Chapter 58 - #58: A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed

[Bonus Chapter]

Ethan knocked on the heavy wooden door for a long time, but no one answered.

He sighed heavily and was just about to leave when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around to see a middle-aged man emerging from the stairwell, carrying a heavy bag of groceries.

“Who… are you?” the middle-aged man asked suspiciously. He looked Ethan up and down, his eyes briefly flicking toward the premium fruit basket in his hands.

It took him a long moment of scrutiny to confirm that he didn’t immediately recognize the visitor standing in the hallway.

“Mr. Forger? I’m Thomas Vale’s son, Ethan,” Ethan replied, politely stepping aside to give the man some space.

“Ethan?” Arthur Forger was visibly taken aback for a moment. He immediately remembered that Thomas had frequently mentioned his son, who had gone away to the city for university.

“Mr. Forger, my dad told me about what happened to Yor. I wanted to come see her…” Ethan said quietly, remaining standing by the door.

Arthur stepped forward and pulled out his keys. “Thank you for coming to check on Yor. Please, come inside. I’m sure she’ll be very happy to know you came all this way to see her.”

As the older man unlocked the door, Ethan immediately noticed the back of Arthur’s hand. The skin gripping the metal key was hideously distorted, marked by deep, uneven patches of healed burn tissue.

Arthur seemed to notice Ethan’s lingering gaze, but he didn’t seem to care. He simply called out into the apartment before pushing the door completely open.

“Yor! Your childhood friend, Ethan, came to see you.”

He waited for about ten seconds before finally turning the handle and stepping inside.

“Ethan, feel free to sit down wherever you like. Yor might not be very willing to see anyone right now, so let me go ask her for you,” Arthur said.

After gesturing for Ethan to sit on the worn living room sofa, the older man walked over to a closed bedroom door.

“Yor, sweetheart, it’s Dad,” he said, knocking lightly on the wood.

The moment his voice fell, the door creaked open just a fraction of an inch. Arthur immediately slipped inside through the narrow gap.

Ethan deliberately avoided looking into the crack of the door. If she was currently refusing to see people, there was a very high chance she wouldn’t want to see him either.

He had left this neighborhood with his parents when he was just a kid. He had absolutely no idea how much she still remembered of their childhood friendship.

They had both been way too young back then.

Neither of them had cell phones, and they hadn’t exchanged any way to keep in contact after the move.

It was supposed to be a classic trope—two childhood friends who had lost touch, reuniting by pure chance after growing up.

But the reality of this specific encounter was deeply tragic, and their reunion was anything but wonderful.

Arthur wasn’t inside the bedroom for very long. He emerged just two or three minutes later.

“Ethan, Yor said she is very glad that you came. But it just really isn’t convenient for her to see you right now,” Arthur said, offering Ethan a deeply apologetic smile.

“Mr. Forger, could I please just have a few words with her?” Ethan asked, looking earnestly toward the closed door.

“I know exactly what happened. I can wear a blindfold, or I can just stand right outside her room. I just really want to talk to her for a little while.”

“Alright… let me ask her,” Arthur sighed. After hesitating for a brief moment, he returned to Yor’s door to relay the request.

“Then… just tell him to put on a blindfold before he comes in…” a soft, incredibly timid female voice drifted out from the room.

The fact that she was willing to agree to a conversation, even with a blindfold, meant she likely harbored a deep desire to reconnect with her oldest childhood friend.

Arthur frantically searched the living room for a proper blindfold, but he couldn’t find anything suitable. He turned back to Ethan with an awkward, helpless smile.

“Mr. Forger, I can just use one of those,” Ethan said, pointing directly at a box of disposable surgical masks sitting on the side table.

“I’m so sorry, Ethan. I’m always happy to have you over, but Yor’s current situation is just incredibly delicate,” Arthur apologized.

He embarrassedly pulled a surgical mask from the box, stretching it over his own eyes first to confirm it completely blocked the light before handing it to Ethan.

“I completely understand, sir. I really just want to say a few words to my friend,” Ethan replied, shaking his head reassuringly.

He stretched the elastic bands over his ears, securely covering his eyes with the thick mask, before allowing Arthur to carefully guide him into Yor’s bedroom.

Arthur guided him across the room until he was safely seated in a wooden chair.

The older man then quietly exited, gently pulling the door shut behind him.

Even though the thick mask blocked all direct visibility, it was still made of a slightly translucent material.

The moment Ethan entered the bedroom, the ambient light bleeding through the fabric plunged into almost total darkness.

