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And he saw it as an easy way to set himself up for a couple years.
There was another sheet of paper in his chicken scratch, a bunch of random words and number combinations.
Except none of them were random.
Her mother’s maiden name.
Her sister’s birthday.
The name of their childhood golden retriever.
Her zip code.
From the looks of things, he’d been trying to figure out her passcode for her account for a long while, jotting down every bit of information thrown at him.
I couldn’t help but wonder what actually did it, what was right, what parts of her past she used to protect her present.
And why today?
Of all days, why and how had he figured it out on what was supposed to be their wedding day? Had she said something to him? Or had he found something when he had gone back to the apartment that he had never noticed before?
Burning questions, all.
Finished, I pushed out the chair, moving to stand, turning to check on Jules, see if she was managing to process the information better than she had been a moment before.
Seeming to sense the motion, she slowly turned from where she was holding a picture of Gemma, her head thrown back, laughing, everything about her radiating light and love as she so often did.
“It was never real,” she concluded, tone hollow, lacking any emotion at all, just a dead recount of the situation as though it didn’t involve her. And certainly not her heart. “What’s that?” she asked, jerking her chin toward my hand, one I hadn’t realized was still clutching that one piece of paper. The one I knew she didn’t want to see. The one I knew would shatter her calm.
“Nothing,” I objected, moving to take a step to the side as she advanced me.
“It’s not nothing. If it was nothing, you wouldn’t be trying to protect me from it,” she shot back, knowing me maybe a bit too well.
“Jules, this stuff he wrote down… it’s not important.”
“It’s important to me,” she specified, brow raising, getting a bit of her spirit back. The kind that said she would stop at nothing to get the paper in my hand, to read what I so badly didn’t want her to. “Give me the paper, Kai,” she demanded, moving in right in front of me, hand going outward, fingers curling impatiently. “Fine,” she grumbled when I didn’t hand it over. Her hand closed over mine, fingers wiggling between, snagging the piece of paper, pulling it out of my closed fist.
I leaned back against the wall, the air exhaling so hard out of me it almost sounded like a sigh as I watched Jules carefully unroll the paper, try to flatten it out so the awful handwriting was more easily seen.
It took a minute.
As it had with me.
Just going over the basic things like her size that, while invasive, wasn’t anything to be freaked out about.
I could see it the moment she realized what the other list was.
Her lips parted.
Her eyes widened.
Her breathing simply stopped.
“Oh, my God,” she whimpered, seeming to lose whatever strength she had that had kept her on her feet.
She slowly sank down, knees hitting the ground.
Both hands were still holding the paper, pulled so tightly that it looked about ready to rip down the center.
A fracture started in my heart at the complete and absolute horror on her face.
Because if there was one thing that should be sacrosanct, it was the intimate parts of you, the things meant only to be shared between partners. Because you would never give that to a person if you didn’t think you could trust them with it, that they would value it, that they would respect it enough to keep it private.
And here it all was, written on paper for anyone to see. For him to analyze. To possibly use against her. Use to manipulate her.
“Hey,” I started as I lowered down in front of her, not sure I even had the right words, but knowing I needed to try to find them. For her. For her sanity. To get that horrific look off her face. My hand reached for the paper, pulling it away, surprised when her fingers allowed it, crumpling the page up again, dropping it, and reaching to snag her chin, forcing her face up, giving it a second before her eyes found mine. “He’s a conman. This is what conmen do. They study you. They find information on you.”
“He wrote it down,” she hissed, trying to take a deep breath.
“Yeah, Jules. But, I think, for his eyes only. Nothing here implies anyone other than him was involved.”
“And my eyes. And your eyes.” Her voice did that hitching thing again, but her eyes were completely dry.
“I stopped reading,” I told her, watching as her eyes closed hard. “No, look at me,” I demanded, giving her chin a little squeeze. “As soon as I realized what it was, I stopped reading. Your secrets are yours to keep, Jules. And I would never betray you like that.”
