I Signed Away Eight Million To Leave Him Chapter 04
After that article, Sloane stopped pretending.
On the club terrace, she passed by me, suddenly stepped on her own hem, and tumbled down two stairs.
Graham rushed over and helped her up.
“Mara pushed me,” she said, her eyes welling with tears.
Before I could even open my mouth, Graham cut in coldly, “Is there any trick lower than this?”
The next day, a gossip column dredged up the old story of my mother’s death from domestic violence.
The source claimed I had personally leaked the details, hoping to win sympathy from Palm Beach society.
Graham threw the paper down in front of me.
“You’ll even use your dead mother to get attention. You disgust me.”
I told him it wasn’t me.
He had only one reply.
“Sloane doesn’t lie.”
Later, Sloane set her sights on the old swing on the estate beach.
Right in front of me, she complained to Graham, “Mara is always bringing up that broken-down swing, as if she’s terrified people might forget how poor she used to be. Leaving it there just makes the Vale family look shabby.”
The next morning, I ran to the beach.
The swing was gone.
The severed ropes were half-buried in the sand, and the wooden seat had been hacked to pieces and tossed near the high-tide line.
Graham had repaired it with his own hands when he was seventeen.
He had sat there and promised I would never be without a home again.
I bent to pick up a splintered piece of wood, and a shard drove deep into my palm.
Graham stood behind me, his expression flat.
“Sloane didn’t like it.”
“So you destroyed it?”
“It was a pile of rotten wood.” He looked at me, his patience worn thin. “You should learn to move on.”
As the wedding date approached, Sloane cornered me in the dressing room at a party.
“You don’t really think he’s going to marry you, do you?”
She smoothed a crease on my shoulder with a familiar hand, her voice a low whisper only I could hear.
“If you leave on your own, you might save a little dignity. Otherwise, the one abandoned at the altar will only look worse.”
After she left, I looked at myself in the mirror.
Dark circles under my eyes. Pale skin. Even my smile looked exhausted.
And suddenly I realized that hearing Graham might not marry me no longer hurt.
Three years of humiliation had worn away the last trace of love.
I shouldn’t have kept waiting.
At the annual fundraising ball, Graham suddenly walked onto the stage.
Every camera in the room swiveled toward him.
He said he wanted to sing a song for “the person who truly understands me, and who truly deserves to stand by my side.”
Sloane sat in the front row, smiling with absolute certainty.
When the final note faded, Graham walked to her, dropped to one knee, and took out a diamond ring.
“Sloane Mercer, will you marry me?”
Gasps ripped through the room. Flashbulbs exploded.
Sloane nodded through her tears.
As Graham slipped the ring onto her finger, he looked past the crowd and found my eyes, as if he were waiting for me to break down, to run onto the stage and beg him not to do this.
Instead, I lifted my glass in his direction.
“Graham, I wish you both happiness.”
Then I set the glass down and walked out of the ballroom.