The Grass Is Greener on the Other Side

Chapter 1 Five years into my secret relationship with my superior, Morgan Gulley, I finally achieved enough results at work to be promoted. Thanks to that, I was finally able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him.

On the day of the celebration dinner, I was filled with joy. However, I then saw him giving all the credit that should have belonged to me to that one company intern—Sestina Roth.

Everyone around us was toasting and celebrating. They teased Morgan and Sestina about being a match made in heaven and praised them for being an equally capable duo.

Meanwhile, I felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over me. I remained rooted to the spot, overcome with despair.

After realizing that he did not love me, I quietly made a phone call.

“I’m willing to leave my current company for yours and fly to Amurus to develop my career there, Mr. Jarle,” I said into the phone.

…

For a moment, Linden Jarle was stunned to hear what I said. He then immediately started making arrangements to finalize my employment with his company.

“Are you serious about that, Quiana? I’ll notify my people immediately and have them prepare a welcome party for you here in Amurus!”

Then, his tone changed. “I just knew that Morgan Gulley fellow had no eye for talent. You’re letting your talent go to waste by staying at his side! Once you come over to my company, we’ll grow better and stronger together!”

I hummed lightly in acknowledgement. Through the restaurant’s transparent glass windows, I saw Morgan being goaded by the party attendees into exchanging a mutual toast with Sestina.

There was no trace of reluctance on his face. On the contrary, he looked quite content with the situation, and his eyes were filled with sweetness and deep affection.

Linden could also hear the ruckus on my end, so he asked me when I could fly to Amurus.

It felt as if there was a huge gaping hole in my heart. Almost as if I was torturing myself, I watched them kiss each other while entwined in each other’s arms.

I clutched at my aching chest and told Linden, “Give me two days. After I’ve completed the handover, I’ll come find you in Amurus.”

As Linden giddily hung up the call, I let my hand fall to my side, my body trembling unconsciously.

It was a midsummer night, but I felt as if I had fallen into an icy lake when I witnessed Morgan cheating on me.

I could hear waves of laughter coming from inside the restaurant. Morgan’s good friends, who had started their business from scratch alongside him, presented Sestina with the fresh flowers they had prepared beforehand to help him woo her.

My fingernails dug into my palms, allowing me to retain my last shred of rationality and dignity. A second later, Morgan caught sight of me standing outside the window.

A flash of panic crossed his face, but he quickly calmed down and reverted to his previous arrogant, dignified countenance—that version of him who looked at me as if I was nothing but an insignificant ant.

I had once been so madly in love with this noble, seemingly unattainable side of him that I had pursued for three years. I had devoted everything to him.

When he agreed to date me five years ago, I felt like I had won the lottery.

However, after witnessing everything that day, I suddenly felt so tired.

It was tiring to constantly chase after Morgan’s footsteps and maintain a romantic relationship with him, only to be nothing but a secret lover who was not allowed to publicize the relationship.

Seeing him thoughtfully peel apples for Sestina, wipe her mouth with a napkin, and pat her back, I finally realized it wasn’t true that he didn’t understand tenderness. I simply hadn’t been the one who could draw that tenderness out of him.

I walked into the restaurant, picked up a wine glass from the table, and mimicked everyone else in toasting to Morgan. “I, Quiana Emer, wish Mr. Gulley and Ms. Roth a happy, long-lasting relationship.”

I then downed my glass of strong wine in one go, smiling through the tears that formed in my eyes as I choked on the alcohol.

Morgan was stunned for a moment and could not help but frown at my appearance.

Knowing that I was an eyesore to him, I turned around and left decisively.

Morgan unconsciously called out to me as he watched me leave.

However, Sestina’s drink was suddenly knocked over right at that moment. She exclaimed in surprise, which pulled Morgan’s attention away. He immediately removed his suit jacket and put it over her lap, attentively taking care of her.

I laughed harshly as I looked at Morgan’s frantic expression, an inexplicable bitterness worming its way into my heart.

In the five years I had been with him, he had been like a statue whose expression could remain unchanging even if the entire world collapsed around him. However, Sestina’s every move seemed to cause him to break character repeatedly.

No matter how much I tried to ignore reality, I should no longer continue to deceive myself.

In the end, I took a taxi back alone, returning to the home I had lived in for five years.

Chapter 2 As I stepped into the house, I saw traces of the life I lived with Morgan everywhere—the matching slippers, the custom-made pillows on the couch, the photo of me and him on the table…

I placed the only photo of us together face down on the table, thinking back to when it was taken.

I even begged Morgan to take the photo with me on my birthday last year. He looked as cold as ice in the photo and had even been reluctant to smile.

After glancing at the photo, I mechanically began to pack my bags.

