Normally, the students would never have dared to make this much of a scene.

As everyone stood there awkwardly exchanging looks, Cheryl suddenly rose onto her tiptoes and licked the cream off Zack's face.

The entire room froze.

Zack himself went still for a brief moment before calmly wiping away the smear with his hand, his tone carrying a helpless sort of indulgence.

"I know you're greedy when it comes to sweets, but that doesn't mean you have to taste everything you see."

Only then did Cheryl seem to realize what she had done. She stuck her tongue out shyly, then turned to explain herself to me, though there was a faint trace of provocation hidden in her eyes.

"Sorry, Ms. Hemingway. I just really love sweets, so I lost control for a second. You're not upset, are you?"

Slowly, I stood up.

Under everyone's gaze, I walked to the dining table and, without warning, flipped the remaining half of the cake onto the floor.

The heavy thud echoed through the room.

I looked at Cheryl, whose face had instantly stiffened, and smiled faintly.

"Don't you love sweets?

"Go on then. Lick the rest off the floor too."

The girl said nothing, but her eyes reddened almost instantly.

Zack's expression darkened at once. He strode over and grabbed my wrist.

"That's enough, Joanna! She's still just a young girl. She's naive. Do you really have to humiliate her on her birthday?"

The other students quickly stepped in to ease the tension.

"Ms. Hemingway, Cheryl just likes to snack, that's all. She didn't mean anything by it. She used to steal bites from Mr. Fenton's lunchboxes all the time. She got so hooked she'd try to mooch food every day."

"Yeah, she's just childish. There's no bad intention behind it."

The moment I heard the words lunchbox, I froze.

Then a wave of bitter irony surged through my chest.

Ever since discovering that Zack suffered from a rare illness, I had spent countless nights buried in ancient medical texts, learning to prepare medicinal meals for him by hand.

But he was always busy. The lunchbox would come back untouched again and again.

Right when I was about to give up, one day, the lunchbox suddenly came back empty.

That day, Zack had even made a rare request of his own.

"Can you make it for me every day from now on? I want to bring it to school."

At the time, I had been overwhelmed with joy. I thought he had finally learned to appreciate my feelings, finally accepted my clumsy way of caring for him.

Turns out the truth was far uglier than I imagined.

I stared into Zack's eyes, catching the flicker of guilt hidden inside them, my voice turning cold.

"Tell them all to get out."

He met my gaze head-on, his eyes filled with disappointment and confusion.

After a long silence, he finally gave in with a weary sigh.

"Everyone, head back first."

As the footsteps gradually faded away, Cheryl's voice drifted back softly.

"Sir, has Ms. Hemingway always had this kind of temper?"

I held my breath.

Then I heard Zack answer with tired resignation.

"She wasn't this strange when she was younger."

The sentence echoed in my ears over and over again.

When I was younger, I had once been the prodigy.

At seven, I could already perform emergency care.

At ten, I could identify hundreds of medicinal herbs.

By fourteen, I was sitting beside my father during consultations at our clinic.

Everyone said the Hemingway family had produced a genius daughter. And I had proudly believed that there was no one in this world I could not save.

Until that day.

Zack was pulled from the river and brought to my family's clinic.

He was still breathing, but the handsome young man lay there with the face of a dead man, refusing to open his eyes no matter what we did.

Furious, I drove everyone out of the room, pried open his mouth, and forcefully breathed air into him.

Sure enough, he woke up immediately, his face flushing bright red with anger.

"Men and women shouldn't touch like that! H-How could you kiss me!"

I planted my hands on my hips and saw straight through him with a single glance.

"You don't want to live anymore, is that it?

"Well too bad. As long as I'm here, nobody I want to save is allowed to die."

I forced him to stay at the clinic and made him take his medicine and treatments every single day.

At first, he resisted constantly. Then he slowly stopped fighting me. In the end, he even started helping sort the medicine and receive patients.

Old Mr. Johnson from next door would often tease him about it.

"Kid, I saw Joanna kiss you that day. Shouldn't you take responsibility for her?"

Zack's ears instantly turned red. His fingers tightened around the paper medicine packet, then slowly loosened, as though he wanted to say something.

But Mrs. Johnson cut him off.

"Oh, forget it. Don't drag poor Joanna down with him. I heard his mother…"

That was when I finally learned why Zack had tried to drown himself.

His father had an affair during the marriage. After getting drunk one night, he beat Zack's mother to death. Once he was sent to prison, Zack was dumped at his uncle's house.

However, how could his uncle possibly treat him well when it was Zack's father who had murdered his own sister?

The neighbors all said Zack had practically grown up in a chicken coop. Every day before sunrise, he had to cook for his uncle's entire family.

On the day he jumped into the river, a group of children had shoved him to the ground and screamed that the son of a murderer did not deserve to live.

Seeing the light suddenly disappear from his eyes, I made a decision on impulse.

I grabbed his hand and announced it to everyone there.

"From today onward, Zack is my father's final apprentice. He's part of the Hemingway family now."

His eyes reddened again. I could not tell if he was moved or just angry at me.

Thankfully, this time he did not refuse.

My father had always given me whatever I asked for. Not only did he take Zack in as a student, he also supported him all the way through school.

