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She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him into a deeply comforting hug. Ethan buried his face in her damp hair, breathing in the scent of her vanilla shampoo and the lingering chill of the rain.

"Best first date ever," Lily whispered onto his skin.

She pulled back just enough to look at him, her eyes shining with pure, unadulterated joy, and kissed him. It was a happy, effortless kiss—tasting of pepperoni, rain, and sheer perfection. Looking at her sitting on the floor, stripped of all pretension, radiant and incredibly happy, something fundamentally shifted inside his chest.

He looked at her and knew, with undeniable, earth-shattering conviction, that he was going to marry her.

The vibrant, beautiful memory dissolved, bleeding into the sprawling, sterile reality of his Chicago apartment.

Ethan sat on the edge of the cold leather sofa, staring blankly at the hardwood floor. The city lights from the floor-to-ceiling windows cast long, imposing shadows across the empty room.

He was entirely alone.

He had destroyed that smiling, beautiful girl on the rug. He had taken her unconditional trust, her vibrant light, and her future, and he had crushed it all with his own two hands. He betrayed the very woman who had wiped the sauce from his face, the woman who had laughed in the rain and loved him when he was at his most vulnerable. He traded a lifetime of that pure, fierce devotion for a selfish, reckless mistake.

Ethan pressed his face into his hands, his broad shoulders shaking as a jagged, tearing sob ripped through his throat. The sound rang in the vast, hollow apartment, answering him with nothing but empty air.

The stark finality of her voice played on a continuous, torturous loop in his mind, drowning out everything else.

Get out, Ethan.

Ethan could not breathe. The sheer, suffocating gravity of what had just happened pressed down on his chest, threatening to crush his ribs into dust.

He pushed off the leather sofa, his dress shoes hitting the floor as he began to pace the length of the sprawling living room. He moved like a caged, desperate animal, his hands running frantically through his hair. His thoughts were a frenzied, violently spinning vortex. Everything had gone wrong. Months of therapy for nothing—all of it entirely obliterated in the span of a single afternoon.

He couldn't lose Lily.

The thought was a physical agony, a blinding panic that hijacked his nervous system. He needed to fix this. He had to find a way—

Two brisk knocks reverberated through the vacant apartment.

Ethan froze. His heart hammered a desperate, erratic rhythm in his chest. Lily. Maybe she had realized she was being too harsh. Maybe Julian had gone too far, and she had come to hear him out.

He crossed the room in three long strides, his hands trembling as he grabbed the brass handle and ripped the front door open.

It was not Lily.

Gemma stood in the hallway, her coat tied tightly around her waist, her blonde hair slightly damp from the rain. She looked up at him, her mascara still faintly smudged around her eyes, an unreadable, tragic defiance settling in her posture.

The desperate hope in Ethan’s veins evaporated in a flash, replaced by a blinding, explosive rage.

"You," Ethan snarled, his voice vibrating with pure venom. "You ruined everything."

He grabbed her by the arm, yanking her over the threshold, and slammed the door shut behind her with a deafening crack.

"I ruined nothing!" Gemma fired back, her voice ringing off the high ceilings as she ripped her arm out of his grasp. "I saved you from your own pathetic delusion! She doesn't want you, Ethan! She never wanted you the way I do!"

"You destroyed my life!" Ethan roared, stepping into her space, his chest heaving. "I had a chance with her. She was finally looking at me again. And you dragged your poison all the way here just to sabotage it!"

"Stop lying to yourself!" Gemma screamed, the polished British socialite vanishing entirely, leaving only a broken, desperate woman in her wake. "She was never going to take you back! You betrayed her, Ethan. You broke her. I am the only one who stayed!"

They circled each other in the entryway, hurling brutal, ugly truths like shattered glass.

"You were a mistake," Ethan spat, the words vicious and intentionally cruel. "A toxic, pathetic mistake I should have cut out of my life years ago."

Gemma didn't flinch. She stepped closer, her chin held high, her eyes burning with a dark, twisted conviction. "I am not a mistake, Ethan. I am your reality. You need to finally understand that we are it for each other. We are the same. I have always loved you, wholly and unconditionally, despite all your flaws."

She reached out, pressing a trembling hand flat to his wildly beating chest. "And you can deny it all you want, but every single time you break, every time the world gets too suffocating... I am the one you run to. Always."