Holy…
It all made sense. Too much sense.
I swayed, my heart cracking in a way I’d never felt before. No. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t.I know Jules!
Do you though? Do you really?
All the questions she never quite answered. Why she’d been so determined to leave DayGlow and start the company with Peyton. Why she’d wanted to stay in Seddledowne even if I didn’t. Why she’d never told me about a single guy from her past…
Maybe she was trying to stop.
Who cares?She’s a prostitute!
Why would you believe Pike? You don’t even know him.
I didn’t. But I knew Liam. Liam, who loved me and hadtried to warn me about my wife. Liam, who wouldn’t lie, even if you put a gun to his head.
I had to know.
“Whatever your beef is with me,” Liam seethed at Sariah. “You leave my family out of it. Do you hear me? You’re never interviewing me again. You’re a real piece of?—”
“Liam?” My voice came out small. “Liam?”
He turned to me, eyes squeezed shut. When he opened them, they were wrecked. The most wrecked I’d ever seen him. Then, like Pike, he nodded too.
The stadium tilted. I couldn’t get air.
I took one breath that didn’t come close to being enough. Then my knees went, and the grass came up to meet me.
Chapter Thirty-Four
GRIFFIN
“Finny?” Sophie cried, somewhere on the edges of my consciousness. She shook my shoulders. “Finn, you need to wake up.”
I pried one eye open.
She laughed—short and wet. “Oh, good. You’re not dead.”
My other opened. She was leaning over me, cheeks tear-streaked. There was a ceiling above us and I was lying on something with cushions.
I blinked, trying to pull the room into focus. Where was I? And why was Sophie crying?
Jules…
A sob rose before I could stop it.
“Oh, Griff.” Sophie collapsed against me.
“No,” Theo said somewhere off to my right. “I don’t believe it.”
“Theo,” Liam’s voice was a warning. “I’m telling you what I saw. Are you calling me a liar?”
“Chill, guys,” Bowen said. “Chill.”
“No, I’m not calling you a liar,” Theo said, though hisvoice was fraying at the edges. “I’m just saying I lived with her for the past three months, and I’m sorry, but she didn’t act like someone who’d prostituted herself. Never once did she try anything with me. She wasn’t sneaking men in, and she wasn’t sneaking out. Trust me. I would know. She whimpered and cried all night from bad dreams. Some nights I hardly slept at all.” He let out a weary sigh. “She never went anywhere other than the farm, the ranch, or our house. It was like she was afraid to go out in public. And she left her phone plugged in on the kitchen counter every night like a teenager who’d been grounded.”
“Some people are good at hiding secrets,” Holden said.
