AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No,” I laughed. “You didn’t. He hates me now because he thinks I came to you on my own about this when we’d planned to talk to you together, and he won’t talk to me because you threatened his entire livelihood if he tried.”
I didn’t have the guts to say that he was still upset with me for keeping the pregnancy from him, too. That wasn’t something Dad needed to know, not right now.
We could have worked through that issue. I was sure of that. But this?
“I should’ve told him sooner that it wasn’t you,” he sighed. “I…apologize for not thinking it through.”
It was my turn to blink at him in return.
I couldn’t remember a single time in my life when Dad had apologized when he was in the wrong. He was always soheadstrong in anything he did, any solutions he offered. This was…whiplash inducing.
I cleared my throat to stuff down the surprise. “How did you find out?”
He shook his head, grunting as he fished his phone out of the recliner. “I got an email of some photos,” he said, almost cringing. He stepped around the back of the couch toward me, his arm outstretched with his phone screen lit up. “I only looked at the first one. And before ‘ya ask, I’ve no fuckin’ clue who sent ‘em.”
Hesitantly, I took his phone.
“I was just tryin’ to protect ‘ya,” he sighed. “I thought he was using ‘ya, kid. He told me he didn’t want somethin’ serious after Jan, and then when I got the photos, I was just terrified you’d have to deal with a scandal and heartbreak.”
Oh my God.
The email address it came from was just a single string of numbers, and there wasn’t a single word in the body of it. Just…photos.
I scrolled.
The first was one of me and Adrian on the balcony at the first charity ball, when he’d followed me outside. My hands were in his hair, my body lifted and pushed against the side of the building, his hips slotted between mine. From the angle, it was clear what was happening, and the whole side of my rear was visible along with his fingers. It looked almost like it had been taken with some sort of long-lens camera—like a paparazzi shot. Surely, neither of us was well known enough to warrant paparazzi.
The second was shot through a foggy window, just two roughly human shapes on the other side of it with one head of black and gray hair and another of bright auburn, his bodyclose to mine against what looked like a…fireplace. That was the Hamptons, on that last night. How the fuck…?
The third was us outside the bagel stand, a car halfway obscuring the photo. His hands were on my cheeks and his mouth was on mine. When he’d told me without telling me that he wanted a relationship.
The fourth showed me that this wasn’t in order, but it was the most vulgar one by far, and I had to keep my roiling nausea at bay as best as I could as I realized how deep this invasion of privacy went. It was shot through the large window in his bedroom on his sailboat, with both of us completely bare. My back was arched against his chest, my rear against his hips, his hand around my fucking throat.
I was going to be sick.
I scrolled quickly past the final two: one of him kissing me on the street when I’d followed him to his date that he abandoned, and one of us stepping out of his car in the parking garage below his building, with me in only my buttoned up coat and my hair a mess.
I ran to the bathroom before Dad could say anything else, spilling my guts into the toilet. The phone sat next to me, still illuminated on that last one, taunting me, violating me.
I needed to find out who the fuck had done this, and I needed to tell Adrian. But even as I hurled up the homemade soup, even as I gagged and nothing came up, I wasn’t sure if I could forgive him for not believing me.
It wasn’t me. It would have never been me.
Chapter 36
Adrian
The moment the forwarded email landed in my inbox, all I could see was red.
It was forwarded from David’s email address, but the note in the text body made it absolutely clear that he wasn’t the one who decided to show me them.
Told you it wasn’t me.
—Ava
I’d fucked up. I well and truly understood that. And although I wanted to grovel at her feet and apologize, I needed to focus on finding the person who had done this. Every image was too personal, too close to home, too sneaky to have been someone I knew trailing me.
And they went back to the first night.
