"I forced her?" I looked straight at Clive. "When her parents and your family had backed her into a corner, I was the one who took her in!"
"If you wanted to keep her and the baby, you could have sent her abroad. Instead you'd rather burn down our wedding than not marry her. Is the child even yours?"
The slap landed hard across my face.
Clive's expression went black. "You knew Mom and Dad didn't like Jade, and you took her in on purpose so they'd unload all their anger on her. As if that wasn't enough, now you want to ruin her name too!"
A low ripple of gasps went up around us. A few of them, I realized, were guests who'd been at the wedding earlier.
"Wait, the wedding got called off because of this woman?"
"Tsk. Catching a mistress in the act, huh."
Someone called out, loud and deliberate, "Mr. Sanchez, what exactly is this lady to you?"
I twisted my lips. "Yeah, Clive. What are we?"
Jade pushed forward through the pointing fingers. "Millicent, hit me, curse me, do whatever you want. Just please don't put Clive on the spot in front of everyone—"
I dodged the hand she reached toward me, and she suddenly clutched her stomach with a sharp hiss.
Clive caught her against him at once, and when he saw how pale she'd gone, something in his eyes turned to stone.
"Jade is my first love!"
He tucked her behind him and pulled a photo from his pocket. A picture of two people, a boy and a girl in school uniforms, standing side by side.
"I only found out recently. Back then it was Millicent Maddox who hired thugs to torment her, who forced her to break up with me. This vicious woman is the real mistress who tore us apart!"
My eyes went wide, and my voice shook at the sheer madness of it.
"Clive—you sure that's how that photo really goes?"
After Raymond died, Clive sank into a deep depression. Watching him like that, I hated that I couldn't take the pain off him and carry it myself.
He said he wanted every photo of Raymond, and I went to acquaintances one by one, begging, doing whatever it took to give him that.
The one in his hand was the one I'd dug out after nights without sleep, sifting through tens of thousands of pictures on his old phone.
It had been a photo of three people.
Now Raymond, who'd stood in the middle, had been cut away, leaving only Clive and Jade.
Looking at how carefully it had been doctored, a cold dread crawled over my whole body.
So he'd prepared all along to pour every filthy thing onto me.
A bleak chill spread through me. I took out my phone, pulled up the original, and barely lifted my hand before Clive's face flashed with panic and he knocked the phone flying.
"Millicent Maddox! What else are you trying to do to Jade?"
"Isn't this all about you wanting back the thing I gave her? Fine, take it!"
He lifted the heirloom pendant off Jade's neck and hurled it against the ground.
"Take your thing and get out! Don't ever come bother us again!"
I lunged on instinct, but I was too slow.
The jade hit the floor a beat ahead of me, and a flying shard sliced a long cut across my face.
Blood welled up, but I felt nothing, my eyes red and fixed on Clive.
He took a step back without meaning to, panic crossing his face.
He had never once imagined that my eyes could look at him with hate.
"Millicent... I..."
Before he finished, Jade cried out in pain. "My stomach! Clive, the baby—"
Clive snapped back to her and swept her up into his arms.
"Don't be scared. I'm taking you to the hospital right now!"
The leather shoes I'd once polished spotless ground down over the back of my hand, and his stride never wavered.
The pain blacked out my vision, but I kept my eyes open and watched his back as he walked away.
The image in my mind slowly overlaid it.
The Clive in my memory, the night that rich heir drugged me and dragged me off when I couldn't fight back, had thrown himself in without a second thought and knocked the man down with one punch.
That night, he'd held me just like this, and walked away just as fast, never once looking back.
