Chapter 4 - Shadows of the Past
To understand why Vanessa hated me with such visceral intensity, one had to look back five years, long before Adrian’s family struck oil and real estate gold, transforming themselves into society royalty.
Back then, Adrian and I were architectural interns working sixty-hour weeks for a pittance in a cramped downtown office. We lived on instant noodles, shared textbooks, and dreamed of building sustainable public housing. Vanessa had entered the picture during our final year at university—a sleek, ambitious marketing major with an eye for wealthy men and an ruthless instinct for social elevation.
She hadn’t built her wealth; she had scavenged it, latching onto Adrian the moment his uncle’s venture capital firm hit a multi-million-dollar IPO. Overnight, Vanessa transformed from a struggling student into a self-proclaimed high-society heiress. She traded her modest wardrobe for designer labels and systematically scrubbed every trace of her ordinary past, including the friends who knew her when she shared a tiny, mold-infested apartment with three roommates.
I was the last living link to that past. I knew about her massive student loan defaults, her estranged family in the industrial suburbs, and the petty retail jobs she had been fired from for skimming register drawers.
When Adrian invited me to his wedding—against Vanessa’s strict, paranoid blacklist—he thought he was simply honoring an old, cherished friendship. He had no idea that Vanessa’s desperate efforts to keep me away weren't just about petty jealousy.
They were about self-preservation.
“You’re just a nobody from the slums,” Vanessa hissed, her voice trembling with venom as she abandoned all pretense of aristocratic grace, lunging toward me across the sea of broken champagne glass. Two security guards finally snapped out of their daze, intercepting her just inches away and holding her back as she thrashed wildly in her fifty-thousand-euro gown.
“Let me go!” she screamed, scratching at the guards’ arms. “She’s a fraud! She forged everything! Arrest her!”
I stood my ground, unmoving, holding the manila folder at my side.
Adrian walked slowly toward me, his eyes dark with exhaustion and pain. “Maya,” he said softly, his voice barely audible over the chaotic whispers of the surrounding crowd. “What is inside that folder?”
May you like
I looked at him with genuine empathy. I had loved Adrian once, long ago, in that quiet, unspoken way of lifelong friends, but that affection had matured into something sturdier: a desire to rescue him from a cage of gold and deceit.
“Everything you’ve been asking your father about for the last six months,” I replied clearly. “And a few things Vanessa hoped would stay buried forever in the corporate registry.”
