Chapter 4You Can’t Escape

Things, however, didn’t go exactly as I’d planned.

Three times a week, I personally accompanied Vivian to the gym.

What started as a way to protect her soon became our special time together.

“Mom, am I just stupid?”

After her first class, Vivian looked down at the bruises on her knees, her voice heavy with disappointment.

The instructor pulled me aside. “Mrs. Sterling, this is really tough for a girl like her. Have you considered something else for Vivian? Dance, or piano, wouldn't that be more suitable?”

Dance? Piano?

What good were those? They were just different settings for the male leads to assault her in.

I gently applied ointment to her bruises. “Who ever said you have to learn things quickly? We’ll take our time.”

I sat on the sidelines during her sessions, watching her fall and get back up, again and again.

The instructor, a man named Coach Zhang, kept trying to change my mind.

“I’ve been teaching for ten years, and this is the least talented kid I’ve ever seen. She trips over her own feet, her skin bruises if you look at it wrong, and her body is so soft it’s like she doesn’t have bones. At this rate, she’ll never build any muscle tone.”

But, mindful of the Sterling family’s wealth, he phrased his suggestion delicately. “Perhaps another hobby would be more… fitting?”

I just smiled and handed Vivian a towel and a bottle of water. “As long as she enjoys it.”

By the third week, Vivian finally mastered a complete defensive maneuver. She was so happy that night she even linked her arm through mine on the way home.

The real change happened in the fourth week.

Coach Zhang ran up to me, his face alight with excitement.

“Incredible! She’s a natural! No matter how hard I train her, she’s completely recovered by the next day! Her flexibility is off the charts, and her pain tolerance is unreal! This girl is a prodigy!”

I had a pretty good idea why.

The damned webnovel’s ridiculous heroine-centric logic was finally doing something useful.

But for me, the most important thing wasn’t how many moves she learned, but the fact that the light in her eyes shone brighter every day.

On the morning of the thirty-third day, I opened her bedroom door and found her standing in front of the mirror, wearing the daffodil-yellow dress we had bought together.

“Mom,” she said, turning around with a smile I hadn’t seen in years. “I want to wear this to school today.”

In that moment, I knew something had fundamentally changed.

But I felt a mix of pride and worry, so I decided to discreetly follow her in my car.

And sure enough, getting rid of Liam just meant a new problem would pop up.

Just outside the school gates, Male Lead Number Two appeared: John Tank.

The Tank family was second only to the Sterlings. John and Vivian had known each other since childhood; they were the classic “childhood friends” trope.

When I first read the book, I had even rooted for this “guiding” romance. But seeing it in person, I realized that his “guidance” was just carefully packaged manipulation.

All his talk of, “You’re only getting stared at because you dress so flamboyantly,” and “Good girls are more modest…”

That kind of rhetoric was probably the real root of Vivian’s chronic lack of confidence.

Just as I was thinking this, John walked up to Vivian.