CHAPTER TWO: The Secret I Couldn’t Tell Him

ARIA

“Call him.” I thrust my phone toward the receptionist. “Tell him I’m not leaving this lobby in this wedding dress.”

I go for the door again. Two guards step in front of me before I can reach it.

“Damian!” I scream..

Employees have stopped pretending to work. Some look away out of pity. One girl by the elevators is filming me on her phone, not even hiding it.

Two hours ago these people were planning to call me Mrs. Sinclair. Now I’ll be content for their group chat.

“Let me go!” I struggle with the guards. “Get your hands off me.”

I can feel the tears coming. I struggle to hold them back. Not now. Not right here.

A man in a suit comes jogging out of the elevator bank, tie loose, already talking before he reaches me.

“Miss Cole,” he says, “I’m Head of Communications, if we could just adjust this somewhere more—”

“Take me to Damian. Right now. Or shut this place down.”

He doesn’t like it. But three minutes later, I am standing in front of Damian’s office door for the first time as someone other than the woman who brings him lunch.

I don’t knock.

He’s behind his desk, jaw tight, like he already knew I’d get here.

“You shouldn’t have come.”

“Why?” I don’t scream. I don’t have the strength to scream. “Just tell me why.”

His eyes don’t leave mine. “There are things that can’t be forgiven.”

“What things, Damian?” My throat tightens. “What did I do?”

He unlocks the cabinet behind him and sets a sealed envelope on the desk.

“Open it.”

  

I look at it and don’t move.

“Why won’t you open it?” he asks.

I finally look up at him. “Because if the man I loved can condemn me without asking for the truth first, then whatever is in there already won. Opening it wouldn’t change your mind. It’ll only change how much it hurts me.”

I push the envelope back across the desk.

Something moves behind his eyes, the smallest crack that goes away before it even settles. For a second, he almost reaches toward me. He stops, looks down at the envelope instead.

”You had every chance to say the truth,” he says, quieter now.

I blink hard. “Tell you what? I don’t even know what you think I did.”

Silence.

“My father collapsed at the altar, Damian. He’s in the hospital right now.”

For a second, he freezes completely. His hand twitches like he might come around the desk. Then his jaw locks again.

“I’m sorry about your father.” His voice goes flat. “But it doesn’t change what you did.”

I take a step closer in utter disbelief. So you do not care if my father dies. Is that it?”

He doesn’t answer. His silence is the answer.

That’s when I notice them—two champagne glasses on the table side. Fresh lipstick on the rim of one. A familiar handbag brand sitting on the chair by the window. A perfume that used to live with me.

Damian’s eyes flick toward the door before it even opens.

Someone is here.

The door opens and a woman steps in with two glasses.

“Vee?”

She stops in the doorway, and for one unguarded second, it’s like looking at a ghost.

“Victoria? I thought something happened to you.”

She doesn’t answer me. She walks straight to Damian and plants a kiss on his forehead.

“We have a press conference in twenty minutes, Sweetheart,” she says. “Smile when you come downstairs. The cameras love happy couples.”

The room tilts, and my stomach turns. I hold onto the edges of the table.

“You are…” I can’t finish the sentence. “You’re marrying Damian?”

She sets the glass down. “I go by Hargrove now.”

My chest tightens.

My best friend, gone for twelve months without a word. Now marrying Damian on my wedding day?

  

“Vee,” I whisper again, hands shaking, “Are you doing this to me?”

“He chose me, Aria.”

“Aria,” Damian says, “this doesn’t change—”

“Don’t.” I hold up a hand. My whole body has started shaking, and it isn’t sadness; it is something closer to disgust.

I stood at the altar for an hour not knowing the two people I trusted had been building a life behind my back! The tears are fighting to rush out now. I am holding them.

I pull the ring off my finger.

“The woman I wanted to marry died the moment I opened that envelope,” Damian says.

I stare at him and almost laugh. “Then I hope she was worth losing.”

“Congratulations. Both of you.”

I throw the ring. It hits his chest and lands spinning on the envelope, and I watch it go still before I turn and run —past the filming girl, past the pity, into the elevator with one hand over my mouth so the scream stays inside.

In the parking garage, dizziness hits me so hard I have to grab the car door to stay upright.

I drive straight to the hospital. A nurse takes one look at me shaking in the waiting room and pulls me into a side room.

“You were vomiting earlier too, weren’t you?”

“It was stress.”

“Maybe.” She doesn’t sound convinced. “Dizziness, vomiting… When was your last cycle?”

“I don’t know.”

She runs the tests anyway.

I sit there staring at the wall, at nothing, my whole body still shaking from a room I’ve already left but can’t seem to walk out of. Damian’s voice. Victoria’s lipstick. The ring spinning on that envelope.

Almost an hour later, the door opens.

“Miss Cole,” the nurse says, holding the results against her chest.

My heart beat accelerates as I prepare for the worst that could happen.

“Just say it,” I whisper.

“You’re pregnant.” She pauses, like she’s watching to see which way I’ll break. “Early, but it’s confirmed.”

The room goes still. I press both hands over my mouth, and for one terrible second I don’t know if what’s coming out of me is a sob or a laugh, because somehow, impossibly, it’s both.

I was standing in a wedding dress three hours ago, waiting for a man who chose another woman.

And now I’m carrying his child.