Chapter 10-First apology

Chapter 10: 10-First apology

The next morning, Aymara woke up before sunrise. She didn’t rush to get up, she remained perfectly still beneath the sheets for several minutes.

The memories of her past life came rushing back like a violent tide. Everything returned at once from the betrayal of the man she had loved for six years, the cruelty of being abandoned when the apocalypse descended, the despair of watching the world collapse around her, and the bitter moment when she realized that the person she trusted most had been using her all along.

Her death was the most painful part of going down memory lane. Her second chance and the mysterious system that had awakened within her were a bonus, a consolation of sorts from fate.

Aymara opened her eyes. The memory of Dylan’s betrayal and the explosion that ended her life left a sour taste in her mouth. She shot up to a sitting position in hurried pace.

"Five days... I have only five days left," she whispered, her eyes burning with the image of Dylan and Sarah.

She could never forget the look in their faces when they betrayed her. That image was permanently stored in her head.

Taking a deep breath, she turned her head toward the window. The city outside was still asleep.

Streetlights illuminated the roads below. A few cars moved through the quiet streets, their headlights sweeping across buildings that would soon be nothing more than ruins beneath the sea.

There was only five days until the first wave hits the world. After that the world she knew would disappeared.

Aymara threw off her blanket. There was no time for sentiment. She showered, dressed in a comfortable pair of jeans and a loose cream sweater, tied her hair into a ponytail, grabbed her handbag, and headed downstairs.

Before leaving, she looked at the enormous kitchen. It was filled with food. For a normal person, it would have been enough to survive several months but forr Aymara, it was barely a beginning of her stock.

She picked up her keys. "Today, I will continue shopping. I need to check off everything on the list."

---

Her first destination was a mall on the other side of the city. It was not the mall she normally visited and that was intentional.

Aymara had learned something from her past life: people remembered unusual behavior in desperate times.

If she suddenly appeared at the same luxury supermarket she frequented every week and bought enough food to feed an army, if she emptied an entire warehouse of supplies and if she purchased hundreds of bottles of water, someone would remember her.

And when the apocalypse came? Those memories could become a death sentence. So Aymara deliberately went places where nobody knew her.

She wore a baseball cap and simple sunglasses. She looked like an ordinary young woman doing an ordinary amount of shopping.

Except that she was planning to buy enough supplies to survive the end of civilization.

She entered the first supermarket. "Good morning," she greeted one of the attendants.

"Good morning."

Aymara smiled politely and walked in. She started filling her cart. Today, she stocked on large supplies of water, water purification supplies, canned foods, spices, cooking oils, variety of snacks and instant noodles.

Aymara stared at the jars and found herself shrugging. "Food is food," she didn’t get picky, into the cart they went.

She continued with her shopping. Aymara moved to check off supplies for lightning: batteries, flashlights, candles, lighters, and portable chargers.

She checked the items out cart after cart and immediately sent everything into the storage space and moved to the next supermarket.

There she stocked up on toiletries, soaps that she uses and the herbal ones she recalled Nathaniel uses. She moved to tooth brushes, toothpaste and sanitary products. Buying more than necessary.

Her pile were high that when she went to pay, the cashier gave her a strange look. "Are you opening a store or something?" He asked.

"Something," Aymara flashed him an unbothered look and paid straight up and made for the exit without looking back.

When the clock struck midday, Aymara stopped at a nearby restaurant.

For six years, she had been careful about what she ate. Every craving had been suppressed, every indulgence denied because Dylan was always there to remind her to "watch her weight."

Today, she wasn’t listening to him anymore. She muted his voice in her head and decided to listen only to her own voice.

She ordered a large serving of stir-fried dishes, noodles, crispy meat, fried rice, dumplings, and every other dish that caught her eye on the menu.

"This will count as my first apology to myself," she said with a relieved sigh.

When the food arrived, the table was almost completely covered. Aymara stared at the feast for a moment without moving.

Some of these dishes were foods she hadn’t allowed herself to eat even once in the past six years.

Dylan had always said they would make her fat. He had told her that she needed to maintain her figure, that a woman had to know how to control her appetite, and that he was only saying those things because he cared about her.

Back then, she had believed him. She had sacrificed her favorite foods, skipped meals, endured hunger, and forced herself to exercise whenever she thought she had eaten too much. All for a man who eventually betray her and left her for another woman.

She bit down the bitterness that came with remembering how much control she had handed Dylan in the name of love. Her desperation to find love in a world where she was alone, she ended up falling into the hands of manipulator like him and he ruined her.

"Now I know, Nathaniel has always been with me so I’ve never been alone. I will earn back the friendship I threw away and be worthy of the life you sacrificed for me," she vowed.

She composed her feelings. She picked up her chopsticks and calmly took the first bite.

The rich flavor spread across her tongue. Her eyes slowly narrowed in satisfaction.

"Delicious," she commented. "This taste..." Her eyes moistened as she recalled her mother and her love for crispy pork chops. "I had forgotten how much this dish brings me back to you," a tear trickled down her eye.

Dylan hadn’t just taken her away from Nathaniel, he had separated her from her late parents. Aymara closed her eyes.

"I’m sorry, mommy... Daddy..." She sniffled. "You must have been very disappointed watching me give up myself for a man like Dylan from above..."

It pained her to imagine how much they must have been disappointed at her wrong choices.

She pushed the feeling back and took another bite. One bite after another, the tastes brought back memories of a happier her from the past, memories she had suppressed to fit the image of her Dylan approved of.

For the first time in six years, she ate exactly what she wanted without feeling guilty about it.

If eating a plate of noodles could make her fat, then so be it. "To hell with you and your expectations, Dylan!" She cursed under her breath, she didn’t want to disturb the other customers by being loud.

She had already died once. She wasn’t going to spend this second life starving herself to satisfy someone else’s standards.

Aymara picked up another piece of food and smiled. "From now on, I’ll eat whatever I want."