“Thank you. I appreciate it,” I murmured as something twisted painfully behind my sternum.
“Of course, Miss Jones.”
“Please take care of her,” I whispered.
“We always do.”
I didn’t break until the call ended. I didn’t break until Granny Irene’s room was upgraded, until the caretaker sent a text with a picture of her in her new bed, smiling with her oxygen tubes tucked neatly at the side. I didn’t break until all the bills were paid and I had no more tasks to hide behind.
Then it hit me, and it hit me like a fucking freight train.
I braced my hands on the kitchen counter and gasped as reality slammed into me.
Memories assaulted me from every angle. Jacob smiling at me across the dining hall. Jacob telling me that I looked good in green. Jacob listening when no one else did. Jacob slipping into my room in the dark. Jacob kissing me like he’d die without it. Jacob holding me like I wasn’t disposable.
Except he was never Jacob.
He was Benjamin goddamn Stonewood the whole fucking time.
And Ben had been studying me, testing me, and manipulating me for his own ends.
My chest squeezed so hard I thought I might choke to death on the irony. I slid down the cabinets until I hit the floor. Cold tilebit through my jeans. I pressed my hands to my mouth to stop the sob clawing its way up my throat, but it tore through anyway.
“Oh God…” My voice cracked in half. “Oh God, I’m such a fucking idiot.”
Hot, violent tears poured down my face, relentless and unending.
“I fell in love with a lie.”
The admission destroyed me. I buried my face in my shaking hands and cried until my ribs ached. I cried until my breath came in ragged, painful pulls, cried until there was nothing left in me but a soft, hollow throb of betrayal.
And even then, even through all of the anger, the heartbreak, and the humiliation, I still missed him.
That was the worst part, the part that made me feel pathetic, the part that made me shake harder, because the second I stopped moving, the second I let myself feel, my mind replayed the one thing I didn’t want to admit. He’d risked his life to save me. He’d bled for me. He’d said that he’d let everything go before hurting me again. He’d let me walk away, and I couldn’t tell which version of him was the truth.
Jacob? Ben? Or maybe neither one was the real him, for all I knew.
My head dropped against my knees, and as I squeezed my eyes shut, my left hand brushed my face. The cool metal of the ring caught against my cheek.
Fuck.
His mother’s ring was still on my finger, the green stone winking in the dim kitchen light like it belonged there.
I froze, staring at it through blurred vision, my eyes burning like someone had thrown acid in them.
It didn’t feel right to leave it on… not after everything, not after the lies that twisted every promise he’d made. But taking it off… God, the thought gutted me, like ripping out the last piece of something that had felt real, even if it wasn’t.
How was I supposed to get it back to him? Mail it? Drop it off like some discarded trinket? I couldn’t face him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
A quiet, broken whisper slipped out of me.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
Chapter
Thirty
BEN
