AllFreeNovel
Share Us
For a long moment, we both sat there in silence. I had graduated to silent sobs now. It felt like I had been waiting for some sympathy for me to fully realize how hurt I felt. My chest felt like it was being pounded upon. It felt like I was seeing his face every time I closed my eyes and I wondered if this was how it felt to be heartbroken.
Knowing that the one you loved was still alive and well somewhere out there, but you could never talk to him, or hold him again was sickening.
The article had shown me only the tip of the iceberg of what the Fitzgeralds were capable of. Christian, of course, did not know because he was not present when his mother had more or less threatened me to stay away from him.
I knew she somehow had a hand in this. None of my co-workers would release that information to the media because they all signed the NDA in their employment contracts not to reveal private information about the hospital.
If it was any of my former co-workers, I had my bet set on Drea. She had it out for me all along, and I always wondered why. It would not surprise me to find out that she had been the anonymous co-worker the tabloids reported on. I wondered if they paid her to talk trash about me. Although, with Drea, she would probably do it for free if it meant that it would hurt me.
“We’re here ma’am.” Roger’s voice interrupted my thoughts again, and I realized that we’d arrived at the airport a while ago and he was probably giving me time to gather myself.
“Thank you, Roger. For everything.” I said to him and he simply gave me a single nod before getting out of the car to help me with my luggage.
I spent the two-hour flight, in and out of sleep. My dreams were littered with thoughts of Christian, being my knight in shining armor, and coming to save me from this mess I currently found myself in.
I did not tell Leila that I was returning to the city, so I took an Uber from the airport to my apartment. It was not a luxury I could afford to take, but I had no choice given how much I needed to get back home and deal with my predicament.
The cheques I was receiving over the past seven months sat untouched in my bank account. It was a very generous amount, but I had no intention of touching it. I concluded that it would be better to keep it in trust for my unborn child.
I was still undecided about my decision to tell Christian about the child, though I knew it was unfair, not just to him, but to the child as well. But I could not afford to think of that just yet and needed to focus on myself and my baby.
It took me two days of wallowing in my tears and the massive pity party I’d thrown myself in before I finally answered one of the many calls.
After ignoring so many calls, both from Christian, Leila, Alba, and various other strange numbers, which I could only assume belonged to the press, I called Leila back.
“Hello?” she answered the call.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Oh, my God! Where have you been? Everyone’s been trying to reach you. Are you okay?” She sounded genuinely worried, and I felt another powerful urge to burst into another fit of tears.
“I’m back home,” I said in a shaky voice filled with tears. Somehow, she immediately understood what I meant, and it renewed a fresh bout of tears from my eyes.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” she replied and hung up immediately.
She arrived in ten minutes.
She had a spare key to my apartment, and she’d been here a few times to let the cleaners up once every month in my absence. When she saw me curled up on the bed, she said nothing, except get under the covers with me and wrapped her arms around my body.
I let out every single form of emotion that I held back since I got back, and I cried harder than I’d ever done in my life.
It felt like I cried more this past year than I have ever cried in all my life. I'd always considered myself a strong human woman. It took my mother dying, and then my heart breaking, for me to realize that I was just as fragile and vulnerable as the next person. And I did not feel so strong now.
Leila and I stayed in that bed for the next hour, and I did not know I’d dozed off until she roused me awake after one hour. She finally asked about what had transpired and I spent a while telling her everything that had happened between us.
When I could not continue, she felt so horrible seeing me in so much pain that she also cried with me.
She forced me to have a shower, and then we left the apartment together. With no special destination in mind, we simply took a long walk around the city like tourists, talking in our surroundings and eating tacos at a taco stand. The first thing I’d eaten other than frozen pizza in the past two days.
It was therapeutic and exactly what I never knew I needed. Somehow, my best friend knew exactly what I needed even when I didn’t and she made me feel better than I felt in days. My phone was still blowing up from texts and calls from Alba. Christian had stopped calling since yesterday, and I received his last text this morning.
I was yet to open a single one of his texts and I doubt I could open them without feeling the need to break down into tears. I also could not bring myself to delete them either, because I wanted to know what he had to say.
Five days after I was the headline in the tabloids, Leila and I went to see an ObGyn for the first time.
It took a little over an hour for me to find out that I had been pregnant for the past three months, but did not know about it until now. The nurse there thought Leila and I were a couple from how much Leila had been holding my hands.
The doctor informed us we could come back in three to four weeks to find out the sex of the baby. For a second while he showed me the baby’s heartbeat, I allowed myself to get excited about the fact that I was going to be a mother soon. My high spirit was short-lived though when I remembered that the father of my baby was out of the picture.
