I took care of Ethan for eighteen years — helped him through his emotional struggles, became his eyes when he lost his sight. Yet right before he was about to regain his vision, I heard him say he’d never end up with someone like me — a maid’s daughter. I stopped holding on and walked away. But when I took another man’s hand, he gave up everything just to beg me to stay.

Chapter 1

I had been with Ethan for eighteen years. In the third year of his blindness, his mother came to me with his fiancée, asking me to stop interfering with their lives. I heard him say with my own ears that he would rather stay blind forever than marry me — the daughter of a maid.

Our friend furiously reminded him that he had once promised me a future together after he recovered. But he just replied indifferently that those were foolish words spoken in a moment of weakness.

“People should make smart choices,” he said, “ if she doesn’t mind, she can simply stay that way.”

That moment, something inside me died completely. The Sterling family paid generously for my eighteen years of devotion, and I decided to walk away from everything.

But just as I was about to leave, he found me — right before being wheeled into the operating room — and told me he wanted me to be the first person he saw when he regained his sight; he begged me to stay by his side, to never leave.

***

It wa