“Why are you standing?” Jackson asked.
“There are chairs.”
Mariam blinked, forcing herself to stop admiring his devilish beauty.
“Oh.”
Feeling slightly foolish, she moved toward the table and sat down.
The movement tugged painfully at her ribs, forcing her to suppress a wince.
Jackson noticed anyway.
It was only injury she had sustained while trying to escape…
His eyes briefly narrowed before returning to the document.
“You shouldn’t have tried to escape like that. It was reckless.”
Mariam bit her lip.
“You can’t keep me imprisoned forever, you know.”
“That’s what I get after saving your life last night?” Jackson replied with a displeased expression.
She hadn’t even thanked him once.
“Thank you…” She lowered her eyes for a moment before forcing the words out.
“Thank you for saving me that night.”
The words felt awkward.
“If you hadn’t arrived…” Her voice softened.
“I would probably be dead.”
“It’s not the first time I have saved you,” Jackson said flatly.
When those words fell on Mariam’s ears, she was pulled into a deep walk down memory lane.
***
Mariam, 14 years old.
As Mariam grew older, she began to notice a change in the world around her.
The people she once assumed were straightforward and kind gradually revealed a more complicated. The source of this chapter is g.com.
They were two-faced.
People had become increasingly materialistic, their hearts growing uglier with time.
She was gradually coming to understand the world’s harshness and its true nature.
She was learnt that sincerity was not as common as she had once believed.
At school, she made new friends, but even those connections came with hidden sides that she didn’t fully understand.
Among the teenage girls especially, there was an unspoken competition that seemed to revolve entirely around attracting attention of boys.
Getting approval and attention from the opposite gender had become like a kind of currency—something to collect, show off, and compare.
Mariam often observeded it from the side without really taking part in it.
During a lunch break, she accidentally overheard a conversation in the school washroom.
She had been inside one of the cubicles, when the door opened and two girls walked in—Brenda and Caroline.
The tap was turned on and the sound of running water was loud, but still the conversation could be heard clearly and neither of them seemed particularly concerned about being overheard.
“I hate that slut, Mariam,” Brenda said.
Mariam froze instantly.
There was a sad chill in her heart because she had just been called a “slut” behind her back.
From the other side of the wall, she could hear Caroline’s voice respond, “What happened?”
Brenda let out an irritated breath.
“All the boys in our class are head over heels for her. It’s disgusting.”
“I know what you mean,” Caroline replied after a short pause, her tone was laced with strong bitterness.
“I just hate her arrogance. She acts like she’s untouchable. Like she’s better than everyone else just because she’s Matthew Doyle’s daughter.”
The mention of her father made Mariam’s fingers tighten slightly against her own palm.
They dared to talk bad about her father as well?
Mariam couldn’t believe that such words were coming from Caroline’s mouth when she had always been nice to her in front of her face.
“She thinks everyone owes her something,” Brenda added with a sharp click of her tongue, as if the words themselves left a bad taste.
Caroline gave a short, humorless laugh.
“Heh…Honestly, if she didn’t get good grades, even teachers wouldn’t find her likeable with her attitude!”
Mariam’s chest tightened.
In fact, she had always tried to be polite.
Hearing her voice twisted so easily into resentment felt unfamiliar, almost unreal.
“I don’t even understand what Ronan sees in her,” Brenda continued as the sound of the hand dryer started in the background.
“Ronan just doesn’t think properly when it comes to that attention seeking bitch.”
In truth, Brenda had a strong crush on Ronan, and seeing how inseparable he was from Mariam only deepened her jealousy and resentment.
“I can’t wait for the day he finally opens his eyes and leaves that slut for good.”
There was a faint pause before Caroline responded, almost reassuringly, “Don’t worry. That day will eventually come. There’s nothing special about her anyway.”
After a few moments, the tap stopped, the dryer switched off, and footsteps moved toward the door as both girls left the washroom
For a long moment, Mariam didn’t move.
Then, slowly, she pushed the cubicle door open and stepped out.
The mirror reflected a face she barely registered at first—eyes slightly red, expression stunned, as though she had just been introduced to a version of herself she did not recognize.
Her throat felt tight.
She had believed they were her friends.
Or at least people she could talk to without fear.
Now that certainty had fractured in a way she didn’t know how to repair.
By the time she left the washroom, the rest of the school day passed in a blur.
She felt very down the entire day.
After school ended, she didn’t go home immediately.
Instead, she found herself walking alone toward the small lake behind the school grounds—a place she had visited before when she needed quiet.
The air there always felt slightly cooler, and the surface of the water reflected the sky was very beautiful.
She sat down near the edge, pulling her knees slightly closer, and picked up small stones scattered around her feet.
One by one, she threw them into the water.
Each stone broke the surface with a soft, dull sound before sinking beneath ripples that disappeared too quickly.
Mariam kept doing it.
She allowed herself to sit in silence without pretending she was unaffected by what she had heard.