Chapter 244 - 0244: You Don’t Care

Chapter 244: Chapter 0244: You Don’t Care

Graham’s Point Of View

"You’re just the other woman carrying my child."

The second the words left my mouth, the room felt different. Not quieter. Sharper. Like the air had grown edges, as though something unseen had cracked open between us and let the cold in. I felt the shift immediately, a kind of pressure change, like

the moment before a storm breaks.

Lillian didn’t breathe.

She just stared at me, her eyes searching my face for some sign that I might take it back, that I might laugh and tell her it was a cruel joke. I watched the hope flicker there, stubborn and small, refusing to die even as the silence stretched on.

Her lips parted slowly, a soft, broken sound leaving her throat... not quite a gasp, not quite a sob, something caught painfully between the two. Her hand slid from her stomach like she’d forgotten it was there, like the weight of what I’d said had erased every instinct to protect what she carried. Shock. Pure shock.

Then hurt, raw, flashing across her face so fast it almost looked like physical pain, the kind that makes a person flinch before they even understand why. I saw the exact moment her mind caught up to her body, the delayed collision of comprehension and anguish.

"What..." she whispered.

She took a step closer, slow, unsteady, like her legs weren’t entirely cooperating, like the ground beneath her had tilted without warning. I almost reached out to steady her. Almost. The instinct surprised me more than it should have, and I let it pass without acting on it.

"What did you just say, Graham?"

Her voice trembled, but she didn’t back down. I’ll give her that. She didn’t crumble immediately. She wanted clarification. Wanted me to retract it. To fix it. To say I didn’t mean it. To hand her back the version of reality she’d built her life around. I could see her constructing the explanation already, some alternate version of the last thirty seconds where I hadn’t said what I’d said.

I did mean it.

I tilted my head slightly, a smirk pulling at the corner of my mouth. It wasn’t amusement. It was irritation curdled into something uglier, something I didn’t bother hiding anymore. Some part of me recognized how it looked from the outside, how it must have felt to her, and found that I didn’t particularly care.

"You heard me perfectly, Lillian," I said lazily. "Or do you need me to spell it out for you?"

Her face went pale, the color draining so quickly I almost expected her knees to buckle. For a moment I actually considered whether I’d need to catch her, whether the theatrics would extend that far.

"You can’t..." she breathed, shaking her head. "You can’t possibly mean that."

"I rarely say things I don’t mean."

Her chest rose and fell faster now, each breath shallow and uneven. She looked smaller suddenly, even with the roundness of her pregnancy making her physically larger... smaller in confidence, smaller in certainty, as if the words had carved something out of her. It was strange, watching someone shrink in real time, watching the architecture of her composure give way piece by piece.

"I left everything for you," she said, her voice gaining strength through desperation. "Do you remember that? I walked away from my apartment. My job. My reputation. Because you said we were building something."

"I said no such thing."

Her eyes widened, disbelief flickering across her face like she couldn’t reconcile the man in front of her with the one she remembered. I watched her search for that other man, the one who must have existed once, the one she’d given up everything for.

"You did," she insisted, stepping closer again, jabbing a finger toward my chest. "You said she wasn’t right for you. You said she didn’t understand you. You said you were stuck."

"I was."

"And I helped you get unstuck!" she snapped. "That was the plan!"

"There was no plan," I shot back immediately. "There was convenience."

The word landed like a slap, and I watched it register, watched something in her expression shatter quietly. There was almost a sound to it, I thought, some silent fracture only visible in the way her eyes went unfocused for half a second.

Her mouth fell open.

"Convenience?" she repeated, as if tasting something rotten, like the word itself had turned bitter on her tongue.

"Yes. You were convenient."

The anger in me was boiling now. Not just at her. At the message still sitting unanswered on my phone. At the pressure building in my chest. At the fact that someone somewhere thought they could dictate my marriage like it was a business merger to be negotiated and signed away. Every grievance seemed to converge in this one room, in this one conversation, and Lillian had the misfortune of standing in the blast radius.

