What She Rides

Hazel shoved me aside at once, her face filled with terror.

She crouched over Cecil carefully and asked, "Are you alright? Does it hurt anywhere?

"Dylan Blanchard! If you're mad at me, then take it out on me! Why must you involve someone innocent?"

I was caught off guard when shoved aside, and I fell onto a broken glass on the floor.

"I never pushed him."

Hazel glared at me fiercely. "Are you telling me that he fell himself?"

I gingerly avoided the broken glass on the floor as I pushed myself up into a sitting position, blood dripping down my palm onto the white rug and quickly turning into a huge puddle.

Hazel was shocked. However, she was just about to say something when her attention was drawn toward Cecil's cries of pain.

"My leg hurts, Hazel."

She panicked and called the ambulance at once. "I'll get you to the hospital as quickly as possible.

"Just you wait, Dylan. I'll be back to settle scores with you later on."

When the ambulance arrived, she instructed the doctors and nurses to take Cecil away and refused to let them stay even a minute longer to bandage my hand.

"But Hazel, Mr. Blanchard is hurt too…" Cecil started.

She scoffed coldly. "It's just a small cut. He won't die from it. He brought it on himself. None of this would have happened if he had never pushed you."

I quietly closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the last of my deliberations vanished.

Leaving was for the best.

…

Hazel never came back home for the rest of the week, but she also never appeared at the hospital.

She only sent me a text message on the day Cecil was discharged.

"Cecil's fracture turned into a broken leg because of you. I never knew how cold-blooded you could be, Dylan Blanchard. You're already making me doubt if I made the right decision to be with you."

I had already been prepared to leave for a while, but I still felt a pang of hurt in my chest when I read her text message.

She firmly believed that I was the one who hurt Cecil just because of something he said. She didn't even think about verifying it by checking the cameras or any other means.

I slowly typed out my reply to her.

"If that's the case, then let's just break up."

However, I didn't receive another reply from her, and checking the status only told me that she never even received it.

She'd blocked my number.

I tossed my phone to the side and officially began the equity transfer process.

My portion of the company's equity was worth at least ten billion dollars now, and I wasn't going to leave that money lying around. So, I transferred them all out to my closer friends instead.

Before signing their part of the agreement, they kept checking back with me repeatedly.

"If you really give us all your shares, then you won't have anything to do with Hazel anymore. You've loved her for so many years, and you were also already preparing to propose to her this year. Are you sure you can bear to do this?"

I signed my name without any hesitation.

"It doesn't matter to me anymore."

I wasn't the only one who wanted to end this relationship. Even Hazel didn't want me anymore.

I'd seen tons of stories on Cecil's Instagram over the past few days. Most of them were black backgrounds with only some text.

"Her soups are amazing, but it's just too tiring for her. I hope that I'll be the one making her food next time."

"It must be hard on her to care for a sick and injured person. I won't let myself get hurt or sick anymore next time because I don't want to see her like this."

"She looks so pretty when she's sleeping."

The last one was from last night, and this one had included a photo as the background, to my surprise.

The photo was of Hazel nestled in his arms while asleep. Although her face had been blurred out, I could still recognize it as her because of the necklace next to the bed. It was the one that I had personally made for her when we celebrated our first anniversary together.

She had never taken it off for anything ever since putting it on. But now, she had taken it off for another man.

I thought for a while before posting something on my own Instagram stories.

"Who knew it would be this easy to leave a place you'd lived in for a decade?"

After that, I headed straight for the airport without looking back.