On Graduation Day, I Received a Cry for Help from Ten Years Ahead Chapter 10

On Graduation Day, I Received a Cry for Help from Ten Years Ahead Chapter 10

My mother finally regretted it.

But it was too late.

I never went back to see her.

Later, I heard she developed Alzheimer’s. There were many things she could no longer remember.

Through social workers and lawyers, I arranged for her to enter a memory–care facility and

transferred the fees by the year. But I did not visit her. For both of us, never seeing each other

again was already the best ending.

Later, the people at the facility told me she had forgotten many things. She forgot her own name.

She forgot where home was. She forgot how to eat and how to dress.

Only one question remained.

Every day, she asked it again and again. She grabbed every person who passed by, her eyes vacant

and stubborn.

“Do you know where my Liv is?”

Until the day she died, she never saw me again. Before the end, she briefly remembered everything. When her tears fell, she closed her eyes and never woke again.

That day at the hospital, when she ran after me and called my name, had become the last time she ever saw her daughter. If she had asked me a few more questions that day, or looked at me a little longer, perhaps that final meeting would not have become the regret she carried to the grave.

Later, at a client dinner, Ethan heard a client slap the table and say, “Why is my business doing better and better? Because I respect my wife. Back when I was working day labor, framing houses,

she was right there with me.”

Everyone at the table laughed. Ethan sat in the corner with a glass of wine and did not move for a long time. He tilted his head back and swallowed a large mouthful. The liquor was too strong. He choked and coughed several times, redness slowly spreading into his eyes.

Five years later, I expanded my father’s company, and our business began entering the West Coast market. More and more companies lined up, hoping to work with me. At an international business summit in Chicago, I stood onstage and gave a presentation. A few hundred people sat below.

Ethan sat in the last row, tucked into a corner. His body had already broken down. The doctor said years of heavy drinking had led to alcohol–related cirrhosis, and his liver function was approaching

failure.

He lifted his head and looked at me onstage. A memory from college came back to him.

I had once asked him, “Will we be happy in the future?”

Back then, he had not answered. Under the table, where I could not see, he had been holding

Sophia’s hand.

When the event ended, he saw Alexander waiting for me by the side door. Alexander naturally took

the bag from my hand and walked out beside me.

I glanced at the jewelry he had given me and could not help saying, “Alexander, everything you give

me is too flashy. Can you be a little more subtle?”

He looked at me, the curve of his mouth faint.

“Apparently not. My gifts are like me. Around someone we love, subtlety stops being an option.”

For all these years, he had stood beside me. He kept the right distance. He never crossed the line.

He never left.

Ethan lowered his head, swallowed the ache in his chest, quickened his steps, and disappeared

into the crowd.

It was not that he had never loved me. If he had not he would not have kept that love secret for three full years before finally confessing after high school graduation. But the love had been real, and so had the novelty Sophia offered.

No one asked what came after anymore.

Only sometimes, when people mentioned Liv Carter, they would say she had lived well. She did not rely on anyone to save her.

She pulled herself out of the worst days of her life with her own hands, made it through the hardest stretch, and finally became exactly the person she had wanted to be.