My Sister Threw Away Her Fiancé Like Trash So I Married Him Instead Chapter 08

My Sister Threw Away Her Fiancé Like Trash So I Married Him Instead Chapter 08

The baby came in the middle of the night.

A boy. Seven and a half pounds. Healthy.

I lay in the hospital bed feeling like my body had been taken apart and put back together wrong.

Samuel stood by the bassinet, looking at that small, wrinkled face with an expression I’d never seen on him

before.

Golden words filled the air: [This is Samuel’s first child.]

[Honestly this girl might actually have played it perfectly. Samuel’s already softening on her.]

[Look at how he’s been acting toward her lately. Something changed.]

No.

It won’t.

Three days later I came home to the estate.

Samuel was there, which was unusual.

“Have you chosen a name?”

“Jackson.”

I watched him hold the baby.

Something came loose in my chest for a moment, a thought I didn’t want to finish.

If none of this had been calculated. If the golden text had never existed. If I’d just met him, just a man, just

myself.

“Samuel.”

He looked up.

“I want a divorce.”

The room went silent.

Samuel’s expression stopped moving.

“Divorce.”

I said it again, level and clear,

“The baby’s yours. We agreed on this from the start.”

He stared at me.

“You’re sure? Because once this is done, there’s no taking it back.”

“I have what I came for.”

Over the past year, the money I’d quietly moved out was enough, more than enough, for my mother and me to

live well for a very long time.

Samuel handed Jackson to the nanny. Then he crossed the room toward me.

“Willow. As a mother – you can really just let go of your own child?”

“I used a child to get what I needed. I think that’s a fair trade.”

A long silence.

Then Samuel’s voice came, quiet and final: “Alright.”

Somehow Aurora got word of the divorce and showed up immediately.

She cornered me at the hotel I was staying at temporarily, dressed like she was going somewhere important,

eyes cold and calculated underneath the careful makeup.

“Willow. You played every card you had and you still walked away empty-handed. Couldn’t even make him love you. What a failure.”

“Figures someone like you couldn’t hold onto a man like him.”

She finished screaming at me and then went straight to Samuel, carefully dressed, carefully tearful, and

begged him to forgive her.

She invoked their past. She invoked everything her family had lost.

Samuel was receptive. Apparently.

The gossip blogs picked up blurry photos of them at upscale venues together. Rumored rekindling.

They ended up in bed soon enough.

None of it had anything to do with me.

I bought a small house in Europe. The kind with a garden.

My mom and I slept in every morning, grew flowers, read books, wandered the nearby villages.

I dated occasionally. Nobody over twenty.

After I left Samuel I could no longer see the golden text above anyone’s head. I stopped following news about

any of them.

Until one afternoon a friend I still kept in occasional contact with called me up.

We exchanged pleasantries. Then her voice shifted, something conspiratorial in it.

“So something big happened on this end.”

“Hm?”

I was barely paying attention.

“Aurora. She’s dead.”

Samuel had never been short of beautiful, volatile women. Aurora’s spoiled outbursts and outdated tantrums bored him quickly.

He discarded her.

Aurora couldn’t survive the drop.

The humiliation of being thrown away ate at her until she turned it outward, targeting Samuel’s other women,

quietly, with methods that couldn’t bear daylight.

It came out fast.

Samuel didn’t bother dealing with it himself. One word from him and Aurora was delivered to a private

psychiatric facility outside the city.

The place had very structured days and no outside contact.

The girl who had once been the most powerful young woman in her social circle ended her life inside those

walls.

I let out a breath, and then let it go.

Three years out, I received an email from Samuel.

One photo, no words.

Jackson. Three years old. In a tiny suit. Grinning at the camera.

His eyes were big and bright.

They looked just like mine.

I looked at the photo for a long time.

Then I deleted it.

Twenty years passed.

My mother had gone two years before, a quiet afternoon in autumn, and she’d gone to sleep and simply not

woken up.

I sold the house. Started moving.

Eventually I ended up on an island with a view that made it easy to forget everything else, and opened a

small bed and breakfast.

Blue water. Wide sky. Good mornings.

One afternoon I was behind the bar mixing drinks when a guest came in.

Young man. Early twenties.

“Hey. I’d like to check in.”

He handed me his passport.

I flipped to the photo page and stopped.

“Jackson.”

I read the name aloud. “Great name.”

He smiled, a wide easy smile, all white teeth.

“Thanks. You running this place alone?”

“Yeah.”

He looked around slowly.

“It’s beautiful here.”

I got him checked in and slid his key across the bar.

He paused.

“Hey

– have we met before? You look really familiar.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I just can’t shake the feeling…” He scratched the back of his head.

I met his eyes, those eyes, the same shape as mine, the same ones I saw every morning in the mirror.

“I probably just have one of those faces.”

He laughed and let it go.

After he went upstairs, I stood behind the bar and looked out at the water.

The sun was sinking slow and red toward the horizon.

I looked down, smiled to myself, and went back to work.

We were both doing fine. That was enough.