From that moment on, we were never apart again, all the way until we graduated from university and got married.

This year marked the eighth year of our marriage.

I was no longer the brilliant, high-spirited genius girl I once was. Now I was a professor so obsessed with developing a targeted drug that I had nearly driven myself insane.

To him, it was probably no surprise that I had become strange.

I crouched down and began cleaning up the mess scattered across the floor.

When I finally finished salvaging the trampled samples, a sudden impulse rose inside me.

I wanted to throw everything into the trash.

But in the end, I carefully locked the samples back inside the cabinet.

We had been husband and wife since we were young.

No matter what, I still could not bear to watch him die.

The next day, I was in the lab as usual, checking data.

Ever since developing the special treatment for my father's terminal illness, my research had made a major breakthrough.

Maybe, just maybe, I really could develop the targeted drug before Zack's condition worsened.

My phone suddenly rang.

It was the dean.

"Ms. Hemingway, your latest paper has been accused of plagiarism. Please come to my office immediately."

My chest tightened. I did not even have time to ask questions before hurrying out with my data and rushing to the dean's office.

I did not expect to run into two familiar figures right outside the door.

Standing on tiptoe, Cheryl carefully wrapped a gray linen scarf around Zack's neck.

"Professor, is that warmer?"

Around her own neck was a matching off-white scarf.

My sudden arrival seemed to shatter the intimate atmosphere between them.

Cheryl immediately put on an innocent expression.

"Ms. Hemingway, you're here too!"

Hearing her voice, Zack turned around. His gaze rested on my face for a brief moment, but he said nothing.

I pretended not to notice either of them and walked straight into the office without looking back.

"Dean, what's going on with this plagiarism accusation? There's no way I would ever do something like that."

The dean looked deeply uncomfortable.

"Ms. Hemingway, of course I know what kind of person you are. But the one who submitted the paper and made the accusation this time is... Mr. Fenton's student."

My entire body froze.

I turned around in disbelief.

Zack was walking in with Cheryl tucked protectively behind him.

"You gave her my paper?"

I could barely believe it.

Zack lifted his eyes to meet mine, his expression calm and unreadable. "Cheryl's thesis was personally supervised by me from start to finish. There is no plagiarism involved."

He paused, and when he looked at me again, there was even a trace of disappointment in his gaze.

"Joanna, I showed you that paper before because I hoped you could give her some guidance. You shouldn't be making such reckless accusations."

The accusation crashed over me like a tidal wave. My mind spun so violently that the world seemed to tilt around me.

I did not even know how Zack had pulled me outside the room. All I could hear was his cold, detached voice.

"Cheryl needs a prestigious award to secure a teaching position after graduation. Joanna, this paper means nothing to you. Just let her have this one."

I stared at him in disbelief.

I could not believe words like that were coming from someone who called himself a teacher.

"Then what about me? I already submitted that paper. If it gets flagged for plagiarism and rejected, that stain will follow me forever!"

"It's only one paper. It won't affect your status or position."

His tone remained flat, almost casual, as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world.

An overwhelming sense of grief and absurdity clenched around my chest.

I looked at his face and suddenly found it unbearably unfamiliar.

"Zack... how far have you two gone?"

He frowned slightly, not understanding.

"What, have you kissed already? Or have you slept together too?"

At last, realization hit him. Anger surged into his eyes almost instantly.

"Joanna! How could your thoughts be this filthy? Cheryl and I are nothing more than teacher and student!"

"Nothing more?"

I let out a cold laugh, my eyes falling on the scarf around his neck.

It was painfully conspicuous.

"You've been allergic to cotton-linen fabric since you were little. Back when we were kids at the clinic, even touching it would make you itch all night."

His expression stiffened.

Instinctively, he reached for the scarf, wanting to pull it off, but halfway through the motion, he abruptly stopped. A flicker of discomfort crossed his face.

Then, just as quickly, he returned to that calm, restrained version of himself.

"Joanna, you're overthinking this."

He sighed and placed a hand on my shoulder.

"Even if the school rules it as plagiarism, at most you'll receive disciplinary action. They won't remove you from your position. But Cheryl only has this one chance."

The fury that had been building inside me finally exploded.

"Do you even realize that if I'm accused of academic misconduct, the school will revoke my access to Lab C6?"

That clause had been written into the contract I signed with the university years ago. Zack had never known about it.

A trace of surprise finally appeared on his face, but it quickly faded back into his usual indifference.

"Wouldn't that be a good thing?"

The way he looked at me carried a kind of exhaustion and emotional distance that seemed to have built up over many years.

"Joanna, you've locked yourself away in that lab for eight whole years.

"You should realize by now that your father's illness may never be cured. Maybe this is a chance for you to finally stop. Maybe that's better for you."

Better for me?

So the eight years I had spent racing against time to save both my father and him... in his eyes, it had all been meaningless self-imprisonment.

The crushing disappointment and heartbreak shattered the last of my restraint.

I raised my hand and slapped him across the face with all my strength.

"Zack, I will never let you destroy my research."

His head turned slightly from the impact, a red handprint rapidly surfacing against his pale skin.

A few seconds later, the last trace of warmth disappeared from his eyes.

All that remained was ice.