The words faded before they finished—but she didn’t need to say more. s ? ?s Find_Novel(.)net

“Yes,” Eric confirmed with a solemn nod.

Their eyes locked, and in that moment, Eric knew she understood. The truth settled between them, heavy and unspoken. For a beat, silence pressed down, thick and suffocating.

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“No—no, this is impossible!” Hadley burst out, her voice rough with denial.

With a sharp cry, Hadley surged forward, shoved the hospital room door open, and stormed inside without hesitation.

“Hadley!” Eric froze for a heartbeat, and then rushed after her.

“Linda!” Hadley snapped, eyes blazing. She strode straight to Linda, seized the sides of the wheelchair, and stared her down with searing intensity.

Her voice curled into a bitter, mocking laugh—sharp-edged and laced with scorn.

“Look at me!” she snapped. “Look at me!”

Linda trembled, lifting her head with reluctant slowness. Her vacant gaze met Hadley’s, empty and detached, as if staring at a stranger.

“You…” Linda’s voice trembled, thick with confusion.

“Stop pretending!” Hadley’s eyes flared wide, fully flashing like fire in her gaze.

She drew breath in ragged bursts. “Brilliant act! Out of schemes, so now you play the madwoman? Only someone like Eric would fall for this! Crazy? You? You’re not the one who goes mad—you make others lose their minds!”

Hadley’s lips curled into a sneer, teeth clenched tight as she hurled the words with venomous force.

“All this pathetic display… for a man?” she spat, her voice rising. “You’ve utterly sacrificed every shred of your dignity at the altar of male attention!”

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“Hadley…” Eric hovered anxiously behind her, one hand suspended in mid-air as he contemplated intervention.

But his half-extended arm wavered in the charged atmosphere before dropping limply back to his side, courage failing him at the critical moment.

“Eric…” Linda’s gaze swiveled toward him with desperate pleading, her bloodshot eyes swimming with unshed tears. “Who… who is this woman? Why is she shouting at me like this?”

Eric’s forehead creased with deep furrows as he maintained a damning silence, caught between loyalty and truth.

“Why?” The single syllable exploded from Hadley’s lips.

A white-hot pain lanced through Hadley’s skull, threatening to cleave her head in two. Whether Linda’s confusion was genuine or masterfully performed remained unclear, but Hadley’s tenuous grip on her composure rapidly unraveled with each passing second.

Her penetrating glare bored into Linda with laser intensity, the whites of her eyes now threaded with angry crimson capillaries.

“Because you,” Hadley enunciated with savage precision, “are utterly, unforgivably shameless!”

“Hadley…” Before she could unleash further vitriol, Eric seized her arm with unexpected firmness, his lips brushing against the shell of her ear as he whispered with forced calm. “Your emotions are running dangerously high. Let’s remove ourselves from this situation, please.”

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