My Best Friend Took My Man. I Gave Her the Whole Ceremony Chapter 03

My Best Friend Took My Man. I Gave Her the Whole Ceremony Chapter 03

Ethan grabbed the paring knife off the table and stabbed my uncle in the back.

My uncle lunged after us, and Valerie threw herself at him, locking her arms around his waist. “Clara, go! Get Ethan out of here. Now!”

Ethan kept trying to get back to him, to finish it. I hauled him toward the door with everything I had.

I thought if I just got Ethan out, it would be over. I thought the worst was behind us.

I was wrong.

The man who raised me. The man I’d trusted my whole life. He assaulted Valerie. Whatever was in his system, he still did that to her.

By the time we came back with the police, it was too late. I would never unsee what I saw in that room.

Valerie was on the hardwood floor, deathly pale. Her clothes were torn open. One ear was bleeding badly where he’d hit her. There were bite marks on her face.

They rushed her to the hospital. But there was no undoing what he’d done. She’d suffered severe internal trauma. She would never be able to have children.

When Valerie’s mother found out, she came at me. She slapped me across the face before I even saw it coming. “Why wasn’t it you? Why was it my daughter and not you?”

“This is your fault. Everything you touch, you destroy.”

The guilt swallowed me. I didn’t remember walking to the rooftop. I just remembered being there.

I told myself my death was the only way to make it right for Valerie.

Valerie was the one who pulled me back from the edge. She was sobbing so hard she could barely get the words out. “If you die, what happens to us? What happens to me and Ethan?”

“Please. Please don’t leave us.”

I smiled and nodded. And later, once we were back inside and no one was looking, I slipped a paring knife into my sleeve.

All of this had happened because of me. My uncle had taken something from Valerie he could never give back, and I was going to make sure he answered for it.

The estate was silent when I walked in. The wrong kind of silent.

My uncle was in the bathtub. He’d slit his wrists.

He’d left a suicide note and a signed confession, begging the court for leniency for Ethan.

Just like that, being eighteen was over.

I woke up from the nightmare and reached across the bed. Ethan hadn’t come home.

I opened my phone, and there it was again. Another post from Valerie’s second account, served up by the algorithm like some sick joke.

This time it was a clip of two hands laced together on a bed. The master bed. The one I’d picked out for our new house.

The caption read: [Sorry, Clara. This is the last time. We promise.]

I let out a weak laugh. Valerie, you absolute fool.

That house was already theirs. The third wedding gift I’d set aside for them. There was no rush.

But knowing something and feeling it were two different things. The betrayal hit me all over again. Both of them, at once.

I barely made it to the bathroom before the heaving started. I gripped the edge of the sink, gasping, and when I finally looked up, my reflection was already ruined. Tears everywhere.

The grief was so bad it broke something loose in my head.

In the mirror, I saw her. Teenage Valerie, that bright open face, looking right at me. “I want a satin mermaid gown. I want champagne roses everywhere. I want… you remember, right? All of it?”

Something cracked open in my chest. I nodded at the empty mirror. “I remember. I remember all of it, Valerie.”

Have a beautiful wedding, you two.

Keys rattled in the front door. I wiped my face dry with my palms and walked out.

Ethan came in with one arm around Valerie and my pill bottle in his free hand.

They both saw my face, swollen and wrecked, and for a split second, something flickered across Ethan’s expression. Something that almost looked like pain.

Then his jaw tightened, and it was gone. “Are you seriously pulling this again? Valerie was alone, drunk, and in trouble. What was I supposed to do, ignore her?”

He threw the pill bottle at my feet. “Quit the victim act, Clara. Haven’t we given up enough for you already?”

I knelt down, picked up the bottle, and straightened. “Okay. Thank you.”

My voice came out so flat it caught him off guard. For a second, he didn’t know what to do with that.