The Bride Wore My Nightmares Chapter 14
I gave him a long look, then raised the mic again. “You’ve all seen it. This is what Vanessa Whitaker does. She was the perpetrator in high school. And now she was ready to make Ethan raise some other man’s child.”
“You’re lying! I was forced! I was threatened too!” Vanessa screamed, completely out of control now.
But with the evidence in plain sight, no amount of raging could shift a single fact.
I took the copy I’d made of the pregnancy report and walked toward her, step by step. “You and Ethan have been together for a month or two, at most. He follows the family’s values. He hasn’t touched you before marriage. So — this baby — whose is it?”
The news of Vanessa’s pregnancy had thrown even me for a loop at first.
The lead had come from Brittany — she worked as a receptionist at a private OB-GYN clinic in LA. She’d had a crush on Ethan years back, and even though he’d turned her down and nothing came of it, she’d quietly kept tabs on the people in his life.
Recently, in the clinic’s appointment system, she’d spotted Vanessa’s name — the appointment was for an abortion.
It felt wrong to her, so she’d told me right away.
The moment I heard, I knew. That baby couldn’t possibly be Ethan’s.
Ethan is the kind of person who might let love blind him, but he won’t cross his own moral lines. He would never sleep with a woman before marriage. I knew that better than anyone.
So Vanessa was clearly pregnant with someone else’s child — desperate to terminate it, and then desperate to marry into the Callahan family, all so that she could quietly erase every unsavory part of her past.
She was completely off the rails now, eyes red, glaring at me. “Madison Callahan, what nonsense are you spouting?! What right do you have to slander me!”
“And what about these men, then?” I asked slowly, pulling out a stack of printed photos from a folder and tossing them onto the stage one by one. “When you were curled up in their arms, how much of the affection was real, and how much was performance?”
Every backdrop was the same West Hollywood lounge. Beyond the footage Chloe and I had captured, Brittany’s uncle had pulled strings and given me every last piece of surveillance from inside that VIP booth.
Vanessa shook her head desperately, still trying to deny it all.
At the back of the ballroom, a large, broad-shouldered man shoved his way through the crowd and strode forward, his presence so menacing that the guests instinctively parted for him.
Wade Hollister.
A black suit stretched over the thick build of a lifelong oilfield hand. On his wrist, a heavy gold Rolex. His belt buckle was a signature Texas silver dinner-plate. He marched right up to the stage.
“You little tramp, you’re carrying my child and trying to crawl into another man’s bed? If I hadn’t come here myself tonight, I’d still be in the dark!”
Vulgarity after vulgarity poured out of him, followed by an open-handed slap that landed squarely on the face Vanessa prized most.
Within seconds, both her cheeks had swelled up. She couldn’t speak.
“Get your phones out! Record all of this! Two months back she crawled into my bed for the money, and I was gone for one damn business trip and she’s already in someone else’s! Hell — how many men have you slept with?! Didn’t I tell you? Carry my son, I’ll pay you, you’ll give birth to him properly, I can afford to raise him!”
Several of the guests from business circles recognized him instantly — wasn’t that Wade Hollister, the Texas oilfield man who’d struck it rich in the last two years?
He’d started out as a rig hand, married the boss’s only daughter to move up, and once the old man was gone and the wife’s health kept her out of business, the whole company had ended up in his hands alone.
The gossip mill had long said he was desperate for a son to inherit.
But his wife, after two daughters, had never managed to conceive again.
Nobody would have guessed that the father of the child inside Vanessa was him.
By rights, hitching herself to this oil tycoon — however scandalous the reputation — would have been much better for Vanessa than marrying into a Callahan family that so clearly didn’t want her. No one could figure out why she’d risk aborting the baby, playing at innocence, and marry Ethan.
Unless — even she didn’t know for sure who the father was.
And on top of all that, she’d been drinking heavily throughout the pregnancy anyway. Whether the baby could even be born healthy was a massive question mark.
Add in that Wade’s wife back home — the original Mrs. Hollister — was famously ruthless in the Texas oil scene…
Suddenly, it all clicked into place!
The crowd thickened, pointing and whispering. Some had already started livestreaming.
