Trapped In Lies Chapter 10
He collapsed into sobs.
I turned and walked toward the boarding gate without looking back.
As the plane took off, I received one last message from Dan.
[I’m sorry. I love you.]
Staring at those words, I remembered the indifferent expression on his face as he said, “I deliberately had you reassigned…”
I deleted his number.
Love?
After everything he had done, did he really have the right to say that word?
Once I returned to the desert, I threw myself into work.
The new project progressed smoothly, and the team I led went on to win a major international award.
At the ceremony, the presenter introduced me to the audience.
“Over the past five years, this remarkable scientist persevered under some of the harshest conditions imaginable and helped achieve breakthroughs that advanced an entire field.”
Thunderous applause filled the room.
“This is what I’m meant to do,’ I thought to myself.
Dan’s company eventually went under.
After suffering a stroke, his father never regained consciousness. Even before he died, he never stopped blaming Dan for what had happened.
I was running tests in the lab when the news reached me.
A colleague asked me how I felt.
I said I felt nothing at all.
The consequences had finally caught up to them. That was all.
Hayley fared even worse.
Nathan left her and called her “used goods.”
She was left to wander the streets with her two children. The glamorous life she once flaunted disappeared overnight.
Someone posted a photo of her working as a waitress in a diner. The woman, who had once looked effortlessly polished, was worn down by life.
People online called it karma, while I just found it sad.
My mother finally reached out to me.
She said she had seen the news and understood that I had been wronged all along.
Over the phone, she broke down in tears as she apologized, “I’m sorry. I should’ve trusted you.’
I told her it was okay.
However, we both knew that some wounds could never fully heal.
My father would never come back, and neither would the years we had lost.
I met a like-minded colleague in the desert.
His name was Joshua Henry. Like me, he was a workaholic.
We often worked late into the night together and debated technical problems.
He never asked about my past. He would simply place a cup of warm water beside me whenever I needed it, without a word.
One day, he said, “Stella, you have a beautiful smile. You should smile more.”
I froze. That was when I realized that it had been a very long time since I had genuinely smiled.
At the end of the year, the project team organized a retreat. Joshua asked me to watch the sunrise with him.
The dawn over the desert was breathtakingly beautiful.
Beside me, he softly said, “Let the past stay where it belongs. You deserve a better future.”
When I turned to look at him, his eyes were clear and sincere.
At that moment, I understood something. Some wounds took time to heal, but life still moved forward.
Two years later, I heard that Dan had become a volunteer teacher in a remote mountain town.
He only earned a few hundred dollars a month, but he stayed.
Someone asked him why, and he told them that he was atoning.
I just kept living my life.
Joshua and I later got married.
The wedding was simple. It was held in the desert, with only our project team there.
We never had children of our own, but we adopted two.
Standing in the desert as the sun set, I thought of the woman I had been five years ago. I had been crying in this very place.
That woman was gone.
However, the woman I had become was living well.
