CHAPTER 2 The Girl from the Hospital
The ballroom fell completely silent.
Twenty years earlier, Ethan had spent months in the children's wing of St. Catherine's Hospital. Angry, lonely, and abandoned by his family, he had found comfort only in the little girl whose bed stood beside the window. Lily had leukemia, but she smiled every day while folding colorful paper cranes.
She had taught Ethan how to fold them too.
When he accidentally cut his finger with a pair of scissors, she wrapped it in a cartoon bandage and laughed until he smiled for the first time in weeks.
Then one morning she was gone.
The nurses told him she hadn't survived.
For twenty years he believed them.
Now she stood in front of him wearing a bakery delivery uniform.
Lily quietly explained the truth.
"I wasn't dead. My mother couldn't afford my treatment anymore. A charity transferred me to another hospital."
"I searched for you," Ethan admitted. "I even hired investigators years later."
"They never found me."
She nodded sadly.
"I tried writing."
Vanessa stepped between them, unable to understand what was happening.
"Ethan... who is she?"
He barely looked at her.
"I built the children's hospital because of Lily."
The room froze.
"I spent twenty years believing I couldn't save one little girl."
Vanessa stared at him in disbelief.
"So everything... all those charity projects..."
"Were because I thought she died."
Lily lowered her head.
May you like
"I only came to deliver a cake."
Instead, she had walked back into the most important memory of Ethan's life.
