He could not remember what he had eaten for breakfast that morning.
He could not summon the name of his own company, the one he had built from the ground up.
But he remembered Shuyin.
Her face existed in perfect, painful clarity. Every fine detail was preserved: the exact curve of her smile at their engagement party, the devastating emptiness in her voice when he told her he was instead marrying her stepsister.
And most vividly of all, the way she had looked this morning in the boardroom, unbroken, formidable, radiating a power that had frozen the blood in his veins.
"I love you, Shuyin," he whispered into the sterile darkness, the words a broken record playing in an empty room.
The curse burrowed deeper with each repetition, rewriting neural pathways, erasing everything that wasn't her. His memories collapsed inward like a dying star, and at the center of the gravitational pull was only one face, one name, one truth his damaged mind could no longer escape.
