All Chapters of From Lies To Loyalty : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Chapter 2: What Did You Do?Lizzie“What did you do?!”My mother’s voice sliced through the hallway before I had both feet inside the house. The door had barely clicked shut behind me when she was in my face, eyes blazing, breath sharp with fury.“What did you do to Kenneth?!”I didn’t answer. I stepped around her instead, slipping off my heels with deliberate calm and placing them neatly by the shoe rack. If I moved slowly enough, maybe the night would rewind itself. Maybe this would turn into any other evening in this suffocating house where silence was safer than truth.“I am talking to you, Elizabeth Marie Foster!” she shrieked.I stopped at the base of the stairs.My father appeared from the living room, newspaper still folded in his hand, reading glasses perched low on his nose. He took in the scene—my mother trembling with rage, me rigid and clearly exhausted.“Carol,” he said gently, “why don’t you let her freshen up first? I don’t think Lizzie would have done something disre

Chapter 4: Lauren Reese“Where the hell are you, Reese? I’ve been waiting here forever!”Lauren’s voice cut through the phone like a siren, piercing my skull with that patented high-pitched urgency. I yanked the device from my ear, feeling my jaw tighten as my grip on the wheel locked into place. The highway ahead blurred with red brake lights and distant headlights as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and exhaled slowly through my nose.“If you’d stop calling every three seconds,” I said deliberately, my tone calm though the tension in my chest simmered, “I might actually be able to focus on driving and get there in one piece.”But my words seemed to set her off. “We had an emergency landing in Chicago an hour ago, Reese! An hour ago! You were supposed to be there waiting when my plane landed! Why am I stranded here alone? Why would you leave me here?!” I inhaled slowly through my nose, letting the air fill my lungs as though it could stop me from losing it completely. “I

Chapter 6: Your Companions Reese Whoever coined the phrase, ‘a sticky situation’, must have taken one look into my future and decided to immortalize this exact moment.Because there I was—standing in the middle of a growing crowd, phones pointed in my direction like I was the star of some public spectacle—while my real fiancée stood in front of me… and the woman beside me had just announced to the world that she was pregnant with my child.A child that did not exist.Jesus Christ.Lauren’s eyes burned into mine, wide with disbelief and fury.Elizabeth’s hand was still clamped around my arm like a lifeline. And people were filming. Of course they were.“I’m talking to you, Reese!” Lauren stamped her heel against the pavement hard enough that several people turned their phones toward her.“Who the hell is this girl?” she demanded. “And is she really pregnant with your baby? Answer me!”For a brief second, the only sound around us was the low murmur of the crowd and the sound of announ

Chapter 8: Focus, Reese Reese By the time we pulled into the underground parking garage of our high-rise apartment building, the tension in the car had thickened to an almost unbearable density. I'd reached my absolute limit—and rightfully so. Not the usual kind of irritation I was used to dealing with. Not the manageable sort of annoyance that came with forced engagements, an annoying father, or even Lauren’s occasional dramatics.No.This was the kind of exhaustion that seeped deep into your bones—the kind that came from being caught in a situation so absurd that your brain still hadn’t fully accepted that it was real.Because if someone had told me this morning that by nightfall I’d be driving home with my furious fiancée in the front seat and the woman who had just publicly claimed to be pregnant with my child in the backseat, I would have laughed them straight out of the room.And yet, here we were, the three of us trapped in this farce, and I could feel the walls closing in.

Chapter 10: You And Me Reese To be honest, I never expected Lauren to actually walk out the door for good. Not this time. Not ever, really.We'd run this script so many times that it now felt scripted. I'd snap at her to leave, get lost, go home, stop hovering. She'd grab her keys or her bag with dramatic flair, slam something on her way toward the exit, then—ten minutes, thirty, an hour later—she'd be back. She'd be sitting on the couch or the bed, eyes puffy but defiant, waiting for me to cave, to pull her close, to mutter those dishonest words that reset the cycle. So when I emerged from the bathroom, towel slung low, and found her still there—perched on the edge of the bed, arms folded so tightly her knuckles probably showed white—I felt only the dull thud of inevitability. She never really went away. Lauren had a way of lingering. Of circling back like unfinished business.So there was actually no shock. Not even a little. Just the heavy drag of exhaustion settling deeper i