Bonnie stared at her, her expression heavy with complexity. "And so what? You woke up from the dream, but you still refused to let go. You drove everyone into the same miserable hell you were living in. Are you satisfied now?"
At this point, Hannah had nothing left to hide. "If you were me, and you had finally forced the man you loved to stay by your side, you wouldn't have been able to push him away either. The damage was already done. Lawrence couldn't go back to the past. His only choice was to stay with me, and eventually, fall in love with me."
Bonnie found the logic absolutely absurd. She couldn't wrap her head around it. "But you can't force your sick, twisted obsession onto every single person who cares about you! Carl and Odette treated you like their own flesh and blood. Lawrence loved you like a real sister. They gave you their absolute, unconditional love—openly and without hesitation. And you weaponized that precious love just to satisfy your own selfish desires. Did you ever once think about how they felt?"
To Hannah, Bonnie was just a romantic rival, someone whose feelings didn't need to be considered. But the Lane family—they were her actual family. Bonnie couldn't fathom the level of sheer selfishness required to rip apart the people who had raised her.
It was utterly incomprehensible.
Hannah fell silent, a sharp, stabbing pain radiating from her chest. Bonnie was right. Their love had been entirely pure and out in the open, which only highlighted the fact that Hannah was nothing more than a rat scurrying in the gutters.
Carl had given her shares in the company. Odette had given her an education and endless affection. When Lawrence was just six years old, he had promised to protect her forever.
For over a decade, the Lane family had made good on every single promise.
What more could she possibly have been dissatisfied with?
Tears streamed down Hannah's face.
The guard standing nearby tapped his watch, warning them that their time was up and they needed to wrap it up. Hannah let out a slow, trembling breath. Uttering her final sentence seemed to drain every last drop of strength from her body.
In those fleeting seconds, her mind raced through a lifetime of memories. She wasn't dead yet, so why was her life flashing before her eyes?
She remembered arriving at the Lane household for the first time. A tiny Lawrence had treated her like absolute royalty, dragging out all his favorite toys just to make her smile. He had already possessed that cocky, youthful arrogance.


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