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Chapter 8: The Sun Rises

On my third month back working at the US headquarters, I received my official executive transfer orders. I was appointed as the Senior Regional Director for a booming tech hub in the Midwest.

The housing market in the new city was reasonable. I took the massive, accumulated bonuses I had brutally saved over the last year. I didn’t buy designer clothes. I didn’t buy a Porsche.

I bought a 1,500-square-foot, single-story, accessible house outright. Cash in hand.

The house wasn’t a billionaire’s mansion, but it was pristine, beautiful, and immaculately clean. There was a large master bedroom with wide doors for my father’s medical equipment. The living room faced the rising sun. I placed several pots of lush, green succulents on the windowsill, watching the sheer white curtains sway gently in the bright, warm sunlight.

The exact moment I held the legal property deed in my hand, my knees buckled. I trembled violently, and years of repressed, suffocating tears fell uncontrollably down my face.

There was a profound bitterness for the youth I had lost, intense joy for the security I had won, and an overwhelming, overwhelming sense of absolute relief. After a decade of struggling in the dirt, fighting the hustle and the glamour of the elite city, I had finally managed to build my parents a bright, safe home, and secure a decent, powerful future for myself.

This was the most important milestone of my entire life. I understood that the road ahead in the corporate world would still be a vicious battlefield. But just knowing I could return to a house that I owned, all the weariness evaporated.

Before leaving New York for the Midwest, I invited my former sales team to a farewell dinner.

The junior girl who had met Nathaniel in Geneva sighed softly over her wine glass. “Audrey, it’s such a tragedy. After six years of dedicating your youth to that gorgeous billionaire, you still walked away empty-handed. It’s such a pity.”

I smiled, swirling the wine in my glass.

Perhaps, to an outsider, losing six years of romantic devotion was a tragedy. But thinking about it critically, my agonizing journey of secretly loving Nathaniel wasn’t a waste. The essence of admiration is the desperate desire to evolve and surpass the object of your affection. In those dark years, I had borrowed Nathaniel’s blinding light to see a completely different, elevated world of wealth and power. From that exposure, I had mapped out my own corporate trajectory.

I had wanted to be worthy of him. And in the brutal process of trying to climb to his level, I had accidentally forged myself into a formidable, unbreakable queen.

Nathaniel may never have been my moon to catch, but at least there was a period when his moonlight illuminated the path out of the mud, forcing me to move forward step by bloody step.

The morning I was scheduled to drive to the airport, Nathaniel came to see me one last, final time.

On the sidewalk, beneath a row of blooming spring cherry blossoms, he stood watching me load my suitcases from afar. He didn’t approach. Seeing me turn around and notice him, he pursed his lips and offered a devastatingly gentle, shattered smile. A smile completely ruined by grief.

“When will you come back, Audrey? Just so I can pick you up from the airport?” he called out, his voice cracking.

I shook my head. “Unless there’s a corporate merger, Nathaniel, I am not coming back.”

He took a few desperate steps toward me. The spring wind blew open his gray cashmere coat. So many agonizing, desperate words seemed to be violently choking his throat. In the end, stripped of his arrogance and his illusions, he could only utter a single, broken confession.

“Audrey… I regret it so much,” Nathaniel wept, the billionaire finally breaking down in the middle of the street. “I regret being a coward for the six years I had you. If I had just realized my ego was blinding me. If I had just been brave enough to claim you, to overcome the elite reality I was so terrified of…”

I smiled softly. It was a smile of genuine, profound peace.

“That doesn’t matter anymore, Nathaniel.”

There was a time when I had hated myself, feeling inferior because of my rotting house and my medical debts, wounded in the pursuit of an elite ghost. My love had been clumsy, pathetic, and dripping with insecurity.

But now? I had accepted my reality and built an empire out of the rubble. I had learned to fiercely, unapologetically love myself. I had taken so many agonizing detours to become strong. Luckily, I had figured it out before it was too late.

I raised my hand, giving Nathaniel one final, graceful wave goodbye.

I turned my back on the billionaire, grabbed the handle of my suitcase, and walked away. In the distance, the brilliant, burning orange light of the morning sun pierced through the city skyline.

I raised my chin and resolutely, powerfully walked forward into the light. I was no longer the pathetic girl huddled in a cubicle, begging for crumbs. I was the sun.

Chapter 9: The Aftermath

Four years later.

When Nathaniel was thirty-two years old, he attended a massive, global logistics summit at the Chicago Convention Center.

Walking through the VIP lounge, he froze.

He saw Audrey again.

By now, she was the Executive Regional Vice President of the Midwest. She was wearing a stunning, razor-sharp white suit, shining with absolute, undeniable brilliance amidst a crowd of fawning tech CEOs.

Nathaniel’s heart hammered against his ribs. He took a step forward, desperately wanting to go and simply say hello to the only woman he had ever truly loved.

But the crowd of powerful executives surrounding her, hanging on her every word, was so vast and impenetrable that it completely swallowed her. He couldn’t even get close. The little, exhausted girl who used to walk quietly behind him, who used to look up at him with desperate, pathetic admiration, had finally transformed into her own, unreachable sun.

He took a step backward, retreating into the shadows of the convention hall.

For the past four years, his wealthy parents had constantly paraded suitable, elite heiresses in front of him. But his heart was dead. None of them could make him feel a single flutter of emotion. He was a ghost haunting his own empire.

Standing in the shadows, Nathaniel suddenly remembered a trip to a secluded Buddhist temple in Kyoto he had taken with his parents a month prior, desperately seeking peace for his depression.

The head monk, after listening to Nathaniel’s agonizing confession of how he had thrown away the love of his life for his ego, had simply smiled a sad, knowing smile. The monk had shaken his head, leaving Nathaniel with a single, devastating sentence that would haunt him for the rest of his natural life.

“Young master. Her absolute lowest limit was you. And your absolute highest limit… was her.”

The monk hadn’t mentioned the concept of karma. But every single word of that sentence was pure, unadulterated retribution.

A coward who strings along a sincere heart to feed his own ego will never, ever deserve to touch happiness again.

THE END