The Snow Mountain Lie Can’t Be Mended, Iodine Coolness Weaves into the Strings

Arthur was sick. A sickness that meant he couldn’t live without me.

He had been born with a severe allergy to all women. A single touch would raise angry red welts on his skin; in the worst cases, he’d struggle to breathe.

And I was the only exception.

So he treated me like medicine. Like a possession. Like the one pure, white ornament in his dark kingdom.

I’d once thought that was love.

Until he left me for a girl named Barbara. He abandoned me to rush into an avalanche for her, and a drone broadcast him kissing her on a snow-covered peak for the whole city to see—making me the biggest joke in Crestwood.

That’s when I understood: medicine can be replaced.

And if that’s the case, then so can a fiancé.

...

“Miss Rebecca… Mr. Arthur—he charged into the avalanche zone to save Barbara!”

On the other end of the line, Arthur’s Chief of Staff was trembling with a frantic urgency that fractured his words. Behind him, I could hear the howl of a blizzard and the chaos of shouting voices.

I stood in the center of my studio, putting the final touches on the last gift for our wedding: an oil painting of the landscape where we first met.

In the painting, the sunlight was warm, the grass a vibrant green. Everything looked like a perfect fairy tale.

But every word through the phone felt like an ice-cold dagger, driving straight into my heart.

“He’s missing?”

My knuckles turned white around the paintbrush. Yet my voice remained eerily calm.

“Y-yes… The drone signal was lost. Rescue teams are assembling, but the weather is too severe…”

I hung up and stared quietly at the unfinished painting.

Barbara. A sweet, innocent college girl who’d only recently arrived in Crestwood.

After Arthur saved her from some thugs on a rainy night, she’d clung to him like a vine.

Everyone said her eyes—wide and dewy, like a frightened fawn’s—looked just like mine when I was young and innocent.

His men started calling her “Becky.”

And Arthur, whose possessiveness of me had once bordered on obsession, allowed it all.

He began “running into” Barbara more and more often. Canceling dates with me just because she called.

When I confronted him, he would only frown impatiently. “Rebecca, don’t be difficult. She has no one. She’s pitiful.”

Right. She was pitiful.

And what about me?

Three days later, Arthur and Barbara were found.

Word spread across the city through a live-streamed broadcast.