Page 84 of Forsaken Trail (Runaway 4)

“I found out.”

“Sorry. You can yell at me later. For now, I just want you out of this hospital.”

“You and me both,” I muttered.

Clara slipped into the hallway where Marty hovered. When the door closed, I sank to the edge of the bed.

Aria turned her gaze to the wall.

“I’m sorry.” I clutched her hand with both of mine. “I’m sorry, baby.”

“You should have told me about the shop.”

“Yes, I should have told you.”

She slumped deeper into the bed. “We can’t keep doing this. Having the same argument. My heart can’t take it, Brody. I think . . . maybe this was never going to work.”

“Don’t.”

“This was about the baby. You know that if I wasn’t pregnant, we never would have gotten together. I think we need to call this what it is. We’re trying to make something that isn’t meant to be.”

Aria was giving up on me.

She was giving up on us.

But there was so much to fight for. Too much to lose the battle of my lifetime.

I refused to let her give up.

“I met Heather at a party.”

That won her attention. She turned away from the wall to face me.

“It was a company Christmas party. She came as the date of one of our employees. She left with me.” Maybe that was why I hadn’t been truly shocked when she cheated with Alastair.

“Why are you telling me this?”

So she’d understand something I’d realized earlier today when she’d kicked me out of her flower shop. Something I suspected Clara had figured out a long, long time ago and was the reason she’d never objected to my gifts.

She’d known why.

“Heather and I dated for a while, then she started to hint at wanting a ring. I bought one. I gave it to her. I didn’t even ask. One day, she didn’t have a ring. The next, she did and she could tell everyone she was engaged to Brody Carmichael. That’s all she’d really wanted. Bragging rights.”

Heather had cared more for my name than she had for me. And I hadn’t really cared at all. She’d been a companion. I hadn’t had to search for dates for company functions or business meetings. She was beautiful and absent.

That was what I’d liked best about Heather. She’d left me alone to do my work. She hadn’t bulldozed her way past my guards like Aria, not that Heather would have stood a chance.

She wasn’t Aria.

“I didn’t buy her things,” I said. “Yeah, I got her birthday and Christmas gifts. I’d pay for a vacation. But otherwise, she was on her own.”

Heather had begun to resent me when I hadn’t let her move into my place. While the rest of her friends who’d landed rich fiancés had been able to quit their jobs, Heather had needed to keep working.

When Alastair came around, she must have seen him as her ticket to financial freedom.

All she’d had to do was time it so that I’d catch the two of them in bed. Heather had to have known that Alastair would want her simply because it had been another way to one-up me.

“I don’t understand,” Aria said. “You didn’t buy her things?”