99% Affection: Mission Failed

"Why couldn't you have died that day instead!" Cassius slammed the door on his way out. Shattered glass littered the floor behind him.

A cold, mechanical voice slammed into my skull. [Mission failed. Erasure will now commence.] He went to the grave of the one that got away, and he drank.

I packed everything I owned. Not one thing left behind. Before the erasure began, I asked him, "Cassius, if I died, would you remember me?" Scorn twisted his whole face. "No.

If I could, I'd wish it had been you who died back then." I gave him a calm little smile. "As you wish." Then I made my last request to the System. "Rewrite the storyline.

Make me the one who died in that accident." Goodbye, Cassius.

Chapter 1 Another fight, and Cassius reached for his usual line to end the show. "Why couldn't you have died that day instead!" Then he snatched his coat off the couch and slammed the door behind him.

That was the moment the System officially declared it. Mission failed. I sat alone in the wreckage of our living room. It took me a long time to speak. "System.

Didn't you say that once his affection score hit ninetynine percent, it could never drop?" He was at ninetynine. I was one point short. One point.

One more point, and I could have stayed. Stayed here and grown old with him. The System had no answer for me.

It was only a string of code, woven together in some higherdimensional world. By its formulas, a human heart at ninetynine percent had nowhere left to fall. And yet.

Mission failed. My life had just proved its precious math wrong in the ugliest way possible. Humans. Such complicated little variables.

Maybe code can feel guilty, because when it finally spoke, it sounded almost sheepish. [Host.

To make up for this miscalculation, I can grant you time to say goodbye to this world.] Then, since I must have looked truly pathetic sitting there, it added one more line. [If you have a wish, I can make it happen.] I didn't answer.

I stared at the pieces of the broken cup. After a long while, I reached out and picked up the shards. One by one. Cassius made that cup with his own hands.

For our first anniversary. I still remembered the look on his face when he gave it to me. I had transmigrated into this world at birth. I grew up right beside him.

Childhood sweethearts, falling in love as naturally as water runs downhill.

That earnest, clumsy boy held out his crooked handmade cup like it was made of glass, trying so hard to hide the nerves and the hope on his face. When I took it, he nearly cried.

Then he swore up and down that the wind had blown sand into his eyes. Standing in the wreckage now, I could almost see him.

That boy, way down at the bottom of my memory, on the far side of all those years. Neither of us could have guessed where we would end up. One step at a time, all the way to this.

When did the first crack open? I couldn't remember. I only remembered that at some point, a plain, forgettable girl appeared at his side. Her name was Celeste Wynn.

At first, Cassius wouldn't even say her name. Then, little by little, she seeped into his life like air. Into everything. Impossible to shut out.

Our dates turned into dates for three. She never actually came along. Her shadow did all the work.

We would pass a shop window full of stuffed animals and he would mutter, "Can't imagine why any girl would love these ugly things." I didn't love stuffed animals.

I knew exactly who did. Or the food would arrive at dinner and it would just slip out of him. "You don't eat onions. I'll pick them out." I ate onions fine. Celeste didn't.

Maybe he felt it himself, his own heart drifting. He held me and apologized. Again and again. He swore he loved only me, that Celeste was someone he admired, nothing more.

He promised to keep his distance from her. I let myself believe our life would settle back onto its old track. Until our wedding day. Until Celeste walked back into our world.

Chapter 2 She had someone lure me up to the rooftop. Then she came at me like a woman with nothing left to lose. She was wearing a wedding dress.

The look on her face was obsession gone rabid. She shoved me. My feet went out from under me, and the only thing that kept me on that roof was my grip on the railing.

Celeste locked both hands around my wrist and hung her whole weight on it. She was trying to drag me down with her.

Then Cassius burst onto the rooftop, and her face lit up. "Cassius! You came to save me, right?" He stared at the two of us swaying over the edge. One arm. Two people's weight.

