Chapter 3
The bodyguards violently twisted my arms behind my back, showing absolutely zero mercy.
I was too weak to fight them off. The pain radiating through my shoulders was so intense that I could barely breathe.
The entire room stared at me with undisguised disgust.
"Girls like her have such pathetic lives. They just have to crash parties for attention."
"She's just insanely jealous. She totally looks like the type to try and be a homewrecker. Trash like that deserves to get hit by a bus."
As the bodyguards dragged me toward the elevator, a tidal wave of vicious, hateful insults crashed over me. Alex didn't look my way again.
As the doors closed, I heard Sophia's tearful, joyful voice saying, "I will!" followed by an eruption of cheers and applause from the room.
It was drizzling outside. The bodyguards shoved me out the revolving doors, throwing me onto the wet pavement before delivering two vicious kicks to my ribs.
A concerned pedestrian tried to step in and help me, but one of the bodyguards glared at him.
"This psycho tried to play the side-chick and seduce Mr. Carter. He just had her thrown out. What, you wanna be a hero for a homewrecker?"
The pedestrian's face instantly changed. The concern in his eyes morphed into deep disgust.
"Girls these days have zero self-respect," he muttered, stepping away from me. "What a complete disgrace to her family. If I were her parents, I'd die of shame."
I curled into a ball, clutching my stomach. Black spots danced at the edges of my vision.
"I... I'm not," I croaked, barely letting out a whisper.
No one heard me. Everyone on the street just stared down at me with judgmental eyes.
The freezing rain soaked through my clothes as I lay there in a puddle of dirty street water. Right as I hovered on the edge of blacking out, I heard a painfully familiar voice above me.
"Take her to the apartment near my office. And take her phone away."
As I slipped into unconsciousness, a fever dream pulled me back to when Alex was 22 years old.
Back then, Alex and I were just two broke college grads trying to survive in Riverdale. We rented the cheapest, crappiest studio apartment we could find. We truly believed that if we just gritted our teeth and worked hard, everything would eventually be okay.
But a year later, my father suffered a massive health crisis. The medical bills were astronomical.
I drained my entire savings account and borrowed money from every single person I knew.
Without even discussing it with me, Alex wired every last cent he had to my father's hospital account, plunging himself into massive debt in the process.
"This is my family's tragedy! I don't want you going into debt for me! I don't want to ruin your life..." I had sobbed, absolutely devastated.
The winters in Riverdale were brutal.
We couldn't afford to turn the heat on, so we huddled together under a single, paper-thin blanket on a creaky wooden bed, clinging to each other just to share body heat.
Hearing me cry and blame myself, Alex just pulled me tighter against his chest.
"Your dad is my dad. I could never just stand by and do nothing. I did it because I wanted to," he whispered against my hair. "Quinn, it's going to be okay. We're going to be okay."
Riverdale was where the money was, so Alex stayed to work off the debt. I had to move back to my hometown to become a full-time caregiver for my parents.
He worked his corporate job all day and delivered food on his bike at night. I worked my office job all day and waitressed at a diner until closing.
One night at the diner, a customer accidentally knocked a pot of boiling soup over, and the back of my hand was covered in massive, agonizing blisters.
That was the very first time I ever saw Alex cry.
"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I can't protect you. I'm making you suffer so much," he sobbed through the phone screen.
His eyes were bloodshot and swollen on the FaceTime call. He spent the last twenty dollars in his account to overnight me burn cream from a pharmacy.
After that night, Alex turned into a literal machine.
He worked from 8 AM to 5 PM at the office, delivered food from 6 PM to 3 AM, and woke up at 7 AM to do it all over again.
He starved himself to save cash, surviving entirely on the free stale crackers in his office breakroom.
We lived like that for two absolute hellish years until we finally paid off the two hundred grand in debt.
When we finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel, Alex looked at me with fierce determination. "Quinn, I'm starting my own company. I swear to God, I am going to give you the best life in the world."
But launching a startup wasn't a fairy tale. Alex pitched to investors until he literally developed a bleeding ulcer from drinking at networking dinners, and he still didn't secure a single dime of funding.
I couldn't stand watching him slowly destroy himself. So, behind his back, I reached out to Jerome Owen, a wealthy senior from my university days.
I made a reckless bet with Jerome, and because of it, Alex anonymously received his very first round of seed funding.
"Quinn," he told me over the phone, his voice shaking with relief. "Just wait for me a little longer."
We had survived the absolute worst days of our lives together. I truly, deeply believed that a few hundred miles of distance could never break a love like ours.
But I was so wrong.
My eyes fluttered open. The warm, loving face of the twenty-two-year-old Alex dissolved into the cold, unfamiliar face of the twenty-nine-year-old stranger sitting next to the bed.
He let out a heavy sigh. "Just listen to me. Let me explain."