—– PART 2 —–

The very next morning, the reality of my new life crashed down on me. The first day I officially worked at Vance Technologies, a torrential downpour battered the city, the heavy rain matching the dread pooling in my stomach .

Liam didn’t hold back.

He gave me the hardest, most punishing tasks he could legally assign, burying me under mountains of paperwork that would have taken a whole department to finish . He treated me with an icy, calculated coldness in front of the entire executive team, dismissing my input and speaking to me as if I were invisible .

He was waiting.

I knew he was waiting for the old, arrogant Clare Bennett to snap, to throw a tantrum and quit so that hating me would be easier .

But I just kept my head down, swallowed my pride, finished every single assignment perfectly, and said absolutely nothing .

Late that night, long after the executive floor had emptied out, the exhaustion finally broke me. I was so bone-tired that I actually fell asleep right at my desk . Spread out next to my hand were the latest, terrifyingly high medical bills . The patient name was printed in harsh black ink: Margaret Bennett, my mother . She was the same warm, gentle woman who had once handed a freezing, soaking-wet Liam a dry towel on a rainy day a decade ago .

When I jolted awake, Liam was standing right in front of my desk. I scrambled to gather my things, but a bill slipped from my trembling fingers and fluttered to the floor. Liam picked it up . His eyes locked onto the bold red stamp: *Overdue Payment* .

"You can request an advance on your salary," he said, his voice flat, completely devoid of the warmth I once knew .

I snatched the bill back, my cheeks burning. "No need" .

Liam’s jaw tightened. "Pride?" .

"No," I replied softly, refusing to look away from his piercing gaze. "Habit. Back then, I had too many things handed to me. After losing everything, I learned the hard way that if I don’t stand on my own two feet, no one will stand for me forever" .

Liam went completely silent . He stared at me like I was a puzzle he couldn't solve, realizing the woman sitting in front of him was nothing like the spoiled, cruel Clare he remembered .

Days later, a massive crisis hit the company's most important project right before a make-or-break investor presentation . The engineering floor was in total panic. The code was failing, and nobody could find the core problem . I was standing quietly at the back of the chaotic boardroom, holding a clipboard, when I glanced at the raw code projected on the massive screen. My heart skipped a beat. I recognized it instantly—it was the exact same structural mistake Liam had made while building his very first beta project ten years earlier in the dusty Westbridge University library .

Without thinking, I spoke up . The room went dead silent. The senior developers scoffed, glaring at the 'new assistant,' but Liam just stared at me. Ignoring his team's skepticism, he ordered them to follow my instructions . Five minutes later, the system compiled perfectly. The problem was exactly where I said it would be .

After the meeting, when the room cleared out, he cornered me. He demanded to know how I could possibly have spotted a high-level algorithmic flaw. I couldn't lie to him anymore. I finally admitted the truth—I knew because I remembered that rainy night in the campus library ten years ago, when his dream had been my dream, too .

[LIAM'S POV]
That night, sitting alone in my penthouse office with the city lights sprawling below me, my chest felt like it was caving in. I walked over to my desk, unlocked the bottom drawer, and pulled out an old wooden box . It was the box I had forced myself not to remember, the box I had dragged from apartment to apartment for a decade .

Inside was a single blue USB drive . It had arrived at my first, run-down apartment right after I left Westbridge University . There was no sender name on the package, just one desperate sentence scribbled on the envelope: *Don’t delete your dream* . I had been so consumed by my hatred for Clare that I had never plugged it in. For ten years, I never opened it .

Tonight, my hands shook as I finally did .

The files popped up on my screen, and the air was sucked from my lungs. Inside the drive was the complete first draft of my original project . It was carefully organized, the coding mistakes highlighted and corrected, with detailed notes in the margins written in handwriting only Clare could have produced . Next to it was a secure folder containing all my backup scholarship documents, dated exactly one week after the day she humiliated me in front of the whole school—the exact week I had packed my bags and left Westbridge .

And then, I saw the final file. It was created seven days after I walked away from her, titled simply: *if_1_day_he_needs_it* .

I double-clicked it. My vision blurred as I read the few sentences typed inside.

*I know you will never accept help from me again. I know you will hate me for what I did. But if one day you need to prove that this dream belongs to you, use these. At least let me protect the one thing you haven’t lost* .

