A dappled light filtered through the blinds in the study, falling on a wooden box at the bottom of the desk—Clara's design manuscripts, hidden away for seven years. Every page was imbued with her painstaking efforts, from the raw first drafts to the mature final versions, from the excitement of their first meeting to their expectations for the future, all sealed within this small wooden box.
Liam was working on documents on the sofa when Vanessa walked in carrying a fruit platter. Her gaze locked onto the wooden box, and a sinister smile curled at the corner of her lips. She had long hated these manuscripts, hated that Clara had used these designs to firmly grasp Liam's attention, and hated even more that these works were a hundred times better than what she had plagiarized.
While Liam was looking down at his documents, Vanessa quickly walked to the desk and yanked open the wooden box. A thick stack of manuscripts was revealed, the edges of the pages slightly yellowed, covered in Clara's familiar handwriting and densely packed corrections.