The night was chilly and the room was silent. It was almost two in the morning. Stella had settled into a
deep sleep, no longer mumbling or talking.
Weston had been by her side for more than an hour, but she had only just calmed down. But now that
she was sound asleep, Weston was still too restless to go to bed.
He was dressed in a long silk nightshirt. The dark blue satin fabric clung to his tall muscular frame. He
stepped out onto the balcony and carefully slid the glass door close so as not to make a sound. For a
while, he stood there and gazed through the glass at Stella who was lying on the sofa.
Then he turned around and rested his arms on the railing as he looked down. The courtyard downstairs
looked different under the soft illumination of street lamps. The bright green leaves looked dark and
gloomy now as they rustled in the night breeze.
The swaying shadows of the trees danced on the balcony, making it look like a scene from another
dimension.
Weston pulled out a cigarette, then nonchalantly tossed the cigarette case aside as he played with the
lighter. A faint blue flame emerged. It burned the end of the cigarette and the scent of burnt tobacco
filled the air. A plume of smoke rose from the cigarette then gently swirled and dissipated.
Weston kept playing with the lighter. The blue flame emerged, vanished, then emerged again. The
metal lighter made a clunking noise that cut through the silence of the night, but no one inside could
hear it.
The stormy waves in Weston’s eyes finally calmed down. He closed them, but now all he could hear
was Stella’s hoarse painful cries. She was begging him. She was pleading for him to believe her, to
save her.
That was the scene in their past that he wished he could shut out forever. He had sometimes been
plagued with nightmares after that fateful night, but his strong self-control would never allow him to be
tormented by nightmares.
But that baby…
Weston raised a hand to rub his temple.
He had never thought much about the baby. When he first found out that Stella was pregnant, he didn’t
have any strong reaction to it. To him, a child meant nothing at all. He never cared about such things.
Naturally, he thought that the best solution was to not have the baby.
But he’d failed to consider Stella’s maternal feelings. To make matters worse, she had the same
medical condition as Guinevere, which meant that she could only have one baby her whole life.
So he agreed to Stella’s appeal. Weston had never given a thought about having children, but that day
when he saw Stella fall down from the top floor clutching at her belly, his heart was torn open and all
the feelings
that he’d been suppressing came rushing out in a torrent.
He had never sat down and properly worked out what his real feelings for Stella were. Ever since
reuniting with her, he had also been suppressing all the painful memories in the past. But after hearing
her crying out his name in distress, pleading with him to save her, he thought it was impossible to hide
his feelings any longer.
The tiny red ember at the end of the cigarette burned slowly. He had not taken many puffs from it, but it
seemed that the cigarette was fast burning out. In truth, he was not that addicted to smoking, but he’d
been constantly surrounded by the smell of smoke this past year.
Stella never liked him to smoke. He had simply ignored it in the past, but now it seemed that he’d been
smoking less and less, subconsciously doing what she wanted him to do.
But she wouldn’t care about it now. She no longer prioritized him the way she used to do. All she
wanted now was to get away from him. Weston put out the cigarette and turned towards the glass door.
He leaned back against the railing with his arms resting on it. His tall figure cast an elongated shadow
under the pale moonlight.
62fb1bb41dcb31934bd49bda