My Online Boyfriend Mistook Me for Someone Else—I Left Chapter 10
For one terrifying second, I genuinely believed he had finally put the pieces together and figured out I was May.
I forced every nerve in my body to lock down, maintaining a flawless facade as I shook my head. “Nothing. I’m just not interested.”
He raised an eyebrow, seemingly accepting it as a casual rejection, and dropped the subject without further comment.
After that night, Wilder Vance systematically extracted himself from my daily life. Even though we shared the same campus, a university was a city in itself. Without intentional effort, seeing someone was nearly impossible.
The next time I saw Weston Sterling face-to-face was a full six months later, during summer break.
Using the fifty grand he had given me back in high school, I had partnered up with a reliable roommate to launch a boutique design studio. We were pitching to a group of investors at a high-end lounge when I spotted him.
Across a long, crowded terrace, he was standing in the center of a sleek corporate circle. True to form, no matter where he went, Weston Sterling was the undisputed center of gravity.
I had knocked back a bit too much wine during the pitch; my head was spinning violently, and my footing felt dangerously loose. Spotting him through the haze made my brain short-circuit for a second.
Before I could reorient myself, he had already sliced through the crowd. His hand shot out, steady and firm as he gripped my upper arm to keep me upright.
“Rainy Miller?”
His grip tightened around my arm, his other hand instantly coming up to press against my forehead. His brow furrowed in immediate panic. “You’re burning up. Are you out of your mind?”
The sudden realization hit me through the fog — the dizziness wasn’t from the wine. I was running a massive fever. “I guess so…” I mumbled, my cognitive functions rapidly shutting down.
“I’m taking you to the ER right now.”
I was half-dragged, half-carried into his sleek sedan, entirely too weak to fight back.
Weston handled the registration, checked me into a private bay, and sat by my bedside for hours as the IV drip slowly drained.
Somewhere in the blurry, half-conscious middle of the night, his voice drifted into my ear. “I have an urgent board meeting I can’t skip. I need to take off soon.”
I let out a weak, noncommittal grunt.
He let out a heavy sigh, his fingers lightly brushing a stray hair from my face. “What’s your passcode? I need to call your studio partner to pick you up.”
My brain was entirely fried; I mumbled out the sequence of numbers without thinking, immediately sinking back into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When my eyes finally cracked open the next morning, the sunlight was streaming through the blinds. Weston hadn’t left.
He was standing by the window, his tall silhouette looking profoundly, utterly isolated. Hearing me shift against the sheets, he slowly turned around.
His voice was terrifyingly raw, scraped completely hollow. “Why?”
I blinked, my morning brain struggling to keep up. “What?”
He let out a low, self-deprecating laugh that sounded closer to a sob. “It’s funny, really. The second your phone unlocked last night, my hand moved on pure instinct. I opened your Snapchat… searching for a secondary login.”
“You were right there,” he whispered, his eyes violently bloodshot as he stepped toward the bed. “You were by my side the entire time. Why the hell did you just stand there and watch me fall in love with a ghost?”