“Evelyn Lane, trying to leave?” He yanked me toward the living room. The pain from my elbow slamming against the carved doorframe was nothing compared to the icy cruelty in his voice. “That dress you’re wearing—I bought it last month. The necklace on your neck—that was a gift from my mother. Everything you’ve eaten and worn these years came from the Hayes family. If you want to leave, leave it all behind.”
The living room instantly erupted in laughter.
His old buddy Jason Miller whistled with an arm around his date. “Ryan’s right! Some people really don’t know their place. Living off the Hayes family and still daring to throw a tantrum?”
His secretary Sophia Reed, teetering on ten-centimeter heels, sauntered up, her finger deliberately brushing my skirt as she spoke in a saccharine tone. “Don’t be upset, Evelyn. Your brother’s still in the hospital waiting for a bone marrow transplant. Without Ryan, where would you get the money to save him? If you really walk away, your brother will…”
Her words pierced me like needles, striking right at my softest spot.
Clenching my fists, I still managed to wrench free of Ryan’s grip. “Ryan, have you forgotten what we had back then?”
He sneered. “Forgot what? That when I lost my memory, you took advantage of the situation and latched onto me? Or that you used my money to support your sickly brother?”
Three years ago, on a stormy night, I found Ryan under a bridge in Queens. He was covered in blood, too weak to even open his eyes, muttering again and again, “Don’t take me to the hospital.”
He’d been shot. I risked my life against mafia pursuit to save him.
I took him back to my cheap apartment in Queens, New York, cleaned his wounds with iodine I bought, cooked instant noodles and always gave him the only egg, spent three months’ worth of wages to buy his medicine and nutrition, even sold the only painting my father had left behind just to keep him alive.
He held my frozen hands and whispered, “Evelyn, when I get better, I’ll make sure you live in a big house.”
It was in that dark apartment that we became lovers. On my birthday, Ryan even twisted a soda can tab into a crooked ring and said, “This is our wedding ring. One day, I’ll replace it with a real one.”