Three Years Forgotten, Why Go Crazy When I Say Goodbye? novel Chapter 258

Willow nodded. She remembered perfectly.

"Are you saying... she's interested in this field too?"

"Exactly. This is her dream," Silas confirmed.

Willow forced a faint smile. "Wow. That's quite a coincidence."

Very few people had the intellect or the drive to obsess over genomic sequencing.

But beneath her polite smile, a bitter wave of disappointment washed over her. No wonder he was willing to sacrifice so much. He was doing it for the woman he loved. The only reason he was handing this data over to Willow was so she could do the heavy lifting, achieve a breakthrough, and then he could present the finished results to his mystery woman.

Willow had experienced arrangements like this before in the corporate world. As long as the boundaries were clear and the terms set upfront, she could handle it. After all, she would never gain access to this level of data without leveraging someone else's immense power. A win-win collaboration was the ultimate goal.

In the past, she had always accepted these realities with clinical detachment. But for some reason, right now, her chest felt tight. A suffocating rush of sour emotions clawed at her throat.

It felt like she had swallowed an unripe apricot—a sharp, acidic bite stuck in her throat that she could neither swallow nor spit out.

Who was the idiot who claimed Silas Thorne was a ruthless machine, entirely immune to romance? It was complete garbage.

He was moving heaven and earth just to make the woman he loved smile.

Willow forcefully shoved down the bitter ache in her chest. "If that's the case, I'll accept it. Don't worry, Mr. Thorne. I will give this everything I have to ensure we see real progress."

Hearing her formal, business-like pledge made Silas feel like something had gone wrong. He didn't want her to "give it everything she had" for the company; he just wanted her to be happy.

As her fingertips brushed the edge of the photo, Silas's tension spiked to an unbearable level.

Should he stop her? What would happen if he didn't?

In that split second, a wild, reckless voice screamed in his mind, urging him to gamble it all. *Let her see it. So what?*

It would finally rip off the mask. It would force all his dark, obsessive, hidden feelings out into the light. It would break the chains he had locked himself in and free him from hiding.

Consumed by the adrenaline of the moment, Silas said nothing. He just stood in heavy silence, watching her.

But as Willow's fingers closed around the photo, she didn't flip it over. Without giving it a second glance, she gently placed it back onto the desk, face down exactly as it had been. As for the woman he loved, she didn't want to know. And she didn't dare to look.