My Fiancé Had A Secret Wife Chapter 07
The pain exploded across her back, and finally—finally—Serena understood what Evelyn had once tried to tell her.
“Lucas takes after our father more than he knows. There’s a certain coldness in him. Serena, please—don’t let your heart run away with you.”
She understood now why Evelyn had been so against the rushed wedding, so against her marrying into the Hart family.
“Serena, I’m not going to stop you from chasing your own happiness. I just want you to know one thing: whatever happens, I’ll be on your side. Even if the person on the other side is my own brother.”
Back then, she’d twisted that into something ugly. She’d told herself Evelyn was looking down on her—her best friend, her sister-in-law. That Evelyn thought a girl who’d grown up in foster care wasn’t good enough to walk through the Hart family door.
That was the wound the poison had grown in. It had rooted deep, and by the time she saw it clearly, it was too late.
She sank to the floor. The gash across her back throbbed, but it was nothing next to the hollow behind her ribs.
Evelyn. I’m so sorry.
The apartment fell into that eerie kind of silence again. It was only then that Vivian remembered Adrian.
“Adrian, let me explain—”
She turned. He was gone.
Panic hit her. She shoved past Lucas and ran for the door.
She didn’t even make it to the hallway. Officers were already coming through the entrance and pushing her back.
“We’ve received a report that you’re all implicated in an assault that resulted in a miscarriage. The victim has submitted evidence.”
The lead officer held up a still frame. It was them—all four of them—pinning me down on the floor.
Every second of it, captured by the apartment’s own security system.
“Vivian Pierce. Lucas Hart. Serena Hart. Adrian Ashford. We’d appreciate your cooperation. You’re coming with us to the station.”
None of them moved.
None of them had thought I’d actually go to the police.
Whatever hope Serena and Lucas had been clinging to went out like a candle.
After tonight, Evelyn was never going to forgive them.
The three of them were escorted out.
As for Adrian—I didn’t expect him to find me as fast as he did.
Room 201, Pinecrest Trauma Center. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
He looked at me lying in the bed, his face raw with guilt.
“Evelyn. You’re really here.”
After watching that footage, he’d finally understood how insane the whole thing had been.
The baby wasn’t his.
The idea that I would ever kidnap a child was a joke.
He and Vivian—the whole thing had been a joke from the start.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Ashford? If I remember correctly, we broke up.”
I set down the newspaper and looked at him with nothing on my face.
“I—I came to apologize.”
“I’m sorry, Evelyn. I know it was me who got it wrong. I know it was me who betrayed you.”
The pain in his eyes was so heavy it almost had a weight of its own.
He had never regretted anything more in his life.
He’d broken every promise he ever made. He’d failed the person he’d once loved more than anyone.
Serena had said all he’d ever felt for me was gratitude. Never love.
That wasn’t true.
Adrian sank to his knees. And out of nowhere, he was remembering a night from years ago.
He’d been trapped in a cold hospital room.
The morning would bring his third surgery since the diagnosis.
Possibly the last one. Which was why he hadn’t slept.
He hadn’t been holding out much hope, not for a third try. He’d asked the night nurse to wheel him out to the garden—he’d wanted, just once more before he died, to look at the outside world. At color. At the sky.
So he’d sat there, drinking it in. Trying to hold on to every second the way you hold on to something you know is being taken from you.
That was when he saw her.
A young woman sitting on a bench in the garden, still reading through surgical notes. Moonlight caught the shape of her, soft, half-outlined.
A breeze lifted the hair at her forehead. Without looking up, she tucked it behind her ear. Her eyes never left the page.
He was in his wheelchair, a few meters away, and before he could stop himself, the words came out.
“She’s beautiful.”
The nurse behind him laughed softly.
“That’s your surgeon. Dr. Hart. She just rotated back from a field hospital overseas. She’s very, very good.”
He stared. His heart was suddenly pounding, and he couldn’t tell if it was the disease or something else entirely.
All he knew was this: a man who had already made peace with dying suddenly, quietly, wanted to live.
That night, he’d meant it—every word of it—when he told himself that if he made it through this, he was going to spend the rest of his life giving her the world.
Then time did what time does. And Vivian walked in and broke everything.
He couldn’t have told you where exactly it started to go wrong.
Maybe it was the first evening Vivian took his hand and cried and told him I can’t survive without you. It was the first time in his life he’d ever felt truly needed.
Maybe it was later, when he found himself stuck between two women and no way out, and he simply chose the path that required the least of him.
He’d told himself he could handle it.
He’d told himself that as long as Evelyn never found out, everything could stay the way it had been.
But now, sitting there staring at a blood-stained pregnancy report on a hospital tray table, he finally understood.
He hadn’t kept anything.
He had, with his own hands, pushed away the woman who used to smile at him in the moonlight—the woman who had once fought for his life on an operating table—and now she was somewhere he could never reach her again.