Obedience No More He's the One I Deserved novel Chapter 211

The line held a heavy silence before a voice finally broke through.

It was Austin.

Dawn pressed her lips together and whispered into the receiver. "Uncle Austin, it's late. Do you need something?"

A soft chuckle slid down the line. "Oh, now I need a reason to call you? You've always said I don't talk to you enough."

His words dragged with the weight of liquor, heavy and slurred at the edges. "Tell me, Dawn. Where did it all fall apart? What part of this was a mistake?"

Her fingers tightened around the phone. Not a single word left her lips.

There had been no mistake.

It was just the wrong time, the wrong people, and paths that split in ways they could never walk back.

"Dawn?"

His voice dropped, softer now, as if he feared she might cut him off. Her silence scared him.

A trace of pleading bled through. "Don't marry him. Please."

Months ago, those words might have made her cry with happiness. Tonight they sparked nothing.

After two long seconds, she spoke. "Uncle Austin, Ethan and I are already married. I'm not leaving him."

"What's so great about him?"

Austin's restraint snapped. His voice crashed against her ear. "Everything he gives you, I can give you too! I gave you everything!"

Just because I raised my voice at you a few times, you went off and married another man?

Just because?

So in his eyes, all of it had been nothing but petty fits.

His coldness. Sydney's plots. None of it mattered to him. It was only her being unreasonable.

A faint curve touched Dawn's lips. She felt the final thread of feeling break clean away.

"I respect what you gave me, Uncle Austin, but marriage is marriage. You call me reckless. Then reckless is what I'll be."

Even if he told her the sun rose at midnight, she no longer cared enough to argue.

Her tone was steady and drained of warmth.

Austin let out a sharp breath, the sound cutting through the night air.

He stood on a hotel balcony, the whole of Northville glowing beneath him in waves of city light. He didn't even need to think to know exactly where she was.

His eyes burned red, and when he spoke again his voice was raw. "What if I said yes?"

Dawn froze.

"I'll say yes to you. I'll marry you."

But no matter how long he sat in it, all he saw was Dawn.

Her bright, teasing smile.

The look in her eyes each time he told her no.

The way her face hardened with every rejection.

He had always told himself he could never love her. Loving her broke every rule. Loving her meant betraying the very reason he had raised her. Even the thought of it made him feel stained.

Yet he had told himself this again and again, and still he could not stop thinking of her. He could not stop seeing her in his dreams, as if he were trapped in some fever.

Sydney had called again and again. She even paid off his secretary just to get near him.

All she ever stirred in him was annoyance. Nothing else.

He kept asking himself why.

Sydney had been the woman he loved most.

They had years of history. She had shaped his youth, filled it, owned it.

When she left, he had thought the pain would ruin him. But compared to tonight, that heartbreak had been nothing at all.

Back then Dawn had still been a kid. When she heard he had broken up, she had been so thrilled she dragged him out to celebrate. They drove through the desert all night, the wind tearing past the car, the sky opening wide above them in a sea of stars ...