On the Day He Proposed, His First Love Returned to Crash the Wedding

With no plans for the day, I wandered the streets for what felt like hours and somehow ended up near the school Zachary and I used to attend.

I was an abandoned child, taken in by my grandmother, who had also been cast aside by her family. I got into my dream university, but she passed away before I could share the good news with her. My earliest memories are of my grandmother; I couldn’t recall anything before that, except for the last name Reed.

Even though my grandmother never went to school, she remembered a poem she had learned as a child:

"I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;"

When she named me Madeline, it was the most cultured name she could think of, a name that she felt carried a sense of grace and beauty. I may not remember much from my early life, but her loving care filled in the gaps. She told me that when she found me, I was badly injured, lying by the roadside, barely alive. She always regretted that after all these years, she hadn’t been able to find any information about my birth family.

I was deeply sad when my grandmother passed away, but the grief seemed to be trapped inside me, and not a single tear came out. After taking care of her affairs, I went back to school. I avoided speaking and interacting with others, and life suddenly felt dull.

One time, while sitting in a coffee shop, I was dragged out by a group of people. They accused me of “pretending to be high-minded” and said I didn’t realize how “dirty” I was deep down. The leader of the group grabbed my collar and pulled me outside, saying, “You lost our love letters? That little bitch made me lose a bet with someone else.”

Probably, their discarded love letters were among the trash from yesterday. Their lives must be so empty if they intersect with someone like me, who’s on the fringes. At that moment, I didn’t say anything. I took a punch without flinching, and just as the second punch was about to land, a pair of big hands stopped it.

A few people who had been so aggressive suddenly lost their confidence and said, “Zachary, let’s get out of here.” They quickly ran off, looking defeated.

“It’s okay,” Zachary said, turning around with a gentle smile. His words felt like a warm breeze that melted away the sadness I’d been shielding.

So, standing by the roadside with a swollen face, I started crying loudly. Zachary, looking a bit flustered, quickly came over to comfort me, saying, “Don’t cry. I’ll go beat up those guys later.”

He took me to the hospital for a check-up, and I had a slight concussion, but my face still hurt badly. After the treatment, I saw three people with swollen, bruised faces, trying to avoid Zachary’s gaze.

“Madeline, your name sounds beautiful. I’m Zachary,” he said with warm, sincere eyes and a bright smile. That day, Zachary and I started to become close.