My fingers were slipping. He hesitated. A few seconds. A lifetime. Then he grabbed my hand, his face gray with panic. "Evie. Take my hand.

Now." The light in Celeste's eyes went out. Then she started to laugh. Softly at first. Then louder, wilder, until it spilled out of her in peals.

Right before she fell, she looked up at Cassius with pure tenderness. "Cassius, I wore this wedding dress for you." "For the rest of this life, let's just say I already married you." And that was where Celeste Wynn's time stopped.

Forever, on that day. They pulled me back over the railing. Cassius was already running the other way, down toward her body, like a man losing his mind.

He was the heir to the Blackwood Group, so the press had swarmed the wedding. Every camera caught the same picture.

The groom clutching a dead woman to his chest and sobbing while people tried, and failed, to pull him away. From that day on, my wedding day became a memorial for another woman.

Every year on that date, Cassius went to Celeste's grave and drank himself sick over her. The tabloids and gossip accounts feasted on it.

The Blackwood Group's young wife, they said. A wife in name only. Deep down, his heart kept one name. Celeste. I propped that marriage up for three years.

And today, the verdict finally came down. We had fought more times than I could count.

But this was the first time he ever said it. "Why couldn't you have died that day instead!" He regretted it. Regretted that on that day, he didn't save her.

An old saying came floating back to me, one people used to love. Maybe every man has two women. At least two.

Marry the white rose, and she fades into a crumb stuck to his shirt; the red one becomes a scar seared over his heart. Celeste died on that day.

So she became the scar he could never stop touching. The living can fight all they want. They never beat the dead. Or maybe that's just what love is.

A thing that turns on you overnight. The next morning, the sun rose outside my window, same as always. Bright. Beautiful. I wouldn't be around to see it much longer.

The System had set my deadline. One week. One week, and I would vanish from this world for good. In the beginning, I chased his heart because failing meant I would be erased.

Then somewhere in all those years of chasing, I fell for him for real. I wanted the ordinary thing. A quiet life with him. Year after year, my whole life orbited his.

I had missed so many sunrises like this one. So this last week would be mine. I would live it for myself. I would make my exit a graceful one.

I went through my things, careful and unhurried. Everything in that house came from our years together. I had picked out every piece myself.

Cassius grew up in a house that never felt like a home. His whole life, he had been searching for one. And I was naive enough, stupid enough, to think I could build it for him.

After we moved in together in college, I poured myself into making that place ours. The renovation. The furniture. Every choice researched, compared, chosen with care.

And now I was leaving. Chapter 3 After I was gone, Cassius would never keep any of this. He hated me too much for that. And I couldn't stand the other option either.

Someday he might love someone new, bring her back here, and let her put her hands all over everything. These rooms held the truest, warmest love a young girl ever had to give. Mine.

So I supervised the movers myself, watching them carry it out piece by piece. Then I hired a crew to strip the renovation. All of it.

Somewhere in the middle of that, Cassius's assistant called. I stared at the screen for a long moment. Then I picked up. "Ma'am, please. You have to come talk Mr.

Blackwood down!" His voice was frantic. Yesterday was our wedding anniversary. Which made it the anniversary of Celeste's death. He and I had torn into each other over it.

By now he would be at her grave, weeping over the headstone. Three years married, and this was his signature performance. Outside, the rain kept coming down. Look at him.

Her most devoted mourner. I laughed at myself a little. The old me would have caved by now.

Fought with him all night, worried about his health like a fool, cooked him homemade soup, driven out there to beg him home, and gotten humiliated for my trouble.

None of that was my job anymore. I let the silence sit, then said, "Sorry. You've got the wrong person." "I can't talk him down.

He doesn't listen to me." I hung up before he could get another word out. Three days until erasure. The house was stripped clean. And I signed it.

The divorce agreement he had been dying for me to sign. I left it in that house for him to find. I knew it wouldn't leave a trace. Nothing of mine would. But call it closure.

