The Ring He Was Putting on My Finger, the Money He Was Sending to Her Chapter 06

The next morning, I ran a fever from a post-op infection. I took a cab to the hospital myself to get IV antibiotics.

I’d barely been lying down for five minutes when the hospital room door slammed open.

Dylan stumbled in, suit rumpled, tie crooked, his eyes bloodshot.

His chest was heaving.

I don’t know if he got the call about the hospital bill while he was in Tiffany’s bed or on his way back from the office.

He fell to his knees beside the bed, hitting the floor hard.

“Why didn’t you tell me…” His fingers twisted into the bedsheet, knuckles white, his voice shaking like crazy. “That was our baby, Claire. How could you just… do that alone?”

Big, heavy tears splashed onto the sheets.

I lay there on the pillow and watched him fall apart. My heart didn’t feel a thing.

No satisfaction. Just deep, bone-tired exhaustion.

“Claire, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…” He tried to grab my hand, panic in his eyes. “I swear I never touched her!”

“I just felt sorry for her. Her family humiliated me back then, and I wanted to see her grovel. That’s all!”

“You’re the only one I love!”

The room was dead quiet.

From the hallway, someone’s phone was playing a song—the one we used to listen to in that crappy rented room five years ago.

I lay there looking at his pathetic, broken face. I just felt tired. And my head hurt.

I reached out and slowly, one by one, peeled his fingers off the sheet.

“When you drank yourself into a bleeding ulcer, I begged the doctors to save you—the same way you’re begging me now.” I looked him straight in the eyes, my voice completely flat. “Back then, I would’ve died if it meant keeping you alive.”

Dylan went completely still. Like he forgot how to breathe.

“But last night, lying on that table while they scraped our baby out of me…” I paused. “I just didn’t want to love you anymore.”

I raised my hand and yanked out the IV needle without hesitating.

A drop of blood splattered onto his white shirt.

“Claire, are you insane?” he gasped, scrambling to grab a cotton ball to press on the wound.

But I turned away from his reach.

I pulled out a tissue, wiped the blood off my hand, and wiped off the fingers he’d just touched.

Then I dropped the bloody tissue into the trash can by the bed.

I looked him straight in the eye and said, in a very gentle voice, “You got the Hillcrest Manor you always wanted. You spent five million to buy it back.”

“And if you wanted Tiffany, well, she’s back at your side now.”

“You got everything, Dylan.”

His face was losing color. “Stop calling me a stand-in. I’m disgusting. And I’m tired.”

Dylan stood frozen, staring into my dead eyes.

“No…” Real panic spread across his face. “You were never a stand-in. Never!”

I didn’t care.

I threw off the covers, got out of bed, and started putting on my coat.

“Claire! Don’t go!” he begged behind me, desperate.

I didn’t look back. Not once.

Chapter 7

In the afternoon, I went back to the apartment to pack.

There wasn’t much to take. Anything he’d touched, I didn’t want.

Water glasses. Pajamas. All swept into trash bags.

As I zipped up my suitcase at dusk, the front door was shoved open.

Dylan stumbled in, reeking of alcohol.

He didn’t even take off his shoes. He dropped to his knees at my feet and wrapped his arms around my legs, holding on so tight it hurt.

“Claire… please don’t go…” He buried his face in my skirt, sobbing messily.

“The Morgans humiliated me. They stepped all over me. I just wanted to prove that I could buy everything they had!”

“Claire, I was just playing a game. Getting back at her. I went too far. I thought… I thought you’d always wait for me…”

I looked down at this man who used to be so untouchable, now groveling at my feet.

I didn’t struggle. That would mean I still cared. Still felt something.

I just watched him cry. When his sobs finally quieted down, I crouched in front of him.

I reached out and stroked his hair, the same way I’d done a hundred times before when he was exhausted from work.

His whole body jolted. He looked up with red, swollen eyes, a desperate, pathetic joy in them: “Claire, you forgive—”

My hand slid from his hair down to his fingers, the ones gripping my skirt.

And then, one by one, I pried them off.

“Mr. Foster,” I said, standing up and smoothing out my wrinkled skirt, my voice so soft it was almost a whisper. “Your suit is all messed up. Tiffany wouldn’t like that.”

The light in Dylan’s eyes went out completely.

He stared at me blankly, all life drained from his face.

Before I left, I set the apartment key on the entry table.

I dragged my suitcase out the door.

As the elevator doors closed, I saw Dylan collapse by the foyer.

He grabbed my old trench coat from the rack and pressed his face into it.

Through the closing gap, all I heard was the sound of a man suffocating on his own sobs.