My Husband Used My Body to Give My Sister the Child She Wanted Chapter 08
When word came that Bryce had fallen from the rooftop, Nolan showed no reaction.
It had been part of his plan all along.
On that same rooftop, Nolan had played the security footage from three years earlier, replaying it frame by
frame.
In the video, my mother stood at the edge of the roof, sobbing as she begged Bryce to let me live.
Bryce stared at her without emotion.
“I’ll spare your daughter if you pay for her sins with your life.”
Then my mother jumped.
When the video ended, Nolan said only one thing.
“You demanded that Audrey’s mother pay with her life. What are you going to pay?”
A second later, Bryce jumped from the roof.
This was how he chose to atone, just as my mother had once been forced to pay with her life.
But Bryce didn’t die.
His spine was shattered, leaving him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
He survived in a condition far crueler than the death he had forced on my mother.
Once everyone else had been punished, Nolan finally began punishing himself.
He didn’t need to inflict anything more.
The ICU doors remained closed.
Every day I lay unconscious behind them was another day of torture for him.
For the third time, the doctors warned him that I might not survive.
“The patient has multiple fractures and severe intracranial bleeding. Even if she survives the immediate
danger, she will most likely remain in a persistent vegetative state.”
“The baby sustained severe trauma in the fall. There is no heartbeat.”
Nolan said nothing.
He remained on his knees outside the ICU, motionless as a statue.
For three years, he had believed he was clever.
To repay what he thought was a debt, he entered a sham courthouse marriage with me, gave me fabricated
trust documents, and used my body to carry Lila and Bryce’s baby.
Yet from beginning to end, he had protected the wrong person.
The woman he had used was the girl who had actually saved his life on that snowy night.
Every moment from the past three years came back to him.
He remembered me smiling as I tied his necktie, sprawling across the couch while I waited for him to come home, and resting my hand carefully over my stomach as I told him, “The baby kicked me today.”
I had given every piece of my heart to a man who deceived me.
“Audrey.”
Nolan’s voice was so hoarse it was barely recognizable.
“Please wake up. Even if you wake only to hate me, even if it’s only to kill me with your own hands, I’ll take it.”
The monitor continued to trace a weak heartbeat.
I gave him no response.
