"My life's worthless. If I die, I die. How could I let you give me a transplant? Wouldn't that just be dragging you down?"

"Dawn, don't be sad after I'm gone. This is just my fate…"

I rolled my eyes inside.

I'd heard lines like this more times than I could count.

Ever since Joel Walker "got cancer," he'd given himself up for lost, refusing treatment, refusing a liver transplant, dead set on not being a burden to me, on dying quick so it would all be over sooner.

He didn't really want to skip treatment. He was just certain I'd never bear to watch him die, so he played hard to get on purpose.

Him going to the hospital at all was practically something I'd begged him into.

To keep him from getting upset, I'd even promised not to visit him there. Which was exactly why I hadn't known who was lying in that bed getting treatment, or who he was supposed to be matched with for the transplant!

But I wasn't buying it anymore.

I made a small sound of agreement.

"Fine. Then we're in agreement."

"You don't want treatment, so there's no reason for me to force you into it. This whole time, I'm the one who's been forcing everything on you anyway."

Then I said nothing more.

I didn't give Joel a chance to react, ready to hang up, but Victoria Jennings's furious voice came through the line first.

"How can you do this?"

"Joel's given up on himself, and you're supposed to help him. How can you just let him throw his life away?"

"You cut off his treatment costs, you won't give him the transplant. Are you trying to get him killed? Do you want to be a murderer?"

I didn't get angry.

If anything my voice went colder.

"Who are you, and why are you in Joel's hospital room in the middle of the night?"

There seemed to be a silent scuffle on the other end.

But Victoria won it.

"I'm just a stranger who couldn't stand by and watch."

"Joel's been in the hospital all this time, and you, his girlfriend, have never once come to see him. Now you're here trying to cut off his last chance to live. How can you do something so heartless?"

I cut her off.

"Then you've got it wrong."

"Joel and I were never in a relationship. We're just ordinary friends. By every measure, I'm perfectly within my rights not to pay his treatment costs and not to give him my liver."

Both of them went quiet on the other end.

Because that was the truth.

Joel was the son of our housekeeper, Naomi Henson. We'd grown up together, childhood companions of a sort, and I'd liked him since we were small, always trailing after him.

But Joel didn't like me. He just never turned me down either.

He'd even toss me a little sweetness whenever I was about to give up chasing him, letting me believe he'd finally started to feel something. And starting last year, he warmed up to me even more. Then, right when I wanted to make things official.

That was when he told me he had cancer, that he didn't want to drag me down. I'd been so moved at the time. But looking at the woman in the mirror who'd aged thirty years in just three, I realized how badly, how monstrously wrong I'd been…

"So what!"

Victoria's voice rang out, righteous.

"Even if you weren't boyfriend and girlfriend, there were feelings there. If you donate him a liver, you can be together out in the open. Isn't that exactly what you wanted?"

"You've got the chance right here. Don't take it, and you'll regret it for the rest of your life."

I hooked up one corner of my mouth in a sneer.

"Money and a liver are both no small thing. I'd hate to pressure him. But you sound like the warmhearted type, and by the sound of your voice you're about my age."

"If you can't stand me and you can't bear to watch Joel die, you can pay for it yourself. You can donate your own."

"If you're willing, I can arrange it for you right now. How about it?"

I hung up before Victoria could give me an answer.

Joel didn't call again. He just kept apologizing over text, saying Victoria was nobody, a stranger who meant nothing, and that I shouldn't take it to heart.

When that got no reply, he went back to playing pitiful, and finally sent me a thousand-word suicide note, all about how it wasn't meant to be in this life, how we'd pick things up again in the next.

He wanted it to make me regret everything, to come crawling back and beg him to get treatment.

The old me would have done exactly that. But now I just turned on Do Not Disturb.

Last time around, he'd walked off with every cent I had, which meant he had a backup plan, something waiting in reserve. I had to be careful. That was the whole reason I hadn't torn the mask off and blown things up on the spot.

That thought sent me straight to the phone with my assistant.

“Joel won't be discharged for a while. Find a way to put surveillance in his hospital room.”

She agreed at once, and had it handled in no time.

Just as I'd guessed, Naomi Henson and Joel were using the money they'd conned out of me over the years to keep paying Victoria's hospital bills.

Victoria, though, was furious.

“Joel, does that Dawn woman know something? Otherwise why would she suddenly refuse to donate?”

Joel shook his head, all confidence.

“No way. She's an idiot. If she actually knew, she'd have blown the roof off by now.”

“She's acting like this because she wants me to cave. She's using it to force me into signing the papers and marrying her, that's all.”

Naomi threw in a few insults about me too.

“But what do we do now? Victoria can't keep dragging this out, and you can't actually go marry her!”

Joel gave the two of them a reassuring look.

“Relax. I know her. To her, I matter more than anything, and she knows my days are numbered, so she won't hold out more than a few days.”

“So we're not the ones who should be panicking. She is.”

