14
“Obedient?”
Many years later, when my best friend heard me describe Cole this way, she laughed for at least ten minutes.
“Honey, how is that possible?” she said. If Cole were truly that naive, he wouldn’t have survived until now.
The kind of “disastrous start” people talked about online was a joke to others, but a reality for Cole.
He was literally born in a public toilet.
He didn’t know who his biological father was.
He stayed with his mother.
2 ± ± ± ± ± 2 i
He learned to cook and do groceries at the age of seven.
He watched his mother get drunk, watched her get beaten by men time and time again, yet she couldn’t bear to leave.
As a child, he would always tend to his mother’s wounds.
He would curl up beside her, warming her hands in his.
He loved her.
Unconditionally, because she was his mother.
It wasn’t until high school that he learned his mother was destroying someone else’s family. He followed the trail from school to their home. He didn’t dare to get close.
Inside, the woman was endlessly hysterical, but the man was always stonewalling her. The child squatting on the stone steps outside could only draw aimlessly in the dirt, trying to become invisible.
In this moment. Cole wished he could die for ble mother
Chofer 2
2019
In that moment, Cole wished he could die for his mother.
Just like later, when Vera’s father gave him a chance at fame and signed him for ten years. The most precious ten years of his career, the wealth he created–not a penny went to him. It all went into Vera’s father’s pocket.
He couldn’t leave.
He worked day and night to make money.
The compensation fee was in the billions. He could never pay it back in his lifetime.
No one knew how much pain he was in. During the most difficult year, he thought about ending it all.
After all, from birth to death, he was just atoning for sins.
In his room, on his small, old flip phone, he typed the same numbers over and over again–207.
It was too painful.
He thought, when the day comes that I no longer think of her, I’ll go and die.
But that day never came.
Every moment, he was thinking of her.
That year, the news of Vera pursuing him was all over the trending topics. I thought he would never come back for me.
On a whim, i agreed to Ashton.
After all, I needed money and resources.
I didn’t want to be alone, left in that eight–hundred–a–month rental.
And Cole, a year later, also saw the news of my announced marriage on the trending topics.
At that time, Vera’s father was seriously ill. The man who had given him both grace and pain, after being tormented by illness, finally agreed to let Cole go.
“As long as you marry Vera.”
“Help Vera get the shares, and you can get a divorce. I’ll let you go.”
He agreed. He got married, got divorced. And at the end, Vera wanted him to go on a reality show.
He saw my name.
That night, he went out in the rain.
The hot spring resort.
A long–awaited reunion. I held the heart rate watch and said to him, my first words:
“You need to put this on.”
It’s over.
She’ll see right through me, Cole thought.
He didn’t know to what extent he had to repay his fillal duty to be free.
He didn’t know to what extent he had to repay his debt of gratitude to be clean.
There is no such thing as unconditional love in this world, he thought.
But for Chloe Taylor, all that mattered was his happiness.
