When Ethan returned, he found the chat records alongside a roomful of crystal antiques I had smashed to pieces.
He only raised his brow faintly.
“You have nothing to explain?”
My ragged breaths mingled with the taste of his cigar smoke.
He chuckled lightly, exhaling a ring of smoke:
“She’s just a young girl, why bother with her?”
His airy tone made it sound as if the blood and storms of his rise in New York’s elite circle hadn’t fallen on us—but on that young girl and him.
“Yes, the little girl truly doesn’t understand.”
I tossed a medical record of a miscarriage onto the table.
He immediately sat upright.
I spoke lightly:
“So I simply taught her to be a real person.”
“Sophia!”
His hands clamped onto my shoulders with such force they nearly shattered.
My back pressed hard against the wall, lips curling as I watched his reddened eyes.
In this life, he had only ever shed tears twice.
Once, in our senior year of high school, when he saw my father drag me half-naked by my hair onto the street, threatening to drown me in the Mississippi River. Ethan stabbed my father eighteen times.
The second was now, when this girl miscarried.
He gripped my shoulders and accused me of being “cruel.”