He said it with plenty of confidence, but when I still didn't show, and his own savings ran thinner and thinner until they couldn't cover Victoria's hospital stay, he finally got desperate.

So a few days later.

Naomi pushed Joel home in a wheelchair.

They'd clearly gone to some trouble with the makeup. Naomi's eyes were rimmed red, as if she cried her way through every day.

Joel looked even worse, gaunt and sallow.

If I didn't know his body was perfectly fine, I might have believed he really was on his deathbed.

I acted like I couldn't see the two of them and their little "makeup job," didn't even let them inside, just left them standing out in the sun.

“What are you two doing here?”

That wasn't the reaction Joel had planned for, but he stuck to the script and put on a smile that was mournful yet full of longing.

“The doctor says I don't have long.”

“The only person I can't let go of is you, so I came to see you one last time.”

I nodded.

“Well, you've seen me. You can go now.”

The words dropped, and both of them froze.

Joel coughed and coughed, waving for Naomi to wheel him away.

But Naomi didn't move. She looked at me with brimming eyes.

“Dawn, please, save Joel.”

“Joel doesn't want to be a burden to you, that's why he won't make it official, won't marry you. But in his heart and mine, the two of you are already husband and wife.”

“Once you're both recovered from the surgery, you can sign the papers, get married, spend your whole lives together.”

Before I could say a word.

Joel coughed even harder, and hard as he was coughing, he still shook his head.

“Mom, you promised me. You said you wouldn't let Dawn donate her liver. How could you lie to me?”

“My job is to protect Dawn, not to hurt her. Making her donate her liver, you might as well just kill me.”

"Dawn, please don't agree to my mom's request."

I smiled and nodded.

"All right, I won't. Don't worry."

Joel was so thrown off he forgot to keep coughing.

He didn't get it.

This playing-hard-to-get routine had kept me on the hook for over twenty years. How had it stopped working all of a sudden? It took him a moment to recover before he shot Naomi a look.

Naomi gritted her teeth and dropped straight to her knees in front of me.

"Dawn, the liver regenerates."

"You'd only lose a small piece of yours, but Joel is losing his whole life."

"Joel would die for you, and you can't give up even a sliver of your liver for him? Or was all that talk about loving Joel a lie?"

"And I raised you from a child. I may not be your real mother, but I'm half a mother to you. Whether it's for Joel or to repay what you owe me, you have to save him!"

I looked at the two of them, mother and son, one playing the villain and one the sympathetic wretch.

I fought hard not to laugh out loud. But the real joke was me, that I'd let people like this con me out of my liver and my money, only to end up so wretchedly.

Their makeup was starting to run, and I decided I'd held back long enough.

"Half a mother?"

"Naomi, you're my housekeeper. Yes, you looked after me from the time I was small, but my family paid you generous wages for it. If that makes you half my mother, then I've got so many mothers I couldn't even count them all."

"And Joel? My family bankrolled him his whole life. A housekeeper's son gets to live like some rich heir out there, and that was all because of me."

"Even his surviving this long after getting sick was because of me. Whichever way you slice it, I owe you nothing."

"But you haven't got a shred of gratitude. Instead you put on a little double act in front of me, trying to force me to donate my liver. How are you two any different from a pair of ingrates?"

Naomi and Joel were both drenched in sweat, unable to work out how I'd turned into this.

But I wasn't about to give them time to think it through.

I called for someone and had the two of them "shown" out.

Joel took it fine, but Naomi couldn't swallow it, couldn't keep up the act any longer. She glared at me viciously, and before she was "shown" out, she left me with a threat.

"Dawn Coleman, just you wait. This isn't over."

"That liver of yours, I'm having it. And not only that. I'll have you begging to give it to me."

The days that followed.

Naomi's threat didn't affect me in the slightest.

She started harassing me around the clock too, sending me all sorts of messages. Some were about the good she'd done me, some were the sweeter moments Joel and I had shared.

Whatever she sent, back and forth, it all came down to one line.

"Dawn Coleman, you can't be this selfish. You have to save Joel."

"There's no need for us both to end up losing. Just save Joel, and I'll treat what happened that day as if it never happened!"

I didn't feel annoyed.

If anything, I read every single message over and over.

I even used AI to generate an image of myself as an old woman and set it as my wallpaper.

Because only that way could I remind myself how foolish I'd been, letting people like this guilt-trip me for so many years.

I threw myself into work. Naomi went on making her scenes, hounding me at every turn.

After about a month of this uproar, Naomi finally went quiet.

But I knew in my heart it wouldn't end this cleanly. They were saving up for something big. Even if they couldn't get my liver, they meant to make me pay a price.

Sure enough.

On the day of my company's product launch.

Somehow Naomi, Joel, and Victoria slipped past security, rushed the stage, and raised a banner in front of the reporters.

【Dawn Coleman leads a man on and throws him away, abandons her cancer-stricken lover. She doesn't deserve to be called human!】