I took a running step forward and yanked Ethan, still frozen where he stood, off the stage.
“You planned this so beautifully,” I roared at her. “Trying to hand Ethan your mess to clean up? Dream on!”
Vanessa stared at me wide-eyed, then whipped her head around to Ethan: “Ethan, I love you. I really do love you. You have to believe me!”
Ethan was still buried under the shock of it all.
When he finally came back to himself, he simply cast one last utterly disillusioned look at Vanessa, turned without a word, and walked away.
This was probably the first time in his life he’d ever fallen in love with anyone.
None of us could have imagined it ending like this.
Vanessa tried to run after him, and Wade grabbed her by the hair from behind. “Where the hell do you think you’re going, bitch?”
He dragged her by the hair like a dog, all the way off the stage.
The guests stared at the sudden turn of events, dumbstruck, dead silent. Vanessa’s parents burst out of the crowd like they’d lost their minds, trying to intervene, and were slammed back in place by the bodyguards Wade had brought. The whole ballroom became bedlam.
Mom and Dad, at least, held their composure, moving among the stunned Callahan relatives, calming them one by one.
I picked up the mic, drew in a slow, deep breath, steadied myself, and addressed those still in the room.
“I’m sorry to have made a spectacle of all this in front of you.”
“This woman is the person who bullied me from the ninth grade on. She hounded me, step by step, into severe clinical depression. And all these years later, she hasn’t shown a single ounce of remorse. She was going to pretend none of it ever happened, and let Ethan raise the illegitimate child growing inside her.
“She thought I’d swallow it all for the sake of Ethan’s so-called happiness — but why should I? Why should any of it just be let go? From the moment she shoved my face into a toilet bowl, from the moment she poured my lunch over my head and spit into it in front of the entire cafeteria, I swore an oath. That demons like her would answer for what they did. And if heaven wouldn’t do it, then I would. Every ounce of pain I bore — I’d hand back to her. Every ounce, in full.”
I slammed the mic down onto the floor.
Every year of suffering came pouring out of me in that instant.
I turned around and threw myself into the nearest arms I could find — my parents. I held them tight.
Mom didn’t say one word of reproach. She just wrapped me in her embrace and patted my back, over and over.
In that instant, every emotion I’d been holding shattered. Composure, appropriateness — none of it mattered anymore. In the middle of the main ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire, in front of everyone, I cried out loud.
…
A few days after the fiasco, Ethan was scheduled to head back to law school.
I sat on my bed, torn about whether to go and see him off.
“Maddie, you asleep?” Ethan’s voice was low, tentative, from outside my door.
I got up quickly and opened it. “Come in.”
He sat down without speaking, then lifted his eyes to mine. “Maddie, I’m sorry.”
I looked at the dark rings under his eyes, the stubble along his jaw, the shell of a man he’d become in a matter of days — and every single thing I’d been prepared to say to him got swallowed back down.
“Ethan, I —”
“Maddie, thank you. If it weren’t for you, I might have been fooled my whole life. And the wound would only have gone deeper.”
I shook my head. Looking at Ethan, drained of all his old brightness, an ache spread through my chest, slow and steady.
“You were the one who walked me out of that dark place all those years ago. I’ll remember it as long as I live. And I know love isn’t something you can control. I’ve never planned on blaming you.”
“So then… do you hate me?” Ethan lifted his eyes, watching me carefully.
“I’ve never hated you.” I shook my head and let out a soft, unburdened laugh.
If I truly hated anyone, it was only ever Vanessa Whitaker.
Ethan pulled his lips into a rueful line. “You say you don’t. But somewhere in your heart, you must resent me a little. Otherwise… you wouldn’t have chosen a way this scorched-earth.”
This time, I said nothing.
The truth was I didn’t hate him. But my beloved brother was almost taken from me by the person who hurt me most in this world — after a road that long, my heart carried more grief than even I could measure.
But I knew — I wouldn’t hold this against him forever.
Because I would always remember —
The day he found out what those people had done to me in high school, and how he clenched his fists, how his eyes went red, and how he swore to me, right there in front of me, that he was going to hunt down every last one of them and make them pay for what they’d done to his sister.
(The End)