Kyla held the necklace in her hand, feeling as though every drop of blood in her body had frozen solid. She returned to the living room, sat on the sofa, and quietly waited for Gerald to come back and deliver the final decision.

Gerald didn't return home until very late. As he entered, Kyla placed the jewelry box on the coffee table in front of him and pushed it towards him. She looked up at him quietly, her eyes devoid of anger, only a hollow emptiness.

Gerald was momentarily taken aback when he saw the jewelry box, but then realization dawned on him. There was no panic on his face as if caught in the act; instead, he appeared to have shed some facade, revealing a hint of weariness and determination.

"So, you saw it." It was a statement, not a question.

Kyla picked up her phone, typing slowly, letter by letter. "Why?"

"There is no why." Gerald leaned back on the sofa, rubbing his temples. "Kyla, let's stop deceiving ourselves."

He finally looked into her eyes, his gaze colder and more ruthless than she had ever seen.

"Aubrey is great. She's lively, cheerful, can discuss the latest academic advancements with me, and makes me laugh when I'm tired. She reminds me what it means to live. And you?" He suddenly leaned closer to Kyla, his voice suppressing a surge of emotion. "For the past five years, what have I come home to? A silent house with a silent wife. When I talk, you respond only with your phone. When I'm happy, you can't share it. When I'm sad, you can't console me. Kyla, do you know how suffocating this life is?"

Gerald was actually blaming her silence.

He was using the sacrifices she had made for him as a reason to betray her.

Kyla's heart was being torn apart by him at that moment. She was in such pain that she almost convulsed, her vision going black.

Summoning all her strength, Kyla steadied her trembling hands to type on the phone. "Who did I lose my voice for?"

Gerald read the words, a flicker of guilt flashed in his eyes but was quickly replaced by deeper irritation.

"You want to bring up that lawsuit again, don't you? How many times have I told you not to mention it again?" Gerald's tone contained no gratitude for Kyla's past efforts to save him but only endless disgust.

Even his eyes seemed to avoid hers, as if he was hiding something.

After a long silence, Gerald let out a long sigh. "Yes, I admit it. I'm grateful to you. That's why for the past five years, I've tried my best to make it up to you, to take care of you. Isn't that enough? I'm a normal man; I need a normal partner instead of a patient whose emotions I need to always gingerly care for."

A patient. He finally said those word.

The last trace of color drained from Kyla's face. So, all her deep affection and sacrifices were nothing but an exhausting ordeal in his eyes, and he was the weary, impatient caregiver.

She laughed silently, bitterly. Tears finally broke free, falling in large drops onto the cold phone screen.

Seeing her collapse, Gerald seemed to feel a flicker of hesitation. He averted his gaze, his voice softening, yet it cut like a dagger. "Kyla, let's get a divorce. It's better for both of us."

With that, he stood up, seemingly unwilling to look at her again, and turned to head upstairs.

Kyla's world crumbled at that moment. She curled up on the sofa in despair, feeling abandoned by the entire world.

Just then, the phone she had tossed aside vibrated with a few messages from an unknown and unlisted number.

Kyla stiffly swiped the screen open with a blank look. "Ms. Gibson, this is Blaine. I've thought about it for a long time and decided to tell you. It's about the case five years ago, when Seawise Group's predecessor accused Gerald Spencer of academic fraud.

I couldn't help wondering why a corporation as large as Seawise Group would go to such great lengths, even using overseas connections to falsely accuse a penniless, yet-to-graduate PhD student. It doesn't make any business sense. But recently, I discovered the truth behind it all."

The words on the screen pierced Kyla's eyes like daggers piercing her calm exterior.

Outside the living room's floor-to-ceiling windows, the night was a thick, suffocating blanket, isolating the city's noise.

Inside the house, a single dim floor lamp barely outlined Kyla's slender figure curled up on the sofa.

Her fingers hovered above the screen, trembling ever so slightly.

It had been five years. For five entire years, she had deliberately sealed away those memories, covering them with thick scars, believing that as long as she didn't retrieve them, the pain would remain dormant.

Yet, Blaine's few words were like a precise scalpel, effortlessly slicing open that seemingly solid scar, exposing the raw, bleeding wound beneath.

The courtroom scenes from those days, the details she had forcibly forgotten, now surged back into her mind.

She recalled the endless piles of paperwork and sleepless nights, the constant worry etched into Gerald's expression, and Seawise Group's legal team's irrational, almost suicidal, attack strategy.

She had to admit it defied business logic.

A colossal group with a market value in the billions, employing top-tier lawyers, even going so far as to falsify evidence, all to target a doctoral student yet to graduate. It was a farce indeed.

Everyone back then assumed it was the personal vendetta of a senior executive of Seawise Group or a preemptive strike to suppress a competitor.

Kyla had thought so, too. She saw the case as a battle of capital bullying the weak, and she fueled her determination with that belief.

She won. It was a resounding victory that captured the entire legal community's attention.

But now, in hindsight, she realized that her victory back then seemed tainted with an eerie strangeness from the start.

Her phone buzzed again, and a new encrypted file with a note was received. "Take a look at this."

Kyla's heart skipped a beat. She took a deep breath and, with fingers tinged with cold, opened the file.

After decompressing, she found it was a high-resolution image, apparently a screenshot of an email on a computer.

The sender was a vice president of Seawise Group at the time, addressed to the legal department.

The email content was brief, but a chemical term burned into Kyla's retinas like a branding iron. XH-97 formula defect.

The email explicitly mentioned that the formula posed an irreversible risk of neurological damage in pre-clinical testing and must be intercepted at all costs before it hit the market.

XH-97...

Kyla knew the name all too well.

It was the cornerstone of Gerald's glory, the core of his doctoral thesis, and the subject of a paper that had shocked the entire biopharmaceutical field.

Kyla's mind raced, comparing the email's date with the timeline of Gerald's thesis submission and patent application. They matched perfectly.

Seawise Group filed the lawsuit just a week after Gerald had submitted his patent application. In other words, Seawise Group wasn't falsely accusing but was trying to stop him.

An absurd yet perfectly logical thought spread in her heart like a creeping vine of doubt.

Kyla abruptly stood up from the sofa, and the sudden movement made her dizzy. She steadied herself against the cold wall, barely managing to stay upright.

She suddenly remembered something. During the final trial, in the cross-examination phase, the opposing lawyer posed a sharp question about the drug's later-stage risk assessment.

At the time, Gerald, as a witness, had a very brief pause. His lips parted, as though he was about to speak, but ultimately, he answered with the prepared response he and Kyla had rehearsed.

At that time, Kyla had thought he was just nervous and even comforted him during recess.

Reflecting now, she couldn't help wondering what kind of storm was hidden in that brief silence.