Jasmine's POV
"After I found my mother's diary," Lina whispered, her voice raw from crying, "I knew I had to search for him myself. The boy who kept visiting her at the end."
My chest tightened as I watched her struggle with each word.
"It took weeks of digging through old hospital records and asking around, but I finally tracked him down." Her hands trembled as she spoke. "That boy who befriended my dying mother was Palmer."
The confession hit me like a physical blow. The room seemed to shrink around us.
Lina pressed her palms against her eyes, breathing in shaky gasps as if the truth was cutting her from the inside.
"He remembered me too," she continued, her voice barely audible. "From a photo in our living room when he came to our house that night, planning his revenge against my father. But when I confronted him about my mother's final days, when I told him she had ended her own life after taking those pills, he smiled. He actually said she got what she deserved."
