"Was he the one who did it to you?" William asked quietly, though the answer was already etched into his mind.
Anna nodded slowly, her throat tightening until the words dissolved before they could escape.
A part of her longed to finally speak it all out loud, to lay the weight of it in soone else’s hands for once. But another part—an older, more wounded part—clung tightly to silence.
Robert hadn’t believed her. He had called her a liar, accused her of seeking attention. And while she wanted to believe that William was different... it felt safer to leave the past untouched.
"We’ll get to him too," he murmured, pulling her closer until her cheek rested against the steady rhythm of his bare chest. "Every single one of them will pay for what they’ve done to you. I’ll make sure of it."
The words wrapped around her like a blanket of warmth. Comforting. Anchoring. William always knew what to say—but more than that, he was the only man she had ever known who truly ant every word he said.
After a mont, her voice broke the quiet. "What’s your nightmare? I want to know what’s been haunting you all this ti... What made you so restless that you couldn’t find peace until Robert Hyde was out of the picture too?"
William paused. She felt the tension shift through his body as he adjusted his position, as though buying himself a few more seconds to think.
He had kept this truth buried deep, for so long. But after everything Anna had shared with him—after all the courage she’d shown—it felt only right to lay down his own truths.
He didn’t like to talk about it. In fact, he hated it. But now, perhaps, it was ti.
"I’m more entangled with your ex-husband than you can imagine," he said at last, his voice low, almost devoid of emotion—as though numbed by mory.
"I’m not my father’s child," William said quietly. "Before she married him, my mother had been in love with another man. She got pregnant, but her family wouldn’t allow her to marry him. He wasn’t... a suitable match. Not in their eyes, at least. But of course, when her arranged husband found out she was already carrying soone else’s child, he wasn’t exactly thrilled either."
He paused, running a hand through his thick brown hair, fingers moving slowly as if trying to comb through the heavy, tangled threads of mory.
"The only leverage my mother had over him was the fact that he couldn’t have children of his own. Infertility. He married her for an heir—and for her family’s investnts. She married him to salvage her reputation. It was a transaction for both of them. But no matter how they dressed it up, it was never a real marriage."
William’s voice grew more distant, like he was speaking from sowhere far away."She tried to keep herself sane. Took up hobbies, tried to stay distracted, tried to pretend. But he always found a way to pull her back into that cold, silent cage. Eventually... she turned to alcohol. It was the only escape she had left."
Anna bit her lower lip, her chest tightening with a wave of quiet sorrow. The thought of William’s mother—trapped in a loveless marriage, unraveling under the weight of expectations—struck her harder than she expected.
And yet, what shook her even more was realizing that William’s very existence was tangled up in that pain.
"And that," William continued, his voice steadier now, "is what ties to Robert Hyde."
Anna’s breath caught in her throat again.
"In our final year at university," he went on, "we started working together on a major security project. It was innovative, cutting-edge stuff—sothing we planned to pitch to the investnt board at the university’s tech expo. It could’ve changed everything for us."
"My mother was already in the hospital back then, waiting for a liver transplant. I was on edge during the final weeks of our project preparations. Then I realized that my part of the program needed further refinent. The code was functional, but it wasn’t strong enough to attract investors—and deep down, we all knew it. All of us, except Robert."
He paused, the bitterness in his voice growing sharper.
"I knew I could fix it, but doing so would require everyone else to update their segnts too. The code needed to be restructured to remain compatible. Naturally, Robert was completely against it."
Anna nodded slowly, her chest tightening. The mory ca rushing back—clear as day. She rembered visiting Robert at the Computer Science Departnt and overhearing their heated argunt from the hallway.
It had never surprised her that Robert resisted change. Even back then, she understood his motives.
He had jumped at the chance to work with William Stark, the prodigy everyone talked about—the brilliant developer with an intuitive grasp of code. Robert, by contrast, struggled to keep up. He had always known that riding on William’s coattails was his best shot at success, with minimal effort on his part.
"When I said the code wasn’t ready," William continued, "Robert convinced the rest of the group to gang up on . They wanted to give in, to present the project as it was. But I refused. I withheld my part of the code—and without it, the program wouldn’t function at all."
He took a deep breath, his jaw tightening slightly before he spoke again.
"That’s when I got an ergency call. My mother’s condition had deteriorated. She was scheduled for an imdiate surgery—her liver was failing fast, and they feared she might fall into a coma."
"I rushed to the hospital, left everything behind. I spent ten hours there—just sitting, waiting, praying. But when the doctor finally ca out... it wasn’t the sa surgeon who had originally been assigned to the operation. Sothing had changed. And because of that change... my mother didn’t make it."
"What...?" Anna turned sharply, her brows drawing together in disbelief. "They switched your mother’s surgeon last minute? But why?"
William’s expression darkened, his jaw clenching as he struggled to keep his composure.
"Because just as the surgery began, the hospital’s president stepped in and reassigned the surgeon. Soone had made a call—soone important—and demanded that my mother’s surgeon be redirected to another patient."
Anna felt the breath leave her lungs as the mories ca flooding back.
Back then, Mr. Hyde had been close friends with the forr president of Sacred Heart Hospital. Around that sa ti, Colette’s sister—Robert’s aunt—had been rushed in for ergency surgery to treat a brain aneurysm.
And it was also the ti when Robert was desperate to secure funding for his security project—desperate enough to do anything.
That was when Robert made the call to his father, asking him to contact the hospital president and pull whatever strings were necessary. He demanded the hospital’s top surgeon—the sa one scheduled to operate on William’s mother.
And they had granted his request.
It was Robert who made that call.
It was Robert who took away William’s mother.
It was Robert who killed her.
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