Chapter 11
471words
She moved into a cheap Queens motel. The room reeked of disinfectant and damp carpet, while outside a flickering neon "Vacancy" sign cast sickly green light on mottled walls.
Everything here contradicted what "Lydia Thorne" represented.
But she was calm—the eerie stillness before a storm.
She dropped a thick, sealed envelope into a rusty street-corner mailbox. Inside: meticulously gathered evidence of the Sterling family's financial fraud.
Then she called her attorney and calmly reconfirmed her will: all trust funds, properties, and art collections would go to a charity for abused women after her "accidental" death.
"Also," she said, voice clear and steady, "if I die, report everything about Damian Sterling to the NYPD, exactly as I explained."
After completing everything, only three hours remained until midnight—the "death time" from her nightmare.
She returned to the motel, opened her tablet, and browsed Dior and Vera Wang's latest bridal collections. She wanted the perfect "burial gown." She favored a vintage satin dress with a train like a blooming white rose—magnificent yet sacred.
She imagined herself wearing it, walking toward death. A grand wedding ceremony belonging to her alone.
She used this morbid, ritualistic busyness to fight the cold fear seeping from her heart's depths.
But when everything was arranged, as she sat alone on coarse sheets listening to the clock ticking toward midnight, her suppressed fear finally overwhelmed her like a breaking dam.
She didn't want to die.
She didn't want to die like in her nightmares—in a cold warehouse, in humiliation and pain, in filth.
At this moment, a face appeared unbidden in her mind.
Caleb's face.
She remembered his eyes—so clean they seemed untouched by dust; the pleasant soap scent that clung to him; the tomato and egg noodles he'd awkwardly cooked; his large hands, warm and rough, covering her ears that night in the Hamptons.
He represented the only thing in her life that had ever been clean and genuine.
She didn't want to die alone like this.
In her final moments, she wanted to see that "clean" person one more time.
Once this thought emerged, it couldn't be suppressed. As if bewitched, she trembled while searching for the number she thought she'd never dial again.
The phone rang only once before being answered.
Silence on the other end, broken only by suppressed breathing—someone desperately maintaining control.
Lydia gripped the phone, knuckles white. She opened her mouth to find all pride and pretense meaningless now. All that emerged was her most instinctive voice, trembling and tear-tinged.
"Caleb..."
"...I'm scared."
On the other end, the silence broke with a violent, suppressed gasp. Then came the crash of a chair toppling over.
Then his voice—so hoarse with urgency it was completely transformed.
"Where are you?"
"I'll come find you."
