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Winona's eyes burned, and it was only when she felt the wetness on her cheeks that she realized she was crying.

After three years abroad, she thought she had cried all her tears out. She never expected a stranger's casual remark to break her like this.

Seventeen-year-old Winona would have done absolutely anything for Zachary Shaw.

Twenty-seven-year-old Winona just wanted to escape.

After hanging up the phone, she stood frozen in place for ten minutes, waiting for the suffocating wave of despair to recede.

But the heavy melancholy inevitably dragged her mind back to another memory.

A few years ago, she had been driving the Wynn family's grandmother to a vacation resort. The grandmother had spoiled her rotten since childhood, nurturing Winona's once-radiant personality. That night, they got caught in a landslide. Panicking and completely lost, she had called Zachary, only for Sienna to answer his phone.

"I cut my hand, and Zachary is keeping me company. He doesn't have time to come to you."

By then, Winona and Zachary had already set a wedding date, yet Sienna still clung to the habit of calling him by an intimate nickname.

Winona broke down sobbing in the car. When her grandmother asked what was wrong, she hysterically confessed that Zachary might be cheating on her.

Cheating on her with his adoptive sister, Sienna.

It was an explosive, horrific scandal.

Outside the car, the earth shattered as a violent mudslide flipped their vehicle. Her grandmother suffered a fatal heart attack that very night.

Her final words to Winona were, "Zachary isn't the type to cheat. You two need to make it work."

When the rescue team finally brought her to Zachary, his pristine suit was ruined, and his expensive leather shoes were coated in thick mud. It was the first time she had ever seen him look so unhinged and desperate. The moment he saw her, he pulled her into a bone-crushing embrace.

"What the hell were you playing at?"

Her grandmother's death had kept Winona weeping for six straight months. Zachary moved his entire workspace to their home and stayed by her side the entire time, barely even contacting Sienna.

Winona was consumed by guilt, convinced that her own reckless assumptions had caused the tragedy.

But in that terrifying moment in the car, she genuinely believed she was going to die.

Those memories played on a loop in her head. The phrase "childhood sweethearts" now felt like a cruel tragedy.

Winona used to constantly badger Zachary, asking if he actually loved her.

But he had never given her a straight answer.

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