Chapter 83: You are the only one.
Inside the hall...
The cake had been cut.
"I also have an announcement to make." It was Elias who spoke. The grin on his face made Elena’s heart skip a beat.
"I am transferring ten percent of my shares to my wife."
Gasps and murmurs rippled through the hall.
"What? Ten percent is worth billions."
"This is the declaration that Elena is important to Elias."
"She is damn lucky. I envy her."
"I never thought I’d see the day Elias Rowan would fall so hard for a woman."
The whispers continued to spread throughout the crowd.
Elena’s surprise deepened as she flipped through the legal documents.
"This is too much." She immediately closed the folder and handed it back to him. "I can’t accept this."
"This is nothing," Elias said. "You are my wife, Elena. And everything I own is yours."
"Take it, Elena," Evelyn chimed in from nearby. A mischievous smile crossed her face. "You are the only woman who has ever managed to attract his attention. Or, I was beginning to think he was gay."
"Evelyn," Elias grunted out.
"Oops..." Evelyn pressed her fingers against her lips dramatically. "I shouldn’t have said that. But trust me, Elena. He has never dated anyone all those years. You are the only woman who has ever mattered to him. And you mean everything to him."
Elena looked at Elias. Her heart pounded uncontrollably.
She had never imagined that a man like Elias Rowan would truly fall for someone like her. It felt unreal.
’Am I dreaming?’ she wondered thoughtfully.
If it were a dream, she never wanted to wake up.
"Elena, you saved my life," Arthur said, snapping her out of her thoughts. "You deserve far more than ten percent."
Elena finally nodded. Her hesitation was gone. "Alright. I’ll accept it."
The crowd erupted into congratulations and applause.
"Everyone..." Arthur’s voice silenced the crowd. "Please enjoy the dinner."
The guests gradually dispersed toward the lavish buffet arranged across the hall.
Only Elias and Elena remained standing together near the center.
They both looked at each other silently for a while.
"You really never dated anyone before?" Elena was the one who started first.
He shrugged. "No one attracted me."
Elena tried to hold back her smile, but the corners of her lips quirked slightly.
"Really? And somehow, you are attracted to me?"
Elias chuckled, scratching his forehead. "That’s right. You are the one who stole my heart."
"But we’ve never met before," she said with confusion in her tone. "And our first meeting wasn’t impressive either. It was a clumsy situation. I was in a mess. Don’t tell me you were attracted to my pitiful condition."
She flashed a teasing smile.
But he wasn’t smiling. The intensity in his eyes made her smile slowly disappear.
"We met before," he said.
A baffled look crossed her face. "What? When?"
She couldn’t remember when she had met him. Why didn’t she remember meeting him?
"Years ago," he replied nostalgically. "At school."
His answer only confused her even more.
"Do you remember helping a boy who was being bullied?"
Elena searched her memories. Then a forgotten scene surfaced.
After the Sinclair family had taken her in, she had transferred to a new school. During lunch break, while wandering around the campus alone, she stumbled upon several boys surrounding and thrashing a frail, quiet boy.
"Now I remember," she said in a daze. She stared at him. "So that was you?"
Elias’s smile resumed. "Yes. You gave me water. You told me not to let anyone treat me that way."
His voice softened. "I remember every word."
Elena’s mouth fell open. To her, it had been nothing more than a small act of kindness. She barely remembered what she had said.
But she had not thought he would take her advice so seriously that he would remember it even after so many years.
Emotion churned within her.
"You remember all that?" She almost choked on her own saliva.
Elias moved in closer, his eyes never leaving hers. "How could I forget? You were the first one who ever helped me."
Elena stared at him, her eyes shimmering with an inexplicable emotion.
"After losing my parents," he continued, "I shut everyone out. I couldn’t forget that horrific incident."
His mind raced back to the night he had lost his parents. "Every day, I thought those people would come back and kill me too."
Elena’s heart ached.
"That fear consumed me. I stopped talking to people. I stopped trusting them. The ones who used to be my friends started to mock me, humiliate me, and bully me. I was left alone at school. And that worsened my condition."
When he remembered those boys bullying him, hitting him, the muscles of his body stiffened.
"It was not that I didn’t want to fight back. I wanted to. I wanted to hit them back and make them stop. But every time, something inside me froze. No matter how angry I was, I couldn’t move. It was as if some invisible force was stopping me, pulling me back. In the end, I just endured it."
His jaw tightened as he thought about how helpless and foolish he had been back then. "I never told anyone. Not Grandpa. Not Eve. No one knew I was bullied at school."
There was anger and regret in his eyes. But they disappeared soon, and his expression softened as he looked back at her.
"Then you appeared." He cupped her face gently. "Like an angel."
Elena’s breath caught.
"You gave me hope when I had none. You gave me courage. You taught me to fight back for myself."
The tenderness in his voice made her heart tremble.
"If that’s true," she asked softly, "why didn’t you talk to me afterward? I never saw you again."
"I got sick after that incident," he explained. "I couldn’t go to school for a week. The doctors confirmed that I had been assaulted. Grandpa became suspicious and questioned. I finally told him everything."
He let out a sigh. "Within days, he sent me overseas. So I never had the chance to meet you again and thank you."
Elena fell silent. That explained why the boy had suddenly disappeared.
"When I returned five years ago, I looked for you. I wanted to find the girl who saved me."
His eyes grew impossibly gentle. "All those years, I never forgot you."
The intensity in his gaze made her heart race. "In my mind, I already imagined you as my girlfriend."
Elena’s breathing changed. Her pulse suddenly roared in her ears. "Really?"
"Yes." His thumbs brushed over her cheeks intimately. "I never allowed another woman to get close to me. I planned to ask you to be my girlfriend. But when I finally found you, you were already engaged to Noah."
For a moment, neither spoke.
Elena looked into his eyes. She couldn’t help wondering if she had met Elias first, would her life have turned out differently? Would she have been spared heartbreak?