Inside the CEO’s office at Sovereign.

Mika Summers stared at the baby on her computer screen, her eyes vacant and filled with sorrow.

These few photos, the only ones on her social media profile, were the sole source of motivation and hope that had kept her going for the past two years.

When she left, Kiki was just over two months old. Now, he was already two and a half. He had grown up.

Perhaps even if she saw Kiki, even if he were standing right in front of her, she wouldn’t recognize him anymore.

’I’m such an incompetent mother, so incompetent...’

’I wonder if Kiki will ever forgive me... if he’ll even want an incompetent mother like me...’

"Thinking about your son again?" Just then, a hand rested on her shoulder, and a man’s low, pleasant voice spoke.

Mika Summers quickly snapped back to her senses and moved to close the web page. Her tone was cold. "When did you get here?"

"Just now, when you were thinking about your son and looked like you were about to cry." Silas Kent sat on the edge of her desk, his gentle eyes fixed on her slightly reddened ones as he spoke softly.

"—" Mika Summers reached for a file on her desk, lowered her head, and said nothing more.

Seeing Mika Summers’s deliberately indifferent act, Silas Kent spoke again. "Since you miss him so much, and you came back for him, why won’t you go see him now?" After all, the whole reason she’d wanted to return to the country was that she missed her son.

"I don’t want my personal affairs to affect my work." ’People out there can say I only got to where I am today by sleeping with Silas Kent, but I can’t just do nothing. I have to prove my own abilities.’

Silas Kent gave a self-deprecating laugh and said coolly, "Mika, I honestly don’t know anymore if changing you back then was the right thing to do or not."

He didn’t know whether he should be gratified or pained.

The Mika of today was exactly the kind of woman he had once wanted her to become, yet now, he desperately missed the girl who had been so full of life, the one who would laugh and cry.

"Silas Kent, are you going to second-guess your own judgment now, too?" Mika Summers looked up, a cold sneer on her face.

Silas Kent got off the desk. He turned Mika Summers’s body to face him and said softly, "Mika, if it’s possible, you can be like you were before. You can rely on me, you can entrust everything to me. I swear, I, Silas Kent, will never let you down. I’ll love you with everything I have—even my life."

He remembered when they had first arrived in Austerra two years ago.

Because of Mika Summers’s soft-tempered nature, he had often lost his temper, even pointing a finger in her face and telling her to get out of his sight.

And then, she actually left.

He had thought she was just throwing a tantrum and figured she’d be back in less than an hour.

But she didn’t. She was gone for two whole days.

And because he was genuinely angry with her, truly not caring if she lived or died, he hadn’t gone to look for her.

Until his assistant told him that on his way to work, he’d seen a beggar on the street who looked a bit like the woman Silas had been with a few days earlier.

Only then did he suddenly remember her existence.

He drove around like a madman, searching for her everywhere. When he finally found her, she was squatting by a utility pole, curled into a ball from the cold and hunger.

His eyes red, he walked over and looked down at her, but he didn’t reach out to pull her up. He just stood there, watching.

Mika Summers seemed to sense someone was there. She lifted her head and looked at him, her gaze clear and cold, without a single tear in her eyes. "Besides you, I have nothing. Without you, I can’t survive. Silas Kent, I will never disappoint you again."