Page 62 of The Billionaire and His Forever

“Graham, please.”

“And if you try to contact Jude,” he goes on, “you’ll hear from my attorneys.”

“Don’t do this,” I beg, tears flowing down my face.

“The ring,” he says, gazing pointedly at my finger. “I need it back. It’s a family heirloom, and one that doesn’t belong on the hand of a lying whore.”

His words hit me like a kick in the stomach. I feel sick. “Please don’t do this.”

“Take it off. Now.”

Sobbing, I twist the ring off my finger and hold it out to him. My hands are trembling.

He wrenches it from my grasp and tucks it in his pocket, giving me one last hard look. “Goodbye, Abbie.”

“No.” I shake my head and reach for him, but he turns his back on me and storms to the door. “Graham, no. Don’t walk away. It can’t end like this.”

He pauses with his hand on the knob, and I hope for one tiny moment that he will change his mind. That he will remember what we have. How much we mean to each other.

“I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you,” he says, so softly I almost can’t hear him.

And then he’s out the door, slamming it so hard the walls rattle.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Abbie

Days pass,and the world feels like it stops spinning. I’m only keeping track of the passage of time thanks to my phone, but in my head the past few weeks feel more like months. Life slows to an excruciating pace, every second reminding me of what I lost and how precious it was. I lost everything, all because of my father. I lost my partner, I lost Jude, I lost my home.

I lost my entire future.

I’m in agony. Graham won’t pick up when I call, and I know better than to defy him and try reaching out to Jude through Mary or Esmeralda—not that I’m sure they’d answer my calls, either. All I have to hold on to are the photos I took all summer long, literally thousands of them, that are saved on my phone. I pore over them constantly, tears stinging my eyes, wishing I could go back to those sweet, perfect moments. Wishing this nightmare wasn’t my new reality.

Until the fall semester at Cornell starts, I’m staying with Amanda at her parents’ house in Stamford. After Graham left me at the apartment in Manhattan, he’d called Amanda to dismiss her from her temporary nanny position and asked her to pack up all my things from the estate. He then had Ronaldo drive her home from Hudson Valley, after which she got in her car and came down to New York City to pick me up. It was one of the longest days of my life.

Since then, my BFF has tried her best to cheer me up, but I haven’t been in the mood to do much of anything except hide under a blanket and cry. Trying to talk to her about my feelings just makes me feel worse. She’s brought me countless cups of tea, braided my hair, forced me to eat toast and soup since I can’t stomach real food right now, tried to distract me with social media and CNN and my favorite movies. Which I appreciate. But it’s not doing much.

I usually love being at Amanda’s parents’ place—they’ve always treated me like their second daughter—but at the moment, leeching off them just makes me feel more pathetic. I’m not even ten miles from my own parents, but I don’t want to go back home. It would require me to call my dad and ask for help, which there is no way in hell I’d do. Not after his betrayal.

This afternoon, Amanda invited me to hang out with her and her girlfriend, but I couldn’t bear the thought of watching them be happy and flirty together when my own heart has taken such a beating. Amanda said she understood. Now I’m sitting in her bedroom by myself, mindlessly scrolling on Instagram, trying (and failing) to keep my brain in sleep mode.

I know I’m guilty of so much, but I didn’t hurt Natasha, I didn’t steal that money from Graham, and I didn’t betray my loves. But Graham doesn’t believe me. It was so easy for him to take my father at his word, to cast me out, to turn his back on me for good. It’s like he never loved me at all. If he did, he would have been fully invested in our partnership. He would have committed to us doing the work together to mend the trust that was broken. So we could move forward, and build a life together. The fact that he didn’t just proves that his love wasn’t real.

Another crying jag takes me, and I sob so hard into Amanda’s spare pillow that I make myself sick. In the bathroom afterward, I splash my face with cold water and rinse out my mouth, studying my puffy, red face in the mirror. I’m a fucking mess.

When Graham rejects my call for the hundredth time, my entire body shudders, but I find that I literally have no more tears left in me to cry. I’m a hollowed-out shell. A black hole. Nothing. I’m nothing without him. Maybe I never was.

And then…something inside me snaps. The old Abbie would be horrified to see me acting like this. The old Abbie had self-respect. I can’t let myself keep sitting here, wallowing and desperate, pleading with God and the universe for Graham to just pick up the phone and say he’ll take me back. What’s done is done. There’s no turning back time. We’re over.

It’s time I get my shit together and take control of my life.

Starting with the attempted murder charges.

IknowI’m innocent, but I can’t move on from all of this until the charges are officially dropped. Which means I need to visit Natasha Ratliff.

After a quick shower, I put on the most modest outfit I can find in my suitcase. Then I work on my face, skipping the Teenage Fantasy and raiding Amanda’s makeup for something more muted, settling on a pale pink. I keep everything natural and light, so I look my age. Young and sheltered and largely ignorant to the ways of the world.

Amanda’s mom is happy to drive me to the Amtrak station, and on the way there I buy my ticket on my phone and just barely make it onto the next train to Manhattan.

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