Every word. Every image.
A blade sliding deeper into my heart.
“No…” I whispered, voice barely there beneath the shock and crushing pain. “This can’t be real. It can’t—”
My grandmother’s hand closed around my arm, firm. Her expression was a mixture of frustration and something like care.
“I told you she was beneath you.”
I barely heard her. My mind had sealed itself off around the betrayal.
The woman I loved had lied to me. Manipulated me. Made me a fool.
And I had fallen—completely.
Then I pulled out another document.
A medical test.
A positive pregnancy result, her name printed at the top.
Valentina was pregnant.
And she had hidden it from me.
My body went cold as I read it once—twice—three times. A violent sense of betrayal and humiliation detonated inside me.
Pregnant.
And after what I’d just seen… there was no way that child could be mine.
That pregnancy—revealed like that, in the cruelest way possible—felt like one more piece of a calculated, filthy scheme.
“Pregnant,” I breathed, feeling something inside me split. “And she didn’t even have the courage to tell me.”
“And why would she?” my grandmother replied with merciless cold. “Don’t be a fool, Enrico. If she were truly carrying your child, don’t you think she would’ve used it to secure her position immediately?” She stepped closer, voice sharp. “No. She didn’t tell you because until you were married—until she had your last name—there was still room for doubt.”
I turned to her, her words sinking into a mind already cracking.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I murmured, even as my conviction began to fall apart.
“It makes perfect sense,” my grandmother snapped, authority absolute. “Open your eyes. She’s a con artist. That child is part of the con.” Her gaze was pitiless. “Don’t let her humiliate you even further.”
Pain and humiliation twisted into rage—violent and consuming.
And in that moment, drowning in that rage, I decided I would not let her humiliate me again.
I would not let her use me as a ladder to whatever future she wanted.
The baby wasn’t mine.
It couldn’t be.
That day, when I left Valentina at the altar, I destroyed more than her dreams.
I destroyed the last remaining possibility of love and trust inside myself.
A part of me died that day.
