Then Ethan stepped forward, deliberately placing his shoe on the paper as he bowed to the girl with an exaggeratedly polite flourish. “Dulce!” he shouted.
She bobbed her head and cooed, “Ethan!”
Her voice matched her name: sugary, flirtatious, instantly endearing.
They smiled at each other like old friends and slipped arms together, possessive and familiar.
So this was the hard-to-get girl Howard had bragged about. Whether she was truly aloof didn’t matter.
The sight of Ethan pressing my pregnancy paper under his shoe felt like him stepping on my heart. The pain took my breath away.
I melted back into the shadows and watched the look on his face—awestruck and enchanted. His gaze lingered on Dulce Vance with restrained appetite. Their shadows on the pavement merged close together, looking very intimate. We were only three meters apart, but it might as well have been galaxies.
I couldn’t let it go, so I called him.
But when he pulled out his phone and saw it was me, he impatiently cut the call.
I called again, and this time, he snapped, “I’m still with a client. Don’t bother me.”
“I need to tell you something—”
But before I could finish, he had already hung up on me. Then, with his face soft and gentlemanly, he led Dulce back into the bar.
From the back, they looked perfect for each other, while the pregnancy test lay torn on the ground under his foot, crushed and split. A single sheet of paper was discarded like me.
In sorrow, I ripped the pregnancy results into pieces and walked away feeling empty, as if someone had taken all the color from my life. The cicadas droned in the summer heat, but I felt ice running through my veins.
Without thinking, I found myself at the hospital entrance, slumping onto a bench with my thoughts in a tangle. I had already begun to decide to terminate the pregnancy when my phone rang, and it was Howard.
Jillian's POV
“Jillian, hurry and come pick Ethan up. He’s wasted!”
“Babe, I miss you so much!”
From his slurred voice, it was obvious that he had drunk too much. I glanced at my phone and saw that it was already one in the morning.
I kept telling myself that he at least knew how to get home, despite being drunk, that he still remembered that I was his wife, and that maybe it had all been just a show tonight.
But another part of me knew better. Three hours after I left was plenty of time for him and that Dulce to do whatever they wanted.