Chapter 12
“I didn’t approach you because I didn’t know what I would say.”
“So you followed me instead?”
“I needed to know if I was imagining it.”
“Imagining what?”
“The boy.”
Noah.
“I saw him look at you, Evelyn, and then he turned his head, and for one second I thought I was looking at Adrian when he was six years old.”
Adrian’s face went white.
Vanessa continued.
“I knew.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I knew enough to count backward.”
Anger pushed through my fear.
“You had no right to photograph my children.”
“No.”
Her answer came immediately.
“I didn’t.”
“Then why send it to Adrian?”
Her voice broke.
“Because I already helped him lose you once.”
I could barely breathe.
“And I wasn’t going to help him lose them too.”
The line went dead.
Chapter 3: The Truth Beneath The Rain - DailyFeed
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Chapter 3: The Truth Beneath The Rain
I barely slept.
Every time I closed my eyes, the past rearranged itself.
Vanessa telling Adrian to return to me.
Adrian finding my suitcase and assuming I would leave.
Divorce papers placed on a table before either of us was brave enough to have a real conversation.
Two people who had loved each other for a decade and somehow managed to destroy everything in less than twenty-four hours.
None of it excused him.
That mattered.
I repeated it to myself while staring at the hotel ceiling at three in the morning.
Adrian had still left me in the rain.
He had still chosen cruelty instead of vulnerability.
He had still watched me sign those papers.
But the woman I had spent six years blaming might never have asked him to choose her at all.
At seven, I found Adrian asleep in a chair outside my hotel door.
I stopped.
Marcus stood several feet away.
“He refused to leave.”
I looked at Adrian.
His head rested against the wall.
The feared head of the Moretti family looked strangely human while sleeping.
Tired.
Older.
Almost lonely.
“Why is he sleeping in the hallway when he rented the room across from mine?”
Marcus considered his answer.
“Because Mr.
Moretti believes hallways are harder to enter unnoticed than locked rooms.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I have learned not to debate his security theories.”
Adrian opened his eyes.
For half a second, he looked disoriented.
Then he saw me and stood.
“You’re not going alone.”