The Girl They Ignored Returned as the Woman Seven Men Would Die For novel Chapter 72

That night, after washing the dishes, Mika asked Mrs. Remington for Julian's contact information.

She finished getting ready for bed, lay back, and sent a friend request to his messaging profile—which featured a seabird avatar. Then, she opened the novels she'd bought and started speed-reading through his work.

After all, her current persona was that of his biggest fan. She needed to know the general plots of the books he wrote.

Fortunately, his books were fairly fast-paced, ranging from a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand words.

With only seven books in total, if she pushed herself, she could breeze through them in a week.

Mika tackled them in the chronological order of their publication.

She had been sitting at her desk for over half an hour, completely sucked into the tense, thrilling murder mystery of Julian's breakout novel, marveling at his sharp, eerie prose.

Suddenly, her phone buzzed loudly against the desk.

The generic pop song ringtone blared, startling her.

Mika jumped, clutching a hand to her chest. She grabbed the phone, only to see the name 'Mom' flashing aggressively on the screen.

Her expression instantly darkened. She took a moment to brace herself mentally before accepting the call. "Hello, Mom..."

"You think you're all grown up now, don't you? I break my back paying to get you into college, and what? Now you think you can just kick me to the curb?"

Damaris Charles's resentful, overbearing voice immediately exploded through the speaker.

The second she heard that tone, a suffocating wave of despair crashed over Mika.

A prickly, electric sensation rushed through her cheeks and fingertips almost instantly.

—The precursor to a visceral trauma response.

Her feelings toward her mother were incredibly complicated.

On one hand, she was deeply hurt by Damaris's harshness and disgust toward her, and she despised her mother's worldview of constantly clinging to different men for survival.

On the other hand, she had to admit a hard truth.

Of her two parents, Damaris was the one who had actually shouldered the responsibility of raising her. She had manipulated money out of men just to make sure Mika finished high school.

The better you knew someone, the easier it was to find their most vulnerable pressure points.

Clearly, after her reputation had tanked thanks to Jude Jensen, Seraphina decided to use Damaris as a knife to stab straight into Mika's heart.

Mika forced herself to take a few deep breaths. A sudden thought flashed through her mind, and her tone turned uncharacteristically mocking.

"After all that yelling, you just want a cut of the money, don't you? What? Won't your new man buy you a gold ring?"

"You!" Damaris clearly hadn't expected Mika to speak to her like that. Her voice skyrocketed an octave.

"Is that how you talk to your mother?! You ungrateful little bitch! You're exactly like your bastard father!"

"Yeah, well, whose fault is it that you decided to marry a bastard?"

Mika's body was trembling violently, but she fought to keep her words razor-sharp.

"The bottom line is, I'm not giving you a single cent. The second I hand it over, you'll just spend it on that man's son. Who is your actual child here, him or me?

You've spent your entire life suffocating yourself to please men—has it ever made them love you even a fraction more?"