Chapter 9
My parents gave their lives to protect Felix and me. That year, lost my father, who planted sunflowers for me, and my mother, who loved me dearly.
Of course, his mother died too, but he wasn’t upset in the slightest and couldn’t understand my grief. After that, I never painted Felix’s portrait again.
At first, I blamed him. I blamed him for taking away the home I had and trapping me in my own world, unwilling to step out. I resented him for taking me from my grandmother, locking me away in his house, and later even using my grandmother to force me into marriage with him.
In those years, Felix loved me deeply. I tried to convince myself to keep going, to forgive him, because, at that time, he was just an innocent child. Every time I felt like giving up, I would go to the garden and look at the sunflowers, drawing flowers on the wall that would never wither.
But later, as I tried to hold on, Darcy’s arrival destroyed everything. Or maybe it was Felix who destroyed it all. He destroyed the sunshine that had grown up with him, and I couldn’t hold on any longer.
One day, Felix’s father, Hugo Palmer, came to see me. I knew he’d always hated me. Unfortunately, Felix had kept a tight leash on him all these years, and his attempts to reach out had never succeeded.
“Felix is all I have left,” Hugo said. “For years, I’ve let him do whatever he wanted, but this time, he nearly ruined himself because of you. Let this farce between you two end. He’s done enough to make it up to you over the years. From now on, I’ll make sure your future is taken care of.”
I sneered. If Hugo hadn’t been too busy with his lover and delayed picking Felix up, none of this would’ve happened. What gave him the right to brush it all aside with a few words, pretending to be doing me a favor?
Hugo had turned me into an orphan, but he thought he was doing me a favor by letting me be with Felix.
I left and returned to the house where I once lived with my parents. It had now become a derelict building, abandoned and decaying.
Now, ten years later, I painted Felix as an adult before lying in the same bed we’d shared as children and closing my eyes. On the headboard, the drawing of our family of four had gathered dust. The naive strokes I’d made back then were filled with a happiness that my adult self could no longer reach, a happiness Felix had
