Chapter 454 Hendrey Johnson’s Secret
Dumb? Veronica automatically ignored everything else Larry said and shot him a sharp look. “You are dumb one!” “What are you, if not dumb? I heard a lot of your old embarrassing stories from Hendrey back then.”
“Hendrey? W-What did he tell you?” Veronica couldn’t help being curious after hearing Larry say that. Stephen, who was sitting in the back seat, had his ears perked up as he eagerly tried to hear about Veronica’s past.
“Let’s see…” Larry frowned slightly as he fell into deep thought, his elbow on the car window to support his head. He suddenly burst out laughing within the next few seconds. “Ah, I remember now! Hendrey said that you and some boys from the village climbed a tree when you were in junior high school.
You then fell from the tree, and you were knocked breathless the whole day. He also said that you were catching shrimps at a pond when you fell in and… Haha! Hendrey also said that you are super dumb. You were in third grade then. It was obviously a school day, but a childhood friend of yours who was cutting class saw you on the way and lied to you that it was a holiday.
You just believed him and dumbly went home with him instead of going to school! You even stole someone’s peas while you were walking home. And when you were discovered, they chased after you for a few miles to get you. Haha!”
As he brought up the stories, Larry started imagining what it was like, and he soon burst into laughter. His voice was so contagious that Stephen and Veronica couldn’t help but laugh along. “Were you really so naughty when you were a child, Veronica?” Stephen chuckled.
She didn’t feel embarrassed when her childhood was ruthlessly uncovered. Instead, she let out a deep sigh after laughing. “Yeah. I grew up in the countryside. My school was quite far from home, so I always followed the children in the village to school. I even got tricked by my childhood friend who was playing hooky. I believed him when he said that it was a holiday. I ended up… being punished by my father.”
Veronica couldn’t help but reminisce when she thought about her past. Life when she was a child was so pure and beautiful that she still longed for it.
As she spoke of this, a thought suddenly hit her and she asked, “How does Hendrey know so much about me? I only told him about me skipping class. How did he know about things like climbing trees and catching shrimps?”
“Hendrey contacted your childhood friend Sol last year. Sol was the one who told him all this.”
“Last year?” Veronica repeated as her eyes fell, her eyebrows knitted together in concentration.
It was true that Sol Lewis was her friend from the village. He was a boy half a year younger than her, but he had been doing business in the south all these years. The two would occasionally reach out to one another.
Hence, Sol knew where she was. Sol would definitely have asked her whereabouts if Hendrey had gotten into contact with him and asked him about Veronica.
It made it seem possible that Hendrey didn’t meet her by chance at the jewelry showcase in Bloomstead last year, and that he… had come for her.
Does this mean that he still has feelings for me?
But the thing is…
Why did it take him only a while to be with Tiffany if he did like me?
He has never returned ever since Tiffany’s death.
It all seemed to sum down into one possibility—Hendrey must have liked Veronica, but upon finding out that she had gotten together with Matthew after he came back to the country, he had turned to Tiffany instead.
And finding out the things that happened to Tiffany must have been such a huge blow that he decided to return to Castron again.
Veronica clearly remembered how Hendrey had received news of Tiffany’s death shortly after he had gone to the airport. It was after that that she couldn’t reach Hendrey anymore.
There was no news from him even after she had told him about Tiffany.
Veronica unwittingly began to feel like something was wrong, but she couldn’t pinpoint what the problem was.
“Do you still meet up with Hendrey often?” she casually threw out a question.
Larry didn’t think much about it and nodded. “We contact each other frequently, but we seldom meet. The last time we met was when he went to Castron from Bloomstead. He called me to pick him up after he got off the plane. We haven’t seen each other since we split that day.”
“Oh, you and him are quite—”
She wasn’t thinking too deeply into it at first when she replied casually, but she stopped halfway through her words when she suddenly thought about how she interrogated Hendrey that day about why she couldn’t get through to him. The man told her that he lost his phone then.
She couldn’t possibly be mistaken because she remembered his reply clearly.
She had called him right after she found out that Tiffany had died half an hour after she sent Hendrey to the airport, but her calls didn’t get through.
It was not until the end of Tiffany’s funeral that Hendrey called her back. When she asked him to explain why she couldn’t contact him, he said that his phone had been stolen.
Her expression suddenly became solemn, but she still pretended to keep it nonchalant as she asked Larry, “So he called you after getting off the plane? I was wondering why he didn’t pick up my calls that day. I thought his phone was stolen.”
“What are you talking about? Do you really think anyone can steal his phone? You underestimate Hendrey.”
“Hmm, is that so?” She gave a random reply. Her heart had instantly started thumping hard against her chest as she felt a feeling of foreboding.
Hendrey lied to me, she concluded in disbelief before a ridiculous thought hit her. Why did he lie, though? Is he related to Tiffany’s death in any way?
On one hand, Veronica thought that she must be going crazy to be thinking about something impossible but on the other, she felt that there was something more to why Hendrey rushed to leave and had deliberately not picked up the phone.
“By the way, what is he doing abroad now? We haven’t had much contact ever since he returned to Castron.”
“I was going to ask you that, but you have already brought it up.”
Larry glanced at Veronica as he muttered, “He has been very discreet with what he does abroad. For all I know, he doesn’t have a fixed job. I don’t know exactly what he does. I have asked him before, but he didn’t tell me anything. I do think he looks like those secret agents you see in TV shows, though. He is always going in and out of high-end places with high-ranking officials.”
Larry seemed to be hiding this from Stephen as he said this in English.
He was doing this because Hendrey had specifically warned him to not tell anyone about him when they met up before.
However, Hendrey must have failed to take into account that Larry was an insensitive, clueless man.
Despite Hendrey’s warning, Larry had blurted it all out to Veronica because she was one of his people, and she was also Hendrey’s first love.
“Gosh, how mysterious.” Upon hearing that, Veronica pretended to be surprised by covering her mouth and acting like a curious cat.
Hendrey must be living quite a good life if what Larry said was true. It didn’t make sense that he would return to Bloomstead to be the president of a small branch office.
That company was a small branch of the Dame Group, where the salary for working there wasn’t high at all.
More importantly, running the company required certain management skills and experience. Hendrey, however, didn’t have any experience. How could he pop out of nowhere and immediately be the president of a company?
Furthermore, he resigned after only a few months of resuming the position as the president and signing the contract after the probation period.
The development of this situation just didn’t make any sense.
Veronica then lowered her head and thought it through, and her eyes happened to fall on her wrist. She was wearing a bangle that Hendrey gave her when he left Bloomstead. He told her then that this bangle might save her life during an emergency situation.
He didn’t seem like he was joking at all when he told her that gravely.
She hesitated for a moment before she rolled up her sleeve and reached out to wave the bangle in front of Larry. “He even gave me a bangle when he left,” she murmured. “He also said that this bangle can save my life at a critical moment. Haha! It sounded outrageous to me.”
Larry, who was driving, only threw an uninterested glance at the bangle. “It seems like he still can’t forget about you.”
Suddenly, Stephen pointed from the back seat at the bangle on Veronica’s outstretched arm and questioned, “Veronica, where did you get the bangle from?”
From the look on his stern expression, there seemed to be something he left unsaid.
