Lahat ng Kabanata ng When the Love Finally Fades: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 9

I was too young then. I didn't know what to do. All I could feel was the blood roaring up into my head.I didn't want her thinking it again, so I never touched her money after that.The five hundred thousand came later, from a friend of hers who offered to "lend" it to me. There was one condition. I had to come out for drinks with her.A group of them kept pouring liquor into me until my stomach started bleeding and I ended up in the ER. Victoria came for me after midnight, her face gray with fury. She didn't say a word the whole drive. She waited until we were home."Do you have any idea what would've happened if I'd gotten there later?"I looked at the floor."Is money really worth that much to you? Why don't you just go work as an escort? You've already given up your dignity, you might as well get paid properly for it."I sat in that car with nowhere to put my eyes. Whatever dignity I had left, she went through it like paper.My stomach hurt. My chest was worse.After that

Whatever color was left in my face went out of it.Three years ago Julian put his car into a guardrail with Victoria in the passenger seat. I threw myself over her, and a length of glass went straight through my knee.She took Julian to the hospital. He was only unconscious. She left me there.By the time anyone got to me it was too late for the joint to heal properly. Every time the weather turns wet it breaks down again and the pain goes into the bone. Six months in recovery cost me my job.Victoria never believed I'd been hurt at all, because she never came to see me. Not once.Later, when I told her — happy about it, actually happy — that I'd found steady work again and could finally carry some of the weight at home, she couldn't even look at me without sneering.Then came the night the old injury flared so badly I couldn't lie still. I called her over and over. I sent everything I had.What came back was one transfer after another. And a voice note from Julian."Sorry abou

Victoria stared at the line on her screen."I've been diagnosed with bone cancer. Same as my dad."Her ears were ringing.And then she remembered that day exactly. She'd been at Julian's apartment. He'd had her phone in his hand, laughing."Daniel's asking you for money again. Let me send him something back, he'll love that."And then — nothing. There was no and then. She'd never even read what he wrote.Was it possible he really had it? Julian had checked. Julian had checked, and her parents had told her for years that this man was a professional, that he worked his way through rich women for a living. She hadn't believed it at first either. But what were the odds — married one day, and the next his father's in a hospital bed needing an enormous sum for surgery?Her head was splitting. She didn't know who to believe anymore.What she did know was that she couldn't lose Daniel.Her fingers shook as she scrolled up. Transfer after transfer after transfer, a solid column of them

They arrested Julian.He ran before the trial, but he was never remotely a match for Victoria, and they had him back within days. It added two years to his sentence.It was only when the cuffs went on that it seemed to reach him. The good years were over. What was waiting for him now had no bottom to it.Five years later.Victoria was thirty-five. She'd gotten colder in business and better at it, and she'd cut her parents off completely by then.She lived alone in the house where her brief, miserable marriage had happened. Nothing in it had been moved. A book Daniel never finished still lay face-down where he'd left it on the couch.She never remarried. There was no man anywhere near her, and there never would be. People in their circle knew there was a name you didn't say lightly around Victoria Sterling — a husband who died young, the one thing she'd never talk about.Only a handful of people knew what it really was. Not a tragic romance. A nightmare she was never going to get