand.”

I was thrown out of the home I’d lived in for twenty years with nothing to my name. Years of overwork had already wrecked my health, and it wasn’t long before I died alone.

My whole life had revolved around Thorne Whitmore. No kids. No friends. No one to even notice when I was gone.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back to the first day I met him.

He’d wet his pants in front of everyone and sat hunched in the corner with his head down.

In my last life, everyone was disgusted by him. No one would sit next to him. I was the one who grabbed tissues and wiped the urine off the floor around him, bit by bit.

But this time, before I could even react, a teenage Vivian Prescott lunged forward. She got there before I could and asked Thorne if he’d be her friend.

I let out a small smile. So Vivian had come back too.

In that case, she can be the one to wait on him for decades and age into a tired old woman before your time.

***

Vivian became Thorne’s deskmate. And just like that, everyone turned on her.

The boy behind her dropped a cockroach down the back of her shirt. She went white as a sheet.

Nobody expected Thorne to snap. He slammed the kid’s desk over, grabbed the cockroach off Vivian and shoved it back at the kid.

The two of them went at it on the floor. I just stood there and watched.

In my last life, someone had dropped a cockroach on me too. When I screamed, Thorne just shot me a look. Like I was the one being annoying.

The rest of the class laughed. They called me a traitor for siding with the “freak,” and said people like me got what we deserved.

After that, the bullying only got worse. I’d naively believed Thorne and I were on the same side.

But he acted like I didn’t exist. He wouldn’t even move his stuff off my side of the desk, so I was stuck hunched over a tiny sliver of space just to write.

I was trapped against the wall, and the students behind me blocked my way out.. I begged Thorne to let me out, but he never responded.

I was terrified I wouldn’t make it to the bathroom in time. So I just stopped drinking water. For all the years of high school.

And now? Thorne, the boy who lived in his own world, had moved his things aside for Vivian without being asked.

He’d even gotten into a physical fight for her.

Everything I had spent three years trying to earn from him, Vivian received effortlessly.

Vivian slid a piece of fruit candy across the desk toward Thorne with a grateful smile, patting his head like he was a child.

“Thank you for standing up for me. You’re not as scary as everyone says.”

“They’re missing out.”

Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw Thorne’s gaze drift over to me for a split second before sliding away.

Vivian was naive. Being Thorne’s deskmate came with a lot more than she bargained for.

By noon, the temperature rose, and Thorne’s body odor became noticeable. Vivian had already dry-heaved twice and scooted her chair away a few times.

By the time half her chair was in the aisle, she forced a smile and asked him gently, “Would you like to go to the bathroom with me and wash up?”

Besides his emotional dysfunction, Thorne also walked with a limp.

That’s why he always arrived first and left last. He never got up from his seat unless absolutely necessary.

In my last life, to protect his dignity, I told everyone my family worked at a fish market and the smell came from me.

Even when the stench made me nauseous, I swallowed it down and never once gagged.

Unlike me, Vivian’s gagging got the whole class staring. She didn’t seem to notice, though. She just kept playing patient while she tried to nudge Thorne.

She assumed that since he liked her, he’d do whatever she said.

But Thorne just kept shaking his head, like that was the only motion he knew how to make.

Vivian’s patience started to fray. “Thorne, I’m only saying this because I care. You need to shower.”

Thorne’s lips pressed into a hard line. That was the expression he wore when his irritation hit its peak.

I’d only seen that look once before—the time he lost control and injured my arm badly. The wound got infected and took over a month to heal.

Vivian kept rambling on.

To my surprise, Thorne didn’t bite her. Instead, he hurt himself with a small knife.

My hand instinctively moved to where the old scar from my last life had been. The skin there was smooth and unmarked now. So Thorne could control himself after all.

I stopped watching the blood drip down his arm and turned back to chatting with the new friend I’d made.

This time, I was never going to build my life around Thorne Whitmore again.