Two Thousand Kilometers South, Away From Everyone I Loved Chapter 10

Two Thousand Kilometers South, Away From Everyone I Loved Chapter 10

Three years later. Early summer in Miami. The breeze was soft, the air gentle and warm.

I stood in front of Miami’s most iconic new landmark, dressed in a sharply tailored suit. This was the first project I had ever designed that had actually been built. As the youngest lead designer at one of the country’s top architecture firms, I had just received one of the industry’s most prestigious emerging talent awards. In one month, I would be heading overseas for further study.

Before I left, I took a trip back to my hometown to finalize the transfer of my official records. The

old streets were just as run-down as I remembered. I walked out of the county clerk’s office with a

brand-new registration document in my hand. Under the heading “Head of Household,” there was

only one name. Mine.

At the street corner, I stopped.

In front of the farmers’ market across the way stood three figures-familiar yet somehow foreign. My parents’ hair had gone completely gray, their backs hunched. They were bickering with a vegetable vendor over a few pennies. Anna had grown heavy. She stood there in cheap, faded clothes, one hand gripping a grubby child, her eyes staring blankly at the cars streaming past. I’d heard through the grapevine that she’d taken up with some lowlife, gotten pregnant before marriage, and been abandoned. She was living off my parents now.

On the other side of the street, a man in a yellowed white shirt leaned against a utility pole,

smoking a cigarette.

It was Lucas.

He had never graduated. Chronic absenteeism and a mountain of failed courses had gotten him expelled from Northwestern. The once golden boy-now nothing but emptiness and dead silence

behind his eyes.

As if sensing something, he turned his head in my direction.

Our eyes met.

The cigarette between Lucas’s fingers trembled violently and dropped to the ground, the ember burning the top of his foot. He flinched in panic, instinctively wanting to hide, yet he couldn’t stop himself from staring at me, transfixed.

My parents and Anna followed his gaze. They saw me. Saw my flawless makeup. The expensive watch on my wrist. The confidence and ease radiating from every inch of my posture. That was the

light they had tried with all their might to bestow upon Anna-the very light they had snatched from me with their own hands.

My mother’s lips parted. It looked like she was trying to call my name. Anna instinctively hid her hands behind her back, trying to cover her rough, coarse skin. Lucas took a single step forward, then wrenched himself to a halt. His eyes flooded red in an instant.

Regret. Despair. Agony. The emotions warped their faces into a grotesque, laughable tableau.

I looked at them. There wasn’t a single ripple in my heart. It was like looking at a group of complete strangers. I didn’t walk over to mock them. I didn’t offer them any pity. I just pulled my gaze back, turned around, and walked toward the car waiting for me at the curb.

The moment the car door closed, I heard a sob rise up from behind me-choked, suppressed,/ shattered to the very extreme. I didn’t look back.

The train pulled out of the station, the scenery outside the window racing backward at full speed. My phone buzzed. It was Cole.

“Designer Brown, the celebration dinner is all set. Everyone’s waiting for you.”

I looked at the screen, and the corner of my lips lifted despite myself. Sunlight streamed through the window and spilled across the back of my hand. Warm and golden. I replied with a single smiley

face.

“On my way.

Ahead of me lay my own sky-ten thousand miles of clear, boundless blue.