I Believed His Noble Excuse For IVF, Only To Uncover His Secret Affair Chapter 08

I Believed His Noble Excuse For IVF, Only To Uncover His Secret Affair Chapter 08

While my lawyer was putting the filing together, she suggested I hire a private investigator to look into Julian so we’d have more useful evidence.

The night before, the investigator’s file had come in.

Julian and I started because I was bullied in high school, and he took a beating from the bullies protecting

But the file showed that he and the ringleader had grown up joined at the hip and had stayed in touch all

those years.

The investigator had also obtained a bar video from the previous year.

I opened it.

In it, Julian and that ringleader had their arms around each other’s shoulders, drinking.

“You’ve always been the smart one. Making me put on that whole show back then got you Elena, the prettiest girl in our class, and you used her family’s money and connections to climb straight up at that school!”

“And if you hadn’t landed Ruby, maybe none of it would’ve worked.”

From the chain of evidence, the truth put itself together for me.

Julian had grown up an orphan, and he picked me as his stepping stone, arranged with the bullies to stage a rescue, and made me fall for him.

And to keep Kath from exposing them, he had gone after Ruby privately and done something that left Ruby fixed on him past all reason, willing to be the other woman as long as she could be with him.

I had thought time and circumstance were what changed Julian and cooled him toward me.

It had never occurred to me that all of it, from the beginning, was a plan.

My fist closed on its own. “Julian, you’re terrifying.”

His face went stiff, and the half of it that turned toward me went red.

Then he dropped to his knees, and with everyone in that shop watching, he grabbed my sleeve and started crying. “Please forgive me! I loved you too much, and that’s why I did it!”

“What are you doing? Get up! Get up!”

Ruby had come in at some point, and she was pulling at him, trying to get him on his feet. “If she wants a

divorce, let her have it! Didn’t you say I was the one you loved and she was only a stepping stone?”

“You’ve made it now, so she’s useless. Leave her and be with me. We’d be a family. What’s wrong with that?”

“You don’t know anything. Don’t touch me!” Julian shoved her off.

It caught her flat, and she stumbled back into the edge of a table with her hip, went white, and went down.

*Jules, my stomach hurts. Please, take me to the hospital.”

Julian didn’t even look at her, and the contempt came straight out. “When are you going to get tired of this

cheap little act?”

“You faked it at the hospital last time too. I didn’t bother calling you on it.”

“And we’re not married, so what’s in your stomach is a bastard. If it’s gone, it’s no loss.”

Something went off in Ruby’s head. Her teeth were chattering, and she pushed the words out through them.

“A… a bastard?”

Julian stood up, looking like he wanted to kill her. “Yes! A bastard!”

“If you and your mother hadn’t blackmailed me, I never would have had a child with you, and I wouldn’t have lost the woman I love. This is all on you!”

He went to go at her again, and I stopped him. I pointed at the floor under Ruby, where the blood had spread into a pool. “If she doesn’t get to a hospital, she’s going to die.”

That was when he finally panicked, and he called 911 with shaking hands.

It was too late. Ruby lost the baby.

Kath lost her mind on the spot and started screaming that Julian was going to pay for it.

The divorce case went to court soon after.

In front of the judge, Julian admitted to every one of my claims.

When the judge asked whether he had anything to say, he looked at me with red eyes. “Lena, if I had never staged that whole thing, would you have fallen in love with me?”

I was quiet, and then I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

The truth was that Julian’s grades had never been bad. If he had put the work in, he might have gotten as far

on his own.

And if he had believed in himself, was it possible he would have grown into somebody warm and bright and

worth wanting?

But life did not run on if, and once he chose that road, he had to keep walking it.

Julian smiled like something had let go of him.

His face was covered in scratches because Ruby had lost the baby, and it had broken something in her mind.

Kath had gone all the way. She stopped pretending to be sick and came at him with everything she had, and she left him covered in marks.

But right then, he looked like he had set down every weight he carried. “Lena, if I could do it again, I’d take a

different road.”

The judge ruled. We were divorced, Julian walked away with nothing, and he got two years for bigamy.

His university issued a notice stripping him of his professorship and dismissing him.

Julian was finished.

In prison, he got bullied, and the ones doing it were men in for murder and arson.

“Look at this soft little guy doing time. Bigamy? A real gentleman criminal.”

“You were fit to teach kids? Let me do society a favor and teach you how to be a person!”

For two full years, Julian lived in the fear and helplessness of being the one getting bullied.

When a boot caught his head, he curled into himself and said it under his breath. “Lena, so this is what being bullied feels like. I’m sorry.”

And I started a new life.

Whenever I went home, and the relatives started asking when I would marry, my parents got in front of me. “There’s no rush. Married or not, either one is fine. Look at the world we live in. Being happy is what matters.”