The lighting in the rental apartment was a little dim, but it captured Hazel Sinclair’s happy smile perfectly.
He gazed at the phone screen, where Hazel Sinclair’s smile was bright and sunny, just like a little sun.
Leon Sterling stared at the photo for a long time before saying, “Send me the picture later.”
“I need to see how it came out.
If it’s ugly, you’re dead meat,” Hazel Sinclair said, reaching out to snatch the phone back.
She looked at the photo; her smile wasn’t distorted, and the background was nicely blurred.
‘Overall, it’s pretty good.’
“Not bad photography skills,” Hazel Sinclair praised him, a rare occurrence.
She held out the phone toward him.
“Come on, let’s take a picture together.”
When Leon Sterling heard she wanted to take a picture with him, the look in his eyes changed completely.
“You…
want to take a picture with me?” Leon Sterling asked.
Hazel Sinclair didn’t understand why he would ask that and replied impatiently, “If you don’t want to, then forget it.
You’re no fun at all.”
After saying that, Hazel Sinclair couldn’t help but mutter under her breath, “If Serena Sinclair were here, you’d probably be dying to take a picture with her, wouldn’t you?”
Hearing her mention Serena Sinclair, Leon Sterling felt compelled to explain.
“I was delivering takeout to her place today and happened to find her with a burst water pipe.”
“I could earn two thousand dollars for helping fix it, so I stayed.”
As Hazel Sinclair listened to his explanation, only one phrase echoed in her mind: ‘earn two thousand dollars’.
‘Damn!’
‘She’s so loaded, just tossing out two thousand dollars like that.’
While Hazel Sinclair was still in shock, Leon Sterling had already moved to stand behind her.
“Are we still taking the picture?” Leon Sterling asked.
“We are,” Hazel Sinclair nodded.
She adjusted the camera, set the timer, and struck a pose, resting a bent hand on her cheek with a smile on her face.
But when she saw Leon Sterling standing beside her like a wooden plank, she grabbed him and pulled him closer.
“Have you never taken a picture before?
Get cheek-to-cheek with me and copy what I’m doing.”
Leon Sterling nodded, pressing his cheek against hers and placing his hand on his own cheek.
One with a brilliant smile, the other cold and impassive—the two of them were captured in that moment on the phone.
After the shot, Hazel Sinclair took a look.
‘A pretty girl and a handsome guy.
We’re very photogenic.’
“Time to eat, time to eat!” Hazel Sinclair turned on a video, placed her phone on a nearby stand, and called out to him.
Silence fell over the dinner table.
Leon Sterling was the type who didn’t talk while eating.
Hazel Sinclair chattered on and on, only to get a single “mm-hmm” in response.
In that instant, Hazel Sinclair immediately lost all desire to share.
The steak was cooked just right—not too rare, not too tough.
[DING-DONG—]
Her WhatsApp pinged again.
After the last little incident, Hazel Sinclair had learned her lesson.
She tapped the notification and converted the voice message directly to text.
[Skylar: Why are you ignoring me, beautiful?
Are you not satisfied with the handsome men I have here?]
[Skylar: If you’re not satisfied, you can always come to our bar and take a look for yourself.]
‘Who is this guy?’
‘What on earth was the original owner of this body up to?’
“System, who exactly is this Skylar?” Hazel Sinclair couldn’t help but ask as she stared at the screen.
[He’s the manager of a high-class bar.
The men and women who go there are all rich and powerful.
After the original owner went bankrupt, she tried to get into this bar to find a sugar daddy but was thrown out before she could even get inside.]
[Afterward, the original owner tried to get the manager’s WhatsApp ID and sent him friend requests many times, but she was always rejected.]
‘He rejected her so many times, but now he suddenly accepts the friend request?
This is fishy.’
[Hazel Sinclair: Well, well, look what the cat dragged in.]
[Hazel Sinclair: Didn’t you throw me out of your bar before?
I sent you like a dozen friend requests and you rejected every single one.]
Hazel Sinclair typed out a series of snarky messages with a CLATTER of her fingers, sent them, then turned off her phone to focus on her meal.
Just then, Leon Sterling looked at her and spoke up.
“What man are you chatting with?”
“Is he more handsome than me?”
“Is he as thoughtful as I am?”
“Would he do all the chores like I do?”
Leon Sterling fixed his pitch-black gaze on her, firing off three questions in a row.
Listening to his questions, Hazel Sinclair’s eyes widened.
She looked up at him, her expression filled with confusion.
Seeing her silence, Leon Sterling grew unusually anxious.
“Say something.”
“Why are you asking me these things?” Hazel Sinclair put down her chopsticks and looked at him seriously.
“This shows you don’t trust me.
Do you think I’d cheat on you at any given moment?” Hazel Sinclair said with extreme seriousness.
Leon Sterling shook his head and retorted, “I don’t.”
Seeing his reaction, Hazel Sinclair pressed her advantage.
“If you don’t, then you’re not allowed to ask again in the future.”
“Also, I have my eye on a dress recently.
It costs four thousand dollars.
If you can’t afford it, I’ll just have Luke Lancaster buy it for me,” Hazel Sinclair said, naming the price of the dress she’d been browsing earlier that day.
‘I could probably resell it for three thousand, anyway.’
“Okay.” Leon Sterling agreed without a moment’s hesitation.
‘It’s only four thousand.
As long as she wants it, I’d risk my life to earn the money for her.’
‘Most importantly, if I don’t buy it for her, plenty of other men will.’
‘My wife, using another man’s money?
How could I let that happen?’
He agreed so quickly that the scolding Hazel Sinclair had prepared for him got stuck in her throat.
Hazel Sinclair shot him a glare.
“Eat.”
After dinner, Hazel Sinclair took a knife, cut the cake, and gave each of them a slice.
“How does it taste?” Hazel Sinclair asked, leaning close to him with a grin.
“Delicious,” Leon Sterling replied with a nod.
‘Of course it’s delicious, it cost a thousand dollars!
If it weren’t for Leon Sterling, a simple working girl like me would never have tasted something like this.’
‘A thousand dollars for such a small cake…
it hurts just to think about it.’
Later, as the two of them lay in bed, the family of four in the next apartment started arguing again.
Hazel Sinclair scrolled through posts on her phone, completely engrossed, while Leon Sterling leaned against the headboard, a laptop open in his lap.
She peeked over at his screen for a moment, then looked away.
It was a dizzying mess of bright colors and all sorts of data.
‘This isn’t something a working stiff like me could understand.’
At midnight, Hazel Sinclair put her phone down and went to sleep right on schedule.
Meanwhile, the couple next door was still in the middle of a heated argument about money.
“School starts in a month!
The tuition for both kids is thirty thousand dollars, where are we going to get that kind of money?”
“I’m trying my best to earn it, aren’t I?”
“‘Earn money, earn money,’ that’s all you say!
But I don’t see you bringing much home.
We can’t even afford the kids’ tuition.”
Listening to their conversation, Hazel Sinclair’s mind filled with an image of two little figures bickering.
Being the imaginative person she was, Hazel Sinclair even started picturing the couple as herself and Leon Sterling.
Of course, in her version, she was the one doing the complaining, and Leon Sterling was the one who had to go out and earn the money.
She drifted off to sleep in the middle of her fantasy.
Beside her, Leon Sterling’s eyes were fixed on his laptop screen.
After a few clicks, he invested six thousand dollars.
This six thousand dollars was money he had secretly saved up over the past three months.
After buying Hazel Sinclair whatever she needed, he would put aside whatever was left.
Hazel Sinclair never asked him for money, only for the things she wanted.