The Flower That Grew from Ashes novel Chapter 191

His face was so gaunt it was almost unrecognizable.

His eyes were deeply sunken, his cheekbones jutting out harshly. Due to the prolonged cold and biting rain, his lips had taken on a sickly, bloodless, purplish hue.

Those beautiful eyes she had once been so hopelessly infatuated with had lost all of their former elite arrogance and icy detachment.

Replaced by something she had never seen in him before.

A boundless, irretrievable regret—the look of a man who had been completely hollowed out of all hope and pride.

He just stood there, looking at her with a shattered, almost begging gaze.

Like a traveler on the verge of dying of thirst in the desert, catching sight of a mirage in the distance.

Knowing it was fake. Knowing it was an illusion.

But still, uncontrollably, reaching out his hand.

Finally, the moment Annelise was about to brush past him.

Hackett spoke.

"Anne—"

His voice was so hoarse it sounded as though it had been repeatedly ground down by sandpaper.

The name he had once called out countless times with the utmost tenderness and affection now slipped from his lips like the despairing cry of a dying man.

The sound was mostly swallowed by the roaring rain.

But Annelise heard it.

Her footsteps paused.

Only for a second.

So briefly it was almost imperceptible.

But it was that one-second pause that caused a faint, dying glimmer of light to suddenly erupt in Hackett's dead, dim eyes.

He thought...

He thought she would at least look at him one more time.

A desperate ex groveling for forgiveness?

No.

The fire had already burned out.

Not even the ashes remained.

Ahead of her was the warm light spilling from her apartment building.

It was the daisies on her windowsill, still striving to bloom in the dead of winter.

It was the freshest batch of ranunculus she needed to fight for at the flower market tomorrow morning.

It was a brand-new, slowly improving life that she was rebuilding piece by piece with her own two hands.

Behind her was that long-rotted old dream, gradually fading away in the torrential downpour.

Annelise's silhouette ultimately vanished completely into the end of the rainy Oslo night.