When I opened the door to Morgan’s study, I saw photos of Sestina all over the walls. They were photos from her childhood to university. Morgan and Sestina looked intimate in the images. The pictures depicted them gazing at each other, and there was apparent affection in Morgan’s eyes.

At that moment, I suddenly recalled that childhood sweetheart he had always refused to speak about. It turned out that Sestina had been in his heart all these years.

Why had he accepted my confession and played with my sincerity when someone else already had his heart?

I looked at the glass cabinet in the study that held the birthday gifts he had prepared for Sestina every year.

He had barely been willing to spare me a smile on my birthday, much less prepare an exquisite gift.

He had always marked this study room as off limits and never allowed me to enter it. However, now that the truth was laid bare before me, I simply felt my heart ache.

It turned out that throughout the five years he had been in a relationship with me, he had been constantly reminiscing about his past with Sestina in the study.

I could not help but feel nauseated at that thought. I rushed out of the study, vehemently cut up that one photo of us together, and threw it into the trash can.

Late at night, Morgan stumbled in, reeking of wine, and tossed the plastic bag in his hand at me.

His gaze did not carry the slightest hint of guilt.

Instead, he looked at me like a rich noble sparing a beggar money and said, “Just let Sestina have the credit for your work this time, Quiana. She’s a newcomer who has just returned to the country, so she needs those results to prove herself more than you do.”

I said nothing. It was my first time seeing his shamelessness with clear eyes, but my heart slowly turned numb.

I refused to believe that Morgan was unaware of how many nights I had stayed up working tirelessly on this project and how I had drunk so much with those major clients of ours that I suffered stomach cramps from too much wine.

However, he had now come up with reasoning as absurd as that for the sake of his childhood sweetheart.

Seeing me remain silent, Morgan softened his attitude for the first time and attempted to persuade me by saying, “Alright. I’ll forget everything you said to me out of anger at the restaurant today. I know you’ve had it tough these past few days, so I went out of my way to buy you the skirt that you wanted. Take it out and have a look.

“Also, make sure to get along well with Sestina at the company in the future.”

He then headed to the bathroom to take a shower.

When I opened the bag, I saw that the skirt had obviously been worn before. There were incredibly obvious wine stains on it.

As I looked at it, I started laughing. Morgan had likely given Sestina the clothes from the bag after she soiled hers, and now he was trying to console me by handing me her stained white skirt.

It all checked out. After all, when had Morgan ever put effort into anything he gave me? In fact, I had always been a dispensable existence to him.

As I tossed and turned in bed that night, I heard Morgan call out Sestina’s name in his dreams, his voice low and tender. Tears flowed unconsciously down my face, wetting my pillow.

I never had a place in his heart. Since that was the case, I would simply treat these five years as a dream that he had woven for me.

Now that I had awoken from this dream, I did not want him anymore.

Let this relationship end here!

Chapter 3 Early the next morning, my eyes were shockingly swollen. Morgan took one look at me and, for the first time, actually showed concern for me.

He asked, “Did you not sleep well yesterday?”

I plastered a smile onto my face and said nothing. He came closer and touched my forehead.

The moment he approached me, I saw a string of obvious kiss marks beneath his shirt collar and could not help but feel queasy.

After not saying a single word to him since the night before, I finally said, “Let’s break up.”

Morgan was stunned. His expression immediately turned cold. “Do you understand what you’re saying, Quiana?”

I nodded, my mind clear. Fearing that he had not heard me well, I repeated, “I said, things are over between us. Let’s part ways on friendly terms.”

However, Morgan assumed that I was simply throwing a minor tantrum. He raised an eyebrow at me and laughed. “It was just one promotion opportunity, Quiana. Why do you have to be so petty that you’re actually threatening to break up with me?”

He patted my face with the belt and slowly asked, “Can you live without me? Don’t let me hear you say something like this again. There should be a limit to your jealousy.”

Perhaps because he thought I was throwing a tantrum to gain his attention, he offered to drive me to the company for the first time ever.

In the five years we had been in this secret relationship, he had always refused to give me a ride on account of avoiding suspicion.

Morgan pulled me into his car, whereupon I caught sight of a pair of torn stockings in the front passenger seat.

Holding back my disgust, I closed the car door and got into the backseat instead.

Morgan had also frozen in place. “Sestina got her clothes dirty yesterday, so I allowed her to change her clothes in my car.”

However, I stopped listening to his explanation and closed my eyes instead.

Upon arriving at the company, my colleagues, whom I used to get along well with, looked strangely at me, as if they were watching an interesting show.

I approached my office, only to discover my valuable documents scattered across the floor. Some of my personal belongings had also been thoroughly rummaged through.

My anger flared instantly, but just as I was about to ask around about the culprit, I spotted Sestina ordering two people to carry a desk into the office.