She grabbed my shirt suddenly, her fingers twisting into the fabric with a strength that surprised me.

"I am carrying your child," she hissed. "Your blood. Your name. And you’re standing there calling me convenient?"

I didn’t even flinch.

"You chose to keep the pregnancy."

Her hand froze against my chest, her fingers curling tighter for just a moment before going still.

"You begged me to," she whispered.

"I suggested options."

"You begged me," she repeated, louder now, her voice cracking under the weight of memory. "You said it would bind us together."

I gave a humorless laugh. "And it did."

Her brows pulled together in confusion, the kind of bewilderment that comes from realizing a sentence means something entirely different than you’d assumed.

"It bound you to me," I clarified coldly. "Not the other way around."

Her breathing turned shallow, each inhale catching audibly in her throat.

"You don’t mean this," she said, shaking her head violently, strands of hair falling loose from the careful style she’d worn that morning. "You’re angry. That’s all. Something else is going on. This isn’t about me."

"It’s exactly about you."

"It’s about her!" she screamed suddenly. "It’s always about her!"

The word her hung between us like a loaded weapon, charged with two years of resentment she’d clearly been swallowing in silence. I almost admired the restraint it must have taken to hold that single syllable back for so long.

"Elena is gone!" she continued, tears spilling freely now, streaking down her face unchecked. "She left! She walked away! She gave you the divorce papers!"

"And I tore them up."

The words came out instinctively. Possessively. Before I’d even decided to say them. I felt something tighten in my chest as I said it, some old reflex I thought I’d buried.

Her body went still, every muscle locking in place.

"Why?" she asked quietly, the question small and fragile in the space between us.

I didn’t answer.

Because the answer wasn’t something I wanted to dissect in front of her, wasn’t something I fully understood myself, let alone something I owed her. The truth sat lodged somewhere behind my ribs, and I had no intention of excavating it for her benefit.

"She’s not coming back," Lillian said, but there was doubt creeping into her tone now, a crack in the certainty she was trying to project. "You know that."

"She’s my wife," I repeated.

"And I’m what?" she demanded, her voice rising with something close to panic.

I stepped closer this time, close enough that she had to tilt her head up to keep eye contact, close enough to see the mascara pooling beneath her lashes.

"You’re the mistake I made while trying to feel something," I said evenly.

Her hand came out of nowhere.

The slap cracked across my face, sharp and loud, echoing against the glass walls of the office. For a second, everything stilled. My head turned slightly from the impact. The sting bloomed across my cheek, hot and immediate, and somewhere beneath the pain I registered a strange, distant respect for the force behind it. It was, I thought absurdly, the most honest thing either of us had done in the last ten minutes.

We both froze.

She looked shocked at herself, at what she’d done, her hand still raised slightly as though she couldn’t quite believe it belonged to her.

Then fury replaced it.

"How dare you," she choked out. "How dare you reduce me to that."

I turned my face back to her slowly. Deliberately. And smiled. Not kindly. Not apologetically. Cold, the way frost settles over glass without asking permission.

"You wanted honesty, and I gave you that," I said.

"You used me," she spat.

"No, we used each other."

The admission seemed to physically knock the air out of her lungs, and she staggered back half a step, one hand flying to her chest as though to hold herself together.

"You told me you loved me."

I didn’t hesitate.

"I lied."

The sound that left her wasn’t a sob. It was something worse. Something torn, something that seemed to come from a place far deeper than simple heartbreak. It was the sound of someone watching years of memory rearrange themselves into something unrecognizable.

"You’re cruel," she whispered.

"No," I corrected calmly. "I’m clear."

She shoved at my chest weakly, but I didn’t move. She wasn’t strong enough for that, not now, not in her condition, and some distant part of me noted the fact even as the rest of me remained unmoved. I registered it the way one registers weather, a fact without weight, without consequence.

"You can’t just discard me," she said, panic seeping into her voice now, rising like water finding every crack. "I’m not disposable."

"You were always temporary."

Her eyes searched my face desperately, like she was still hoping to find some softness hiding there, some flicker of the man she’d convinced herself she knew.

