She Vowed to Kill Him for Me, Then Helped Him Propose to Another Woman Chapter 11

She Vowed to Kill Him for Me, Then Helped Him Propose to Another Woman Chapter 11

She hurried to defend herself.

“No, Mrs. Whitfield. I just came to see Claire…”

“How do you even have the nerve to see her?”

“Sloane, the biggest mistake I ever made was loving you like my own daughter.”

“I was blind. Because of me, Claire’s whole life was ruined.”

As my mother spoke, tears rolled down her face without warning.

I wiped them away and gently pulled her into my arms.

Sloane stood there helplessly.

She watched us, pain cutting across her face as if her heart had been carved open.

My mother and I went back inside.

Under the dim glow of the porch light, Sloane still stood where she was.

I sighed and went to the door to let her in.

With her personality, if some things were not said clearly, she would cling to them for the rest of her life.

If that was the case, then we might as well end it properly.

Sloane came inside.

My parents and I were about to have dinner.

I set out a plate and utensils for her.

“Sit down. Eat something.”

She looked up at me, as if trying to understand what I was thinking.

In the end, she sat down.

There was nothing extravagant on the table.

Just a few simple home-cooked dishes.

But Sloane started crying as she ate.

She sniffed, her words muffled by the food in her mouth.

“For five years, there hasn’t been a single day I didn’t miss this.”

My parents’ faces remained cold.

They said nothing.

I simply ate quietly.

Half an hour later, my parents and I had put down our utensils and were waiting for Sloane to finish.

But she did not stop.

She kept stuffing food into her mouth.

Again and again, until she nearly gagged.

“Sloane, enough.”

I reached out and grabbed her arm.

“No. It’s not enough. If I finish this meal, I’m scared I’ll never get to eat it again.”

She sobbed, but still refused to stop.

My parents and I took the food away and handed her a glass of water.

Her face was smeared with food.

With red eyes, she looked at me and asked, “Claire, are you… done with me?”

I took a wet napkin and wiped the food from her face.

“Sloane, I used to feel lucky that I had you beside me.”

“But from the moment you stood in front of Vivienne and protected her, there was never going to be an us again.”

Her tears fell all at once.

They landed on the back of my hand, burning hot.

“Claire, do you know?”

“When I was with you, I always felt inferior.”

“I felt like I wasn’t good enough. Like I didn’t deserve how good you were to me.”

“So when I met Vivienne, I felt like she and I were equal.”

“But I regret it now. Only after losing you did I realize how horribly wrong I was.”

She pulled out that shattered photo and pressed it to her chest.

“The three of us… can we ever…”

“Sloane, leave.”

I cut her off.

“There are things I don’t want to say too cruelly.”

She walked to the door and forced a smile at me.

“Claire Whitfield, you have to be happy.”

“I’ll always be your best friend. I’ll always be the person in your corner.”

I looked into her eyes and gave no response.

Then, just as she was about to break down crying, I calmly closed the door.

The next time I heard news about Grant and Sloane, it was on the news.

Vivienne had been driven into a psychiatric facility after what those thugs had done to her.

She escaped, waited outside Whitmore Group, and the moment she saw Grant, she stabbed him, unleashing five years of buried psychotic rage.

She stabbed him eighty-one times, one brutal strike for every night of horror she claimed she had endured.

Vivienne was arrested.

Grant died on the scene.

They said that before he died, he kept murmuring someone’s name.

As for Sloane, she was now lying in a hospital bed in a vegetative state.

They said she ignored her coach’s warnings and insisted on stepping into the ring for a bout far above her weight class, fighting with a suicidal frenzy, as if she were trying to atone for someone.

When I saw the news, I simply turned off my phone.

I no longer wanted to be disturbed by people from the past.

A month later, I received a call from an estate attorney.

He told me Grant’s entire estate would belong to me.

It turned out that even if Vivienne had not killed him, he only had three months left because of late-stage lung cancer.

On the day I went to sign the papers, I received Grant’s will.

Inside was also a letter.

The envelope read, [For Claire Whitfield Only.]

I picked it up but did not open it.

Instead, I lit a lighter and burned it to ash.

I did not want to see him again.

I did not even want to see his handwriting.

The ashes of the past scattered into the wind, leaving nothing behind.

For the first time in my life, the horizon ahead belonged entirely to peace.