I picked up a project plan that had two dirty shoe prints on it from the floor. I had spent half a month writing its contents.

As I dusted it off, I looked at Sestina and asked, “Were you the one who did this?”

Sestina covered her mouth with a look of surprise on her face. “Oh. Oops! I didn’t expect them to be so careless either, Quiana. They actually treated all your belongings like trash!”

Even though she was apologizing, there was a look of contempt in her eyes. “However, Mr. Gulley already approved the transfer of ownership of this office to me, so trash should know its place!”

I smiled and decisively lifted my hand with the intent to slap Sestina’s face, but Morgan rushed out a second later with anger in his eyes and shoved me to the floor.

“What are you doing, Quiana?” he bellowed.

I hit my head against the corner of the table. My ears instantly started ringing, quickly followed by a sharp pain in my forehead.

However, the pain was nothing compared to the ache in my heart at that moment.

I stared blankly at Morgan, the man I had once loved deeply. He was now nothing more than a stranger to me.

Chapter 4 Morgan’s anger had not yet faded. As soon as he calmed Sestina down, he immediately started reprimanding me extremely harshly. It was as if I had done something inexcusably terrible and wrong.

However, my slap had not even landed on Sestina’s face.

He yelled furiously at me, “Quiana! If you think you can do your job at the company, then do it! Otherwise, get out! The company is not your playground! I’m not so magnanimous as to tolerate your disrespect for the rules and absolute lack of tolerance for others!”

Tears rolled down my face like a leaking faucet, and my heart ached with terrible pain.

In the three years that I pursued him, I used funds from my family to support his business and asked my father to give him pointers behind the scenes. In that fashion, I had led him up the stairway to success.

However, he said that it was not good for me to suddenly become appointed as the deputy CEO of the company. He was afraid people would call him nepotistic, so he requested that I start from the bottom as an employee transporting goods.

I rubbed the calluses on my fingertips. Even when I no longer had to do such menial work, the calluses remained on my hands and in my heart.

With just one sentence, Morgan had denounced all the effort I had put into the company and everything I had sacrificed for him.

It was like I was meeting him for the first time. I was finally seeing his true colors—his selfish, ugly self—with clarity.

Seeing him leave the office with Sestina in his arms, the gossip-hungry gazes of all my colleagues outside the door immediately landed on me. Some were sympathetic, some pitying, and others filled with gloating.

I wiped my tears away and stood up, using the table to support myself. As I struggled to stand, no one dared to help me or ask me anything.

In the end, it was the general assistant, Jane Yarrow, who could not bear to watch any longer and helped me close the door, preserving my last shred of dignity, before handing me a tissue.

It was only when blood dripped from my forehead onto the floor that I realized that my head was bleeding. I endured the pain while heading to the bathroom to clean the wound.

As I was washing my hands, I saw Sestina smiling smugly at me with lips that were swollen from kissing. “If you can’t hold onto a man’s heart, it doesn’t matter how well you do at work. Look! I can easily steal all your hard work without lifting a finger, so if you know what’s good for you, don’t try to fight me!”

She poked the wound on my forehead with her manicured nails before continuing disdainfully, “Morgs and I are childhood friends, so our relationship isn’t something a bootlicker like you can easily get between!”

Blood flowed down my forehead. Sestina looked at me as if she was looking at trash before leaving the bathroom, smiling and humming to herself.

I stopped the recording on my phone. Then, before I was inevitably fired, I went to the monitoring room and used my authority as executive director to get in. Once inside, I accessed the surveillance feed showing the events that had unfolded in my office.

Finally, I booked a flight to Amurus scheduled for tomorrow and attempted to pull myself together again.

Sestina had been right. Trash should stay in the trash can, and Morgan was the human trash I had voluntarily abandoned. The two of them were truly made for each other.

I returned to my desk, printed out my resignation letter, and asked my colleagues to hand it in for me. After that, I neatly packed up all my things and left the company building.

Night had already fallen by the time I arrived home. When I read the message that Morgan had sent me, I sneered.

It read, “I won’t be returning home tonight, Quiana. Sestina feels a little unwell. Remember to arrive on time for the meeting tomorrow morning. It’s about time you learn to tone down your temper.”

Morgan knew very well that I could not bring myself to leave him, so he would always resort to giving me the cold shoulder. However, I now understood that there had never been such a thing as being unable to live without him.

What happened in the past would stay in the past. I was a brand new person starting from that day onward. I would no longer have anything to do with Morgan from now on!

Having made up my mind, I either blocked or deleted all of Morgan’s contact information from my phone before closing the door to the house behind me.

The next day, I boarded the earliest flight to Amurus and started a new chapter in my life.