Everyone Betrayed Me While I Carried His Baby Chapter 01
After Cassian Lombardi cheated and returned to the family, everyone close to me began to keep a watch on him.
He’d take out the trash, and my father would trail him, sending me an iMessage a moment later: *He’s behaving. Didn’t even touch his phone.*
When he went to his law firm for meetings, my mother dressed as a cleaner to sneak inside. Her report: *Not a single woman near his office.*
After his business trips, my best friend, Adriana, would show up armed with a lint roller and a flashlight to inspect him from head to toe.
“No strange hair. No lipstick. He’s clean.”
They all insisted Cassian had come back to the family.
Cassian himself sat by my bed every day, swearing he would love only me and our child from now on.
This went on until I was seven months pregnant. Cassian was supposed to be on a business trip, so I went to my prenatal checkup alone.
As I passed the maternity ward, I saw him cradling a newborn, leaning down to kiss the woman in the hospital bed.
My parents and Adriana stood beside them, their eyes glistening with tears.
The woman was Jenna. The same woman he had cheated on me with before.
The moment I appeared, the happy scene froze. Their first instinct was to shield the baby from my view.
I walked over to Cassian and smoothed the rumpled collar of his shirt.
“The baby is cute. She looks like you.”
I offered a small smile. “Take your time. I’ll go home and get the laundry started.”
…
Cassian just stood there, panic washing over his face.
“Seren, listen to me.”
“Do these need to be washed, too?” I asked, pointing to a pile of men’s clothes on the sofa.
His face went white. He reached out, his hand clamping around my arm. “Seren, don’t do this. Just let me explain.”
“What am I doing?” I looked at him, the corner of my mouth twitching. “Am I bothering you?”
He shook his head, his voice dropping to a whisper.
“You’re not angry?”
I knew why he was asking.
Six months ago, when I’d first found out about him and Jenna, I had lost my mind.
I printed over a thousand photos of them in a hotel room and plastered them all over the entrance of his law firm.
The day he mentioned divorce, I took a baseball bat to the windows of his BMW M8, then climbed onto the railing of the Brooklyn Bridge.
That day, my parents and Adriana had dragged Cassian to the bridge, shards of glass still clinging to his suit. They’d shoved my positive pregnancy test in his face and made him beg. “Seren, you’re pregnant,” he’d pleaded. “For the baby’s sake, please, forgive me just this once.”
Back then, everyone thought I had gone insane.
Now, I just calmly pried his fingers off my arm, one by one.
“Because there’s no need to be.”
As if on cue, the baby in his arms started to cry.
Adriana, who only yesterday had pressed her ear to my belly and promised to be my child’s godmother, rushed over and shoved me.
“Take it outside. Don’t make a scene in here. You’ll scare the baby.”
She glared at me. “Jenna was so worried about upsetting you that she wouldn’t even stay in a private suite. Do you have any idea how much she’s suffered?”
My parents, who once lost sleep worrying about me, now moved to stand in front of Jenna’s bed.
“Seren, Jenna is a good girl,” my father said. “She has no one else here. Of course we were going to be with her when she gave birth.”
I was seven months pregnant, and the people I trusted most in the world forced me backward until my spine slammed against the doorframe. A cold sweat of pain broke out across my skin.
A few seconds passed before I found my voice.
“That’s your business. I don’t care.”
I clutched my stomach and turned to leave, but Jenna scrambled out of bed, her eyes red. She stumbled toward me and grabbed my hand.
“Seren, don’t blame them. This is all my fault.”
“My father was trying to force me to go back to our little town in West Virginia to get married. They were just trying to help me, so we came up with a plan. I’d have the baby and tell everyone I was already married.”
“You’re the one who got me out of that town, who paid for my college education. I’ve never forgotten that. I would never steal your husband.”
She was sobbing, but as she lowered her head, she couldn’t hide the flicker of triumph in her eyes.
A wave of nausea washed over me. I shook her hand off, braced myself against the wall, and dry-heaved.
“Jenna!”
“Seren Lombardi, how dare you touch her? She just gave birth!”
Adriana slapped me hard across the face.
My cheek stung, burning hot.
I held my belly, trying to speak, but my parents were already pushing me out of the room.
“Just go home. Stop making trouble.”
The door slammed shut behind me.
Through the wood, I could hear them comforting Jenna.
I was locked out.
Thunder rumbled outside the long corridor window. A cold wind snaked through the cracks, and I couldn’t stop shivering.
Cassian followed me out, holding an umbrella.
“Seren, it’s raining. I’ll take you home.”
I didn’t say no.
He seemed to let out a breath of relief and started talking, the words rushing out of him.
“The doctor said Jenna has a condition. If she didn’t have this baby, she might never be able to get pregnant again. I couldn’t… I just couldn’t do that to her.”
“But I swear, you’re the only one I love.”
“As soon as she’s discharged, I’ll set her and the baby up on Long Island. I promise, you’ll never have to see them again.”
“I don’t care.”
I turned, pulled the diamond ring from my finger, and threw it at his feet.
“Give it to her.”
“After our baby is born, we’re getting a divorce.”