On the weekend, Thaddeus took me to a church to pray for the baby. Previously, he never believed in fate.
But now, I watched him kneel devoutly, seriously praying for a child. His gaze carried a hint of mockery.
After the prayer, he drove me to the mountaintop to get some fresh air.
Vaguely, I felt like a bird kept in captivity, occasionally allowed out to play, only to return to be teased by him.
I was doing worse than in my previous life. At the mountaintop, I leaned against the car.
Facing the cool breeze, I looked at Thaddeus standing on the cliff's edge, gazing downward, and for a moment, I had the impulse to push him off.
It felt like only his death would allow me to truly be reborn.
I slowly approached, reaching out my hand to touch his back...
"Irene."
Thaddeus turned around and grabbed my hand.
I snapped back to reality, my heart racing, pulling my fingers back quickly. He stared at me for a moment before his gaze shifted to the nearby cliff, and he seemed to understand:
"Are you planning to kill me?"
"This spot isn't great for that."
He pointed to a tree behind us: "There's a surveillance camera behind you."
Back in the car, he started the engine, looking at the cliff on the right side. Suddenly, he smiled: "Irene, what do you think about the two of us driving off this cliff together?" He had lost his mind.
But I thought, "I don't want to die yet."
Calming myself down, I shook my head: "I still have so much to do, I don't want to die yet."
Thaddeus narrowed his eyes: "I remember before, you could threaten me with suicide to make me leave you."
"Why don't you want to die now?"
I bit my lip, turned my head, and said nothing.
He smiled, his smile tinged with a bleakness: "Let me tell you why."
"You have friends now, that Xavier, you have someone to care about, so you can't bear to die, right? Irene, so stuck in the past, it's only me who has nothing left."
---
Thaddeus was clearly beyond the point of reasoning... even crazier than in the past life. I wanted to advise him, to change him, but I didn't know where to start.
The love and hatred between him and me were too intense, like a fog that couldn't be cleared. But I didn't want to give up.
Having lived this life again, I wanted to live it well.
Never to fall into inner turmoil, to become a madman defeated by hatred. On the way home, I told him: "I want to visit the company."
He was about to shake his head, but I grabbed his sleeve: "I haven't been there in so long, I just want to take a quick look, please."
Maybe it was because I hadn't used such a soft voice with him in a long time. He swallowed hard, clenched his fist, and said sternly:"I'll give you half an hour."
I nodded.
The bodyguards watched me all the time.
I sat in the office, pulled out a drawer, and my fingers quietly brushed against a bottle of sleeping pills, clutching them in my palm.
