Chapter 4

Morgan's anger had not yet faded. As soon as he calmed Sestina down, he immediately started reprimanding me extremely harshly. It was as if I had done something inexcusably terrible and wrong. However, my slap had not even landed on Sestina's face. He yelled furiously at me, "Quiana! If you think you can do your job at the company, then do it! Otherwise, get out! The company is not your playground! I'm not so magnanimous as to tolerate your disrespect for the rules and absolute lack of tolerance for others!" Tears rolled down my face like a leaking faucet, and my heart ached with terrible pain. In the three years that I pursued him, I used funds from my family to support his business and asked my father to give him pointers behind the scenes. In that fashion, I had led him up the stairway to success. However, he said that it was not good for me to suddenly become appointed as the deputy CEO of the company. He was afraid people would call him nepotistic, so he requested that I start from the bottom as an employee transporting goods. I rubbed the calluses on my fingertips. Even when I no longer had to do such menial work, the calluses remained on my hands and in my heart. With just one sentence, Morgan had denounced all the effort I had put into the company and everything I had sacrificed for him. It was like I was meeting him for the first time. I was finally seeing his true colors—his selfish, ugly self—with clarity. Seeing him leave the office with Sestina in his arms, the gossip-hungry gazes of all my colleagues outside the door immediately landed on me. Some were sympathetic, some pitying, and others filled with gloating. I wiped my tears away and stood up, using the table to support myself. As I struggled to stand, no one dared to help me or ask me anything. In the end, it was the general assistant, Jane Yarrow, who could not bear to watch any longer and helped me close the door, preserving my last shred of dignity, before handing me a tissue. It was only when blood dripped from my forehead onto the floor that I realized that my head was bleeding. I endured the pain while heading to the bathroom to clean the wound. As I was washing my hands, I saw Sestina smiling smugly at me with lips that were swollen from kissing. "If you can't hold onto a man's heart, it doesn't matter how well you do at work. Look! I can easily steal all your hard work without lifting a finger, so if you know what's good for you, don't try to fight me!" She poked the wound on my forehead with her manicured nails before continuing disdainfully, "Morgs and I are childhood friends, so our relationship isn't something a bootlicker like you can easily get between!" Blood flowed down my forehead. Sestina looked at me as if she was looking at trash before leaving the bathroom, smiling and humming to herself. I stopped the recording on my phone. Then, before I was inevitably fired, I went to the monitoring room and used my authority as executive director to get in. Once inside, I accessed the surveillance feed showing the events that had unfolded in my office. Finally, I booked a flight to Amurus scheduled for tomorrow and attempted to pull myself together again. Sestina had been right. Trash should stay in the trash can, and Morgan was the human trash I had voluntarily abandoned. The two of them were truly made for each other. I returned to my desk, printed out my resignation letter, and asked my colleagues to hand it in for me. After that, I neatly packed up all my things and left the company building. Night had already fallen by the time I arrived home. When I read the message that Morgan had sent me, I sneered. It read, "I won't be returning home tonight, Quiana. Sestina feels a little unwell. Remember to arrive on time for the meeting tomorrow morning. It's about time you learn to tone down your temper." Morgan knew very well that I could not bring myself to leave him, so he would always resort to giving me the cold shoulder. However, I now understood that there had never been such a thing as being unable to live without him. What happened in the past would stay in the past. I was a brand new person starting from that day onward. I would no longer have anything to do with Morgan from now on! Having made up my mind, I either blocked or deleted all of Morgan's contact information from my phone before closing the door to the house behind me. The next day, I boarded the earliest flight to Amurus and started a new chapter in my life.