Bride Number Ninety-Nine: My Groom Married Her First Chapter 08

Bride Number Ninety-Nine: My Groom Married Her First Chapter 08

Grant didn’t leave Florence.

He rented an apartment near the restoration institute.

Every morning, without fail, a bowl of lobster bisque arrived.

The first day, I didn’t touch it.

The second day, it sat there untouched again.

By the tenth day, the person delivering it was him.

He stood in the winter rain, his hair soaked through, cradling the insulated container against his chest.

“No chives, cilantro, or parsley. I picked it clean myself.”

I didn’t take it.

“I don’t like it anymore.”

Grant went still for a long moment.

“You used to love it.”

“People change what they like.”

His lips moved, but in the end, nothing came out.

That evening, after work, he was still waiting outside.

I walked past him. He suddenly pulled two grapefruit candies from his pocket.

“Saved these for you.”

That day, at the wedding, he had given the candy that was meant for me to Hazel instead.

Now he’d bought a whole box of them, but no amount of sugar can repay those ten minutes I spent alone, clutching the wall as I stumbled into the lounge during a hypoglycemic episode.

“I don’t need them.”

I didn’t stop walking.

For a long while, there were no footsteps behind me.

When I looked back, he was still standing there in the rain. Palm open. Tthe two candies gleaming, soaked

through.

For a moment, I remembered something from years ago.

He’d been penniless then, and still willing to wait two hours in line just to buy me a single piece of candy.

Later, he had everything. And I never got that particular candy again.

The day before the divorce hearing, Hazel came to find me.

She threw a stack of photos onto the table.

“Congratulations, Eleanor. You won.”

“Grant kicked me out of the company. He cut off every card of mine. He even sold the house we grew up in.”

I calmly flipped through the documents.

“That’s between the two of you.”

Hazel’s eyes turned red.

“You clearly don’t want him anymore. Why are you making him do this to me?”

“I didn’t make him do anything.”

“Then why won’t you come back?”

Her voice rose sharply.

“If you’d just go back, he’d stop tormenting everyone!”

I closed the file and looked up at her.

“Hazel Doyle. You think his suffering is because I won’t forgive him.”

“It isn’t.”

“It’s because he’s finally realizing that not everything he destroys can be bought back with money.”

Her face went pale.

Before she left, she let out a short laugh.

“You know what?”

“Grant calls out your name when he’s drunk. He’s watched the wedding footage over and over. He even

taught himself how to mend dresses.”

“His hands are covered in needle marks.”

“Doesn’t any of that make you feel a thing?”

I looked down at my own fingertips.

The marks the needle had once left there had long since healed.

“I felt for him for seven years.”

“That was enough.”