Kimberly’s POV
I dragged myself home alone, collapsing onto my bed and curling into a ball as waves of pain tore through my body. The sheets grew damp with cold sweat while I fumbled for the bottle of pills on my nightstand.
Just sleep, I told myself as I swallowed them dry. Sleep, and the pain can’t touch you.
As consciousness slipped away, I drifted back to when I was twenty and Cedric was nobody–just a broke college student with ambition burning in his eyes and love spilling from his heart.
On my birthday that winter, we were walking past a café when I stopped, transfixed by a couple seated by the window. The girl was laughing, a small white cake with delicate frosting sitting between them. It looked magical–the kind of luxury that existed in a different universe from ours.
Snow fell around us in fat, lazy flakes. I gathered a handful, packed it between my palms, and held it up with a smile that held no bitterness, no calculation.
“Look, Cedric,” I said, my breath clouding between us. “Nature’s birthday cake. Free of charge.”
He pulled me against him so quickly I didn’t catch the way his eyes had reddened. But I felt the tremor in his hands as they gripped my coat.
Three days later, he appeared beneath my dorm window, face raw from the cold, holding a box from that same café.
A whole cake from there cost £258.
He’d stood on street corners in the bitter cold for three days straight, handing out flyers for a local business to earn £100. The rest he’d borrowed from friends with promises to work it off.
S
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When I saw his hands–red, cracked, with chilblains forming on his fingertips–something broke inside me.
793
“Your hands aren’t meant for this!” I shouted, tears streaming down my face. “These hands are supposed to build your future, to write your success story–not be ruined just to buy me something sweet!”
I kept saying I wasn’t worth it, that I didn’t deserve such extravagance.
11-4
伊•
Cedric’s face hardened with a determination I’d come to know well in later years. “Kimberley Horwich,” he said, using my full name as he always did when he was deadly serious, “you are the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever known. You deserve every beautiful thing this world has to offer–and I’m going to spend my life making sure you get them.”
I cried as we ate that cake, sitting cross–legged on my narrow dorm bed. The taste is gone from my memory now, faded like old photographs.
But I remember knowing, with absolute certainty, that no cake would ever taste sweeter.
Funny how he kept that promise in all the wrong ways. The shoes, the jewelry, the cars, the houses–he gave me everything except what I’d treasured most: the boy who would stand in the snow to give me something sweet.
The insistent ringing of my phone pulled me from the edges of sleep. I answered without checking who it was.
“Kimberley.” His voice, still carrying that commanding tone that had made him millions.
For a moment, I was twenty again. I laughed softly, my voice slipping into the sweetness I hadn’t used with him in years.
“Cedric, it’s snowing outside,” I murmured, not knowing or caring if it actually was. “I want some cake.”
Before he could respond, I ended the call and drifted back into darkness, wondering if he remembered that cake too. Not that it mattered now. Snow melts. Cake goes stale. Time runs out.
And mine was almost gone.
