"Why do you have to be so cruel about it?" Clive paused. "You only want the pendant because you're going through with the abortion, don't you?"
There was a sneer buried in his voice. "It's a minor procedure. Do you really need it for that?"
When Jade so much as slept badly, he treated it like a crisis and stole the one thing that mattered most to me.
But the procedure that would kill our child wasn't even worth a second thought to him.
The cold swept through me. I closed my eyes, hung up without another word, and drove straight for the county clerk's office.
On the way, Clive called.
I didn't pick up. A text came through instead.
【That was me failing to understand how nervous you are before the procedure. I'm sorry. You'll get the pendant back. Just answer the phone first, Millie.】
The phone buzzed again. I let it connect, and his voice came through at once.
"I ran into someone I know while I was at the office just now. Our wedding fell through today, and I'm worried people will start talking about Jade. I need you to step in and set the record straight."
"Just tell them Jade and I used to be together, that you schemed your way between us and that's why we broke up, and now you've come to your senses and want to admit publicly that you were the other woman. Apologize to Jade in front of everyone."
"You don't have to worry about people calling me a cheater over it. I can take a little heat—that's nothing to me. But I will not let Jade suffer for this."
"Do this right, and once the child is grown, I'll give you the pendant back."
I gripped the wheel, and suddenly I was laughing.
Laughing until the tears ran down.
He'd kept Jade wrapped up and untouchable, convinced that taking a few harmless insults made him some kind of martyr.
And I, the one actually wronged, the one only trying to take back what was mine, was supposed to be shoved out front to carry a crime I never committed and stand there while the whole world spat on me.
And he didn't care at all.
I said nothing. I just hung up.
When I reached the clerk's office, I caught Clive's car pulling away, and I went straight after it.
I followed it all the way to an upscale restaurant, where I watched with my own eyes as Clive climbed out of the driver's seat and opened the passenger door.
A foot reached out of the car, and he dropped to one knee, taking that slender ankle in his hand, carefully tying the loosened lace, brushing the dust from the toe of her shoe, and only then easing Jade gently out.
The sight went into me like a knife, and my eyes were wet before I could stop them.
In the Sanchez family's worst days, an investor had humiliated him on purpose, sticking out a foot as he stepped from his car and ordering him to shine his shoes.
"What I do to Millicent Maddox is none of your business, you're hired help. Understood?"
That became the deepest scar he carried. After that, he never bent for anyone again.
Once I'd only asked him to tuck a blanket over my mother's legs while she sat in her wheelchair, and he'd flown into a rage, with no thought for my embarrassment or how it made my mother feel.
Even that had made me ache for him. After that, every morning before we left the house, I knelt and shined his shoes, slipped them onto his feet myself.
I had guarded that wound so carefully. And now what I was watching slapped it all back in my face.
I got out of the car and walked toward them, one step at a time.
"Clive."
His head snapped around, his eyes darting away, his face caught between awkwardness and panic, and still he moved on instinct to shield Jade behind him.
"Millie, why are you here?"
The moment Jade saw me, her eyes went red. "It's all my fault! I'm the one who wronged you. Don't blame Clive, blame me—"
Her little performance was all it took to set him off.
The flinching dropped away. He shoved me, hard.
"That's enough, Millicent! I already apologized, what more do you want? Just because you can't have a child of your own, you'd force Jade to die with my Sanchez blood inside her?"
