I Called Him from Under an AVALANCHE, But He Declined to Bed His Secretary Chapter 04
Sienna’s voice shifted — lower, anxious.
“What about my brother? He can’t go to prison — he’s still so young.”
“He didn’t mean for anyone to die. And he didn’t mean to run — he panicked.”
The floor dropped out from under me. My vision tunneled.
Julian kept talking, and every word went through me like a blade.
“The surveillance footage is gone — all of it. And your brother was still a minor two years ago. Even if someone digs it up, my lawyers can work with that. He’ll be fine.”
Two years ago, my parents were on a mountain road. A group of street racers came tearing around the bend.
One of them drifted wide on a turn and crossed into their lane.
The impact sent my parents’ car over the edge.
Nobody called 911. Nobody stopped. They drove off and left my parents to burn.
My knees buckled. I hit the wall hard enough to hear it, the blood draining from my face.
The noise brought them both to the door.
Julian yanked the door open. The second he saw my face, every excuse died behind his eyes. All that was left was panic.
Tears spilled down my face, the pain ripping through my blind socket like fire.
“Hazel, listen to me…”
The crack of my palm against his cheek echoed down the hall. I hit him with everything I had.
I hit him. Open palm, full force, across the face of the man I’d loved more than anyone.
Whatever he was about to say died on his tongue.
“Why?” My voice shattered. Tears ran down my face faster than I could feel them. “Why!”
Why the affair. Why the lies. Why protect the person who killed my parents — why keep destroying me over and over again?
His head had snapped to the side from the force of it. The red was already swelling across his cheek.
He slowly turned back to me. His eyes were steady. Unmoved. And every question I had rotted in my throat.
He looked at me and said nothing.
Sienna shoved past him, cradling his jaw like he was the one who’d been hurt, and turned on me.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
I closed my eyes. The ground tilted under me.
Julian’s voice came low and measured.
“Hazel, he just turned eighteen. Are you really going to ruin his entire life over a teenage mistake? Can you just — try to see it from his side?”
“See it from his side…”
A laugh tore out of me — hollow, scraped clean of anything human.
Every last bit of fight left my body.
“Julian, I wish I’d never saved you that day…”
I stumbled back to the bedroom. Didn’t turn on the lights. Collapsed onto the bed like a puppet with its strings cut.
A few minutes later, Julian came in.
“Hazel, can we talk?”
I kept my eyes shut. He climbed onto the bed behind me and wrapped his arms around me with a sigh — the kind that was meant to sound helpless.
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“I’ll make it up to you. I swear.”
He didn’t turn on the lights either. So he didn’t see the divorce papers sitting on his nightstand.
Not that it mattered. You needed a real marriage to file for divorce. Ours was fiction. The papers were worthless.
When I didn’t respond, Julian gave up. He was gone in minutes.
“Just… cool off, okay?”
I drifted in and out of something that wasn’t quite sleep. I dreamed of Julian — young, thrown out by the Hayes family with nothing to his name. I was the one who brought him home.
My parents gave him a roof and a place at the table.
I dreamed of who he used to be.
He’d throw himself at anyone who looked at me wrong — fists first, consequences later.
I dreamed of the day he asked me out.
His hands were shaking around the flowers. “Hazel — will you go out with me?”
Then Sienna crept into the dream.
Then everything changed.
When I opened my eyes, gray light was seeping through the curtains. The pillow was soaked — sweat or tears, I couldn’t tell.
Julian had texted.
[Taking Sienna to her checkup. We’ll talk when I’m back. Hazel, I’m not going to abandon you.]
I deleted it.
I packed my bags and left two things behind for Julian.
Then I walked out the door and didn’t look back.
I headed for the airport.
Across town, Julian sat outside the exam room and felt his chest tighten for no reason.
He stared at the text she hadn’t answered. His mind snagged on something he couldn’t name.
He shook it off.
Probably nothing.
When he got home, the first thing out of his mouth was habit. “Hazel?”
No answer. He pushed the bedroom door open, irritation already building. “Hazel, we—”
He stopped dead. Whatever he’d been about to say evaporated the second he saw what she’d left behind.