There wasn’t any.

"You said we’d be a family," she tried again, voice trembling, the words barely holding together.

"I said the child would be taken care of."

"That’s not the same thing!"

"It’s the only thing that matters."

She stared at me like she’d never seen me before, like two years of intimacy had suddenly dissolved into the face of a stranger.

Maybe she hadn’t ever really seen me at all. Maybe neither of us had bothered to look closely enough, too distracted by what we wanted the other to be.

"Do you hear yourself?" she whispered. "Do you hear how monstrous you sound?"

I stepped back slightly, adjusting my cuff like we were discussing a minor inconvenience rather than the wreckage of her life. I unbuttoned my silver links, slid them into my pocket, and slowly rolled my sleeves up to my elbows. My watch face glinted under the recessed lighting... forty-four minutes left on that goddamn timer resting on the desk behind me, counting down toward something I hadn’t yet decided how to face. The number mocked me somehow, indifferent to the devastation unfolding just a few feet away from it.

"You’re emotional," I said dismissively, walking over to the marble island to grab my whiskey glass. It was half-full, dark amber liquor sitting over a melting sphere of ice. I swirled it around, the faint clinking sound cutting through the tension. "That’s expected."

"Emotional?" she repeated, disbelief flooding her face again. She followed me across the room, her heels clicking sharply against the hardwood floor until she stopped right on the edge of the rug, as though some final shred of restraint kept her from closing the last few feet between us. "You just destroyed everything I thought we were."

"There was no we." I took a slow sip, letting the burn coat my throat before setting the glass down with a heavy thud that seemed to punctuate the finality of it.

Her breathing broke. Her hands trembled at her sides, her knuckles turning white as she balled them into tight fists, nails digging crescents into her palms.

"You told me she was cold," she said quietly, her voice dropping into a register so dark it almost didn’t sound like her. "You told me she didn’t touch you. That she didn’t give you what you needed."

"She didn’t."

"And I did!"

"For a while."

She made a strangled noise in the back of her throat, a choked sound of pure humiliation that seemed to catch on every breath she tried to take.

"What about the nights in Chicago?" she pressed, stepping right into my space again, her chest heaving against her thin blouse. "What about when you brought me to your summer house while she was sitting alone at home waiting for your call? Was that temporary? Were those lies too?"

"They were moments," I said coldly. "Nothing more. Don’t make them out to be a grand romance, Lillian. You knew what you were getting into the second you let me buy your silence with a penthouse key."

"You pushed me into this!" She grabbed the edge of the marble island, her nails scraping against the stone hard enough that I half expected them to crack. "You made me feel like I was the one who mattered! You let me sit at the same table as her! You introduced me to your friends as your cousin just so you could keep me close enough to touch while she was standing three feet away! You made a fool out of her, Graham, but you made a bigger fool out of me!"

"I didn’t make you do anything," I replied, my voice dropping lower, rasping, stripped of any remaining pretense. "You liked the clothes. You liked the cars. You liked the idea of taking something that belonged to Elena because you thought it made you better than her."

Tears streamed down her cheeks, ruining her makeup, leaving dark trails down her pale skin, but she didn’t even bother wiping them away, as though the effort of maintaining composure had simply become too much.

"I loved you," she choked out, her shoulders shaking violently. "I gave up two years of my life for you. I’m carrying a baby right now that I didn’t even ask for until you told me you wanted a legacy!"

"And the baby will have a legacy," I said flatly. "A trust fund. A house. The best schooling money can buy. That is more than enough."

"I don’t want your fucking money!" she screamed, her voice cracking as it echoed off the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. "I wanted a life with you! I wanted you to look at me the way you look at her when you think nobody’s watching!"

I turned my back to her, reaching into my pocket for my phone. The countdown timer was still ticking, the numbers steadily eating away at the hour, indifferent to everything unraveling in the room behind me.

"You were never going to get that," I said softly to the black screen.

"Why?" she sobbed, taking a shuddering breath that sounded like her ