Page 188 of This Life of Mine

A high-pitched ringing fills my ears, drowning out everything else. The sounds around me fades into muffled fragments as my heartbeat pounds so violently it’s in my throat.

Too fast. Far too fast.

Grief crashes over me in relentless waves.

Not just for what I lost. For what was taken.

For every birthday I’ll never celebrate. Every scraped knee I’ll never kiss. Every laugh I’ll never hear. Every memory that was stolen prior to its existence.

My knees give way.

Strength drains from my body so completely it’s as though the ground has vanished beneath me. I reach for something—anything—to steady myself.

There’s nothing.

Nothing except the crushing weight of a truth I never wanted to know.

“I wanted it clean,” she goes on. “Simple. A tragedy.” Her eyes light up—not with grief, but with satisfaction. “Me, the poor mother who lost her son. The devastated grandmother who never even got to hold her grandchild.” A laugh bubbles up from her chest, shrill and ugly.

“Two birds with one stone,” she says. “Cole and the baby. But he decided to wear a seatbelt that night. He never does. He should have died that day too,” she says, as though it was an inconvenience.

I can’t hold it back anymore.

A sob tears free from somewhere deep inside me as hot tears spill down my cheeks.

My baby. My Danny.

I clutch at my chest, desperate to ease the ache threatening to split me in two, but it only grows heavier. Every memory crashes over me at once—his tiny fingers wrapped around mine, the dreams I’d carried for him, the life he’d never get to live.

My sweet boy. I’m so sorry.

“I didn’t know the trust only required you to get pregnant,” she adds, irritation flashing across her face like I’m the one who tricked her. “I thought the money was tied to the actual live birth. So I did what I had to do to make sure you walked away with nothing. Cassie was all too easy to convince, easy to pay off. After all, she’s only after the money. At least she’s up front about it. She was even up front about her child not being Cole’s. I can at least admire her honesty and determination,” she says, laughing, like it’s all one big joke.

Suddenly, her expression hardens into annoyance. “Turns out I simply misunderstood the trust. I should have made sure youalldied that day.”

The silence that follows is suffocating. I’m sure my stunned face says it all.

This woman who once kissed my cheek and asked how the baby was doing, who placed her hand on my stomach and smiled, as if she cared, murdered my child. My innocent little Danny. Her grandchild.

What she doesn’t realize is a part of me did die that day. The day Danny took his last breath. The day I woke up to a future that no longer existed with him in it.

I remember the magnitude of that loss. The hollow ache that settled inside me and never truly left. The way I kept reaching for a life that had already slipped through my fingers.

And now she stands here, pinning me with a stare as though the real tragedy is that I survived it. As though losing my child wasn’t enough.

The anger seeps into my bones, and I wipe my last tear away.

“Oh, get it together, Lina,” she says, spitting my name.

Terrifyingly—I understand something. This is who I could have become. If I had stayed. If I had believed the threats. If I had let fear keep me trapped the way it trapped her. Bitter. Hollow. Rotting from the inside out.

I think of the day I left Cole. How I walked away with nothing. And I would rather have lost everything than become this.

I left because I wanted to live. She stayed because she wanted to win.

This woman destroyed more than one life, all for money.

I hear Alex shift slightly behind me—and I know that if she pulls the trigger, she won’t live another second. But I will be gone.