I sat completely paralyzed in the glow of the monitor . For ten years, I had built my entire life, my entire empire, on the toxic belief that Clare Bennett destroyed me . But the blue USB was telling an entirely different story. She hadn’t thrown my dream away like trash . She had meticulously protected it, sent it back to me, and kept believing in it, even after I walked away from her with nothing but pure, unadulterated hatred in my heart .

The next morning, I tore into the past. Not because I was angry, but because I was utterly terrified that I had been wrong about everything . I ordered my executive assistant, Maya, to deep-dive into the university's old archived system .

"Maya," I said over the intercom, my voice shaking. "There is a file you can reference named 'chuyện 15.txt'. It's the raw data dump from the Westbridge Dean's office from ten years ago. Decrypt it and find any correspondence involving Richard Bennett."

Ten minutes later, Maya walked in, her face pale, and handed me the printed emails .

Sender: Richard Bennett, Clare’s billionaire father .

*If Liam Vance continues appearing beside my daughter, I want all financial support connected to him reviewed immediately* .

The follow-up email, sent two days later, was a death sentence:

*If Clare refuses to end the relationship, Liam Vance’s file will be sent to the disciplinary committee for expulsion* .

I closed my eyes as the brutal truth slammed into me. Richard Bennett had threatened to completely destroy my scholarship, my academic future, and everything a poor young man from ten years ago had absolutely no power to protect . And Clare had known it . Instead of telling me the truth—instead of watching me try to fight a billionaire who would have crushed me like a bug—she had chosen to become the ultimate villain . She shattered her own image so I would leave, so I would hate her, and most importantly, so I could survive .

[CLARE'S POV]
That afternoon, I was hiding in the dusty storage room on the 40th floor, trying to organize physical contracts just to keep my mind off my mother's failing health. The heavy door clicked shut behind me. Liam stood there, his eyes red-rimmed, holding a stack of papers.

"Richard Bennett threatened you," he said, his voice breaking the suffocating silence .

My face turned completely pale . The heavy files slipped from my numb hands and crashed onto the floor .

"He was going to take away my scholarship," Liam took a step closer, his voice laced with agony. "Create a fake reason to send me to the disciplinary committee and ruin my life" .

"You shouldn't have looked into this, Liam," I whispered, backing away .

"I hated you for ten years, Clare!" he shouted, the pain of a decade echoing in the small room .

"I know," I cried softly .

"No, you don't!" he stepped into my space, holding up the printed emails. "I thought I was just a sick joke to you. I thought you destroyed me . While the truth was… you were trying to save me" .

Tears gathered in my eyes, blinding me, but I refused to let them fall . "Because if you hated me," I said, finally speaking the crushing sentence I had locked inside my heart for ten agonizing years, "at least you moved on . If you knew the truth back then, you wouldn't have left. You would have stayed. You would have stubbornly fought my father. And he would have completely destroyed you . Back then you had no money, no powerful lawyers, no one strong enough to protect you. And my father had everything" .

My voice trembled violently. "So I had to become the person you hated most in this world . Because only if you hated me would you be hurt enough to finally walk away . And only if you walked away, he couldn't touch you anymore" .

Liam stared at me, his chest heaving. "What about you?" he asked, his voice shattering. "What did you lose?" .

I stayed silent for a long time, staring at the floor, before bending down to pick up the scattered papers. "It doesn't matter anymore" .

He dropped to his knees beside me and gently caught my hand . His touch sent a shockwave through my body. "It matters," he pleaded .

"Liam, some things—even if you say them out loud, they can't fix anything," I whispered, pulling my hand away .

"But silence destroyed us," he begged, looking at me with the same desperate eyes from ten years ago .

I smiled, a bitter, painful smile. "No," I told him gently. "It only destroyed me . You lived" . I looked around at the towering glass and steel building he had created. "You lived."

I stood up and walked past him, leaving the storage room, while Liam remained kneeling among the scattered papers, finally understanding that the person he wanted to punish the most might have been the person who loved him the absolute most .

But what Liam didn't know yet—what neither of us knew—was that the ghost of our past was already in the building. Richard Bennett was about to walk into Vance Technologies that very Monday morning .