Three years of marriage, signed off. After all, this was the same agreement Cassius used to have delivered to my face after every big fight.

The first time he brought up divorce, it was because I had said one thing to wound him: Celeste is dead. He went white with rage and slapped the papers across my face.

They were already drawn up. He had kept them ready. I just stood there, staring at those papers. And what I saw instead was the old Cassius.

The boy who wanted to lay every good thing in the world at my feet. Back then, I was always first. First in his heart, before anything. That Cassius was gone.

It was so funny I actually laughed out loud. He looked at me like I was a chore. "Not satisfied with the terms? What else do you want?

Take it up with my assistant." I laughed and laughed, and then my eyes burned, and the tears wouldn't stop. "Cassius.

Do you remember what you said when you proposed to me?" What did he say? His proposal was legend.

The whole world watched Cassius Blackwood, hopelessly in love with Evangeline Moss, drop onto both knees in front of everyone because he was too nervous to manage one.

When I said yes, he cried for the first time in his life. Cried like he couldn't stop. He said meeting me was the luckiest thing that ever happened to him.

And he said, "Between you and me, there is no divorce—only death.

If you ever want to leave me, it will be over my dead body!" There was even a saying going around back then. "Marry a man like Cassius Blackwood." Chapter 4 But the man who once said all that just looked at me, bored. "Sign the papers.

Let's end this clean." I looked down at the agreement. A scrap of courage I didn't know was still in me picked that paper up and tore it to shreds.

Maybe the past was too beautiful to spit on. Maybe I just refused to hand them a happy ending.

I looked Cassius dead in the eye and gave it to him one word at a time. "I won't sign." Something in him snapped.

This man who never raised his voice at me stared back with his eyes full of fire. "You'll regret this, Evangeline." Dwelling on the past only cuts you deeper.

I pulled myself back to the present and went on planning my own sendoff. I knew the erasure would wipe every trace of me from this world. Still. Call it superstition.

I wanted a grave. A place to belong to, when I died. I took out my savings and picked a cemetery plot for myself. Took my time. Chose well.

Nothing of mine would survive to be buried. But an empty grave, just a headstone with nothing beneath it, would do. Proof that I had passed through this world at all.

The System let me have that without comment.

As for Cassius, his days went to two things: playing the dutiful son to Celeste's parents, the Wynns, and building the charity foundation in her name.

Running between the two ate everything he had. He had even shelved Blackwood Group business.

When the assistant mentioned that I had left something for him at the Clearwater Bay house, his face didn't change.

He offered one flat reminder. "From now on, if it's about someone who doesn't matter, don't bring it to me." The assistant opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded.

He had gone to the same high school as the two of us. He'd had a frontrow seat to what Cassius and I were at seventeen. Two people who loved like that.

And this was where the road went. The burial plot was settled. Next, I wanted a good photo of myself. I found a photographer with glowing reviews and booked a session.

The location was a lake near the college Cassius and I attended. Willows trailing in the water, light rippling gold across the surface. Pretty enough that it drew a crowd most days.

In college, I loved walking there alone. Maybe because that lake looked so much like the one outside my family's door, back in the world before this one.

The day of the shoot, I wore my favorite dress and did my makeup soft and clean. I got there early and watched the water while I waited. What I didn't expect was Cassius.

He came through with a group trailing behind him. He saw me, frowned, and moved on. He didn't come over. Didn't say a word. I answered a text and thought nothing of it.

The photographer arrived a few minutes later. We talked through the look I wanted and shot for a good while. The final images were exactly right. I was satisfied.

I was about to leave when I saw Cassius again. No entourage this time. Just him.

He walked straight at me, displeasure all over his face. "What are you doing here?" The question came out of nowhere, so I tossed back the first nonsense that came to mind. "Shooting the photo for my own funeral.

Want one too?" His brows pulled tighter. "What game are you playing this time, Evangeline?" Chapter 5