“Think what you want, Hayley,” he said with a bored-sounding sigh. “But it is what it is. I’m leaving and I don’t want you in my life—or bed—any longer. Don’t embarrass yourself by making a scene, Hayley.I don’t want you. Do I need to spell it out?”
Numbness had completely overtaken her as she absorbed the dispassionate way he stood there shattering her as though she were nothing. Had never been anything to him.
“No,” she whispered. “No need to add to my humiliation more. I loved you, Silas. I gave youeverythingand I never once asked you for a damn thing and certainly not a fucking minivan, children or a housein the suburbs. The only thing I’m guilty of is being too stupid to live by believing someone like me could ever matter to someone like you. I hope the next woman will make you happy, since apparently I was a miserable failure in that regard.”
For the briefest of moments, she thought she saw shards of pain splintering in his eyes, but just as quickly he donned that unflappable, emotionless look, and he turned and walked out of the door and out of her life, leaving her in pieces all over the floor of the place he expected her to live in.
It took every bit of willpower she possessed not to call after him, not to go after him and beg on her knees if that was what it took. To ask him what she had done that was so wrong that he’d treat her so callously and with such a lack of regard. He’d discarded her like yesterday’s trash, and maybe that was what she was to him. Certainly no one worthy of a place in his life.
She sank to her knees, covering her face with her hands as sobs escaped her numb body.
33
The next week was interminable for Hayley. She went through the motions of each day like a robot programmed to do its master’s bidding. She didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. Instead, she lay awake in her big bed, alone, hot tears making her nose swell and head ache vilely as she replayed every moment she’d spent with Silas.
She trudged to the subway station two blocks from her new apartment building and rode it to the stop a block away from the school and walked through the crowded streets with unseeing eyes.
It was the very day after Silas had so cruelly shattered her heart that she discovered something else was every bit as absent as her soul was. The passion and zest she had always felt for her music was utterly gone. Even she winced at the flat, uninspired notes pulled lifelessly from the magnificent violin Silas had bought for her.
By the fourth day, one of her professors had pulled her aside after class, his expression one of bewilderment and concern as he questioned what was going on with her. She hadn’t known what to say. She just didn’t care. About anything. The one thing that had always brought her joy in life was now the source of unending pain because all she thought of when attempting to play was Silas and how much he’d loved listening to her perform.
Making an instant decision, she’d informed her professor she was done and was going to her advisor at once to withdraw. Her professor had begged her to complete the semester so she wouldn’t have to retake it all over again, but she wouldn’t be swayed. It was the first decision in a week that brought her any relief or peace.
Two hours later, utterly exhausted, she trudged her way through the lobby of her apartment building after an emotionally draining meeting with her advisor, who, like her professor, had implored her to think about what she was doing and that her scholarship would most certainly be revoked if she simply withdrew from classes. Hayley had merely shrugged and left, opting to walk the entire way instead of taking the subway.
After getting off the elevator, she walked listlessly to her door and shoved it open, having not even bothered to lock it on her way out that morning. She went rigid as soon as she was inside, loathing floating through her entire body. She hated this place. Despised it and everything it stood for. Silas buying her off after casting her aside.
Fuck that.
He’d treated her no better than a discarded whore. She glanced down at the violin case she carried and suddenly couldn’t bear to even look at it anymore. She stormed into her bedroom and tossed it onto the still-made bed and then went to her closet and began yanking out the items of clothing that truly belonged to her, and she made damn sure she left every single thing that Silas had ever given her in its place in the closets, the drawers and the apartment.
Yes, she’d made the worst mistake of her idiot, young life by trusting a man who didn’t deserve either her trust or her love, but that didn’t mean she had to spend the rest of her life paying for that mistake. And the very first thing she was doing to climb out of her shell of misery was cutting ties with everything having to do with Silas Goodnight.
This wasn’t her apartment. Nothing in it was hers except the fewthreadbare items of clothing and her mother’s dishes. Everything else could rot or burn to the ground. She didn’t give a shit about any of it.
She wasn’t without options. She still had every penny of the insurance check as well as the substantial amount given to her above the promised settlement, and if she was careful, it would last her a long time. Not in the city, but anywhere else that the cost of living wasn’t so prohibitively exorbitant.
Nothing was holding her here now. She no longer had a scholarship to a prestigious academy of music. Her father would most assuredly understand her heartbreak and her inability to continue pursuing his dream for her. All he ever truly wanted was for her to behappy. And staying here was making her decidedlyunhappy.
She would move to someplace temporary and she wouldn’t shell out a ridiculous amount in the process. Not when she planned to leave this fucked-up place in her dust just as soon as she formulated a sound plan and figured out where best to go. She was tired of living in the past and she had no one and nothing to go back to in Tennessee. She needed a fresh start in a place where she was just another face in the crowd and nobody knew of her pain and betrayal.
There were a lot of big cities in the south, even ones with schools of music. With the amount of money she now possessed, she could afford to rent a small apartment or even a house and pay her own way through school.
Exhilarated to finally have a plan of action, she made short work of packing her things and used a few articles of clothing to protect her mother’s dishes as she reverently packed them in one of the empty boxes left behind from when Silas had so hurriedly cut her loose and hadn’t wasted a single moment in moving her out of his apartment and his life.
The minute she was finished, she hoisted the box in her arms and then tossed her large gym bag over her shoulder. She glanced around the room, ensuring she was leaving nothing of herself behind beforegathering her purse and heading for the door. She stopped, realizing she was still holding on to the keys, and then she turned, launching them toward the kitchen counter, watching as they skidded across the smooth surface before coming to a stop right in the middle, where they’d be easily found.
That’s what I think of your parting gift, Silas. And fuck you too.
She would splurge and spend tonight in the cheapest hotel she could find and use this night to search for vacant apartments in the not-so-great parts of the city, where her money would go further.
As she rode the elevator down, tears threatened as grief and a keen sense of loss sliced through her, cutting her and making her bleed more fiercely than a bullet ever had. But she fought them off, biting harshly into her lip. Never again would she waste another breath or tear on a man who didn’t deserve to breathe the same air she did.
***
“Are we boring you, Silas?” Drake asked dryly from behind his desk.
Silas looked up from his phone, where he’d been watching the surveillance footage of the hallway in front of Hayley’s new apartment. She’d left just after returning home from class, carrying what looked to be a large box and a bag and her purse thrown over her shoulder, and he wanted to know where the hell she was going.