Ethan sat quietly and obediently in his chair. Every single curtain in Yor’s bedroom had been tightly drawn shut, leaving the room shrouded in a heavy, suffocating gloom.

“Yor, it’s been a really long time,” Ethan spoke first, his voice soft in the quiet room.

He waited in silence for a long time before a gentle, trembling female voice finally replied. “Ethan… it really has been a long time.”

Sitting in the artificial darkness, Ethan turned his head toward the source of her voice.

Through the faint shadows, he could just barely sense the silhouette of a girl huddled on the edge of the bed.

“Yor, let’s get you in for the reconstructive surgeries. If one procedure isn’t enough, we’ll do it twice,” Ethan said firmly.

“And if two isn’t enough, we’ll do it three times. We’ll keep going until your skin is completely healed.”

Ethan had already learned the grim medical reality from his parents. Yor’s current condition was physically impossible to recover from naturally.

The burns covered a massive surface area, destroying the skin, the underlying muscle tissue, and the deep dermal layers.

“Heal… I’m never going to heal…” Yor shook her head, her voice hollow and profoundly depressed in the dark.

“Ethan, thank you so much for coming to see me. I really am glad to hear your voice again, but I just want to rest now.”

After exchanging barely three sentences, she was already politely trying to evict him from the room.

“Why? Why are you just giving up on the treatment?” Ethan pressed.

“Ethan, I was just a completely ordinary person, and that fire destroyed everything we had. We have nothing left,” Yor whispered.

Her words seemingly struck a deep, agonizing nerve in her heart. “I don’t want to keep fighting it. The financial burden on my dad is just too much.”

In that exact moment, Ethan suddenly understood the profound, crushing despair that had driven her to suicide in his previous life.

“I will personally pay for it. I’m actually making a lot of money now. Let’s just go back to the hospital, okay?” Ethan pleaded.

“Thank you, but I can’t accept that. Let’s just keep our childhood memories pure, okay?” She slowly stood up, her footsteps sounding incredibly weak as she walked over to him.

“I have absolutely nothing to my name. My family has already borrowed way too much debt, and I can never pay any of it back…”

Ethan remained completely silent.

He could understand the girl’s defensive stubbornness, as well as the suffocating sense of powerlessness anchoring her to the floor.

In his past life, she had likely chosen to end things simply because she couldn’t bear the thought of being a permanent burden on the people she loved.

“You should go,” she said softly.

She walked over to the bedroom door and reached for the handle.

“Wait,” Ethan spoke up quickly, hearing the metallic click of the latch turning.

“I recently founded a software studio. And I want to formally hire you to join my company.”

“A studio? Do you even know what major I studied in university?” Yor asked, a faint, bitter hint of sarcasm bleeding into her voice.

“And you came all this way just to invite a cripple into your company?”

“I know exactly what you studied. You majored in Game Engine Architecture, and your grades were consistently ranked in the top three of your entire batch,” Ethan quickly replied, recalling the specific details his father had mentioned.

Click.

The bedroom door slowly closed again.

“Did you secretly ask my dad about my degree?”

“Actually, before I traveled down here, I pulled a list of highly talented regional graduates that I wanted to aggressively recruit for my studio. Your academic file was right at the top of that list,” Ethan lied smoothly.

Even with the surgical mask tightly covering his eyes, he turned his head directly toward the sound of her voice.

“What exactly is the name of your studio?” Yor asked, slowly walking back to stand in front of him.

If there was even a fraction of a possibility, she genuinely didn’t want to leave this world.

It wasn’t that she was necessarily afraid of dying, but she was utterly terrified of inflicting more pain on the family that loved her.

In Ethan’s previous life on Earth, the primary catalyst for her suicide was the fact that her ongoing medical bills were astronomically high.

With her body permanently disfigured, she had found it completely impossible to secure a job to alleviate the debt.

Even if she could psychologically force herself to ignore the horrified, staring eyes of the public, she couldn’t ignore the crushing financial and emotional burden she was placing on her parents.

Both financially and mentally, the weight was agonizing.

It had been dragging on for so long, and the isolation had become completely, utterly unbearable.

But now, if Ethan was genuinely willing to offer her a legitimate job, she was willing to give it one last, desperate try.

She was willing to find a reason to continue living in this world.

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Bonus Chapter for the 1M Views… Thanks for reading!

P.S. GTA 6: Extended Cut… Wow. I mean, damnnn! Did everyone see it? Every time I see Jason and Lucia, they always remind me of Arthur and Mary from RDR2.

I’m beggin’ here!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg72z08aTXY