Marianne's POV
The latest messages stopped last night.
[I swear, Arabella. You could’ve at least warned us you were coming. Didn’t you know Marianne would be here?]
[Exactly. Don’t let her find out you and Gideon are getting close!]
[I really don’t get it. Why does whatever Gideon and Arabella have to do with some third party?]
Arabella replied to that last one. [Some women are petty. She probably thinks that if Gideon and I patch things up, she’s out of the picture.]
From the start, Gideon hadn’t defended me. He never said one word to explain that I hated Arabella because she’d bullied me for three years.
I found myself scrolling back through the chat and realized this group was created the day we got married.
I remembered, on our wedding night, he didn’t touch me as he had to deal with a difficult client, he said. But the truth was, he spent the whole night in that group chat.
I wiped my tears and called my Colette.
“I suddenly want to go to the amusement park today. You free?” I asked, wrapping myself up against the fall chill.
We met there a little while later, and as soon as we met, she handed me the divorce papers.
Without ceremony, she asked the question we both already knew the answer to. “Those two are together?”
I nodded.
She ground her teeth with anger. “Gideon’s an idiot. His dad got murdered by that bitch, yet he acts like it’s nothing. Also, he knows how badly Arabella treated you because of him himself.” Her voice was thick with fury.
She was right. Because I’d dragged Gideon out of a wreck, we’d confirmed our relationship.
But after that, someone locked me in a bathroom and forced me to drink disinfectant.
If someone hadn’t found me in time, I would have died.
Just because I saved him, things between him and Arabella had only gotten worse, at least on paper.
The park was huge, but I soon found them. Arabella’s head rested on his shoulder as she ate a double-scoop ice cream. Their voices were low, but I heard everything.
“We shouldn’t go out alone anymore,” she said. “Even if I’ve done nothing, your wife still looks at me like an enemy. I’m a woman too, I get hurt.” She wiped at her eyes. “Also, that night three years ago, I was drunk. Let’s just pretend it never happened. We can still be enemies, but move on.”
So that was why Gideon was impossible to reach before our wedding night. He’d been busy with Arabella. No wonder she had time to get a tattoo on him before the wedding.
Even though I’d braced myself, her words felt like a bucket of ice water poured over my head.
But Colette, hot-tempered as always, rolled up her sleeves and started forward.
Luckily, I grabbed her in time. But a kid holding an ice cream cone barreled into us, and the sticky mess splattered across my clothes.
When I looked up, Gideon was using his finger to wipe ice cream from the corner of Arabella’s mouth. I felt ridiculous, humiliated, scrubbing my shirt until the stain only grew worse.
Then I heard him say, casual and cruel, “I stopped blaming you a long time ago. My dad used to yell at you. So, him getting hit by you is just his karma. As for Marianne, if she hadn’t been in the picture, maybe you and I would’ve been together long ago. I always thought that sometimes hate, at its extreme, is just another kind of love.”
Arabella’s eyes lit up. “Then will you give me a wedding?”
My vision blurred. I didn’t see his answer. But Colette covered my eyes with both hands, swearing under her breath.
“You ungrateful dog!” she hissed. “If you hadn’t dragged him out of that car back then, he’d be six feet under! You helped him without asking for anything, and yet he let her ruin you for years!”
“Divorce isn’t enough,” she kept muttering as she fumed. “I’ll make sure he walks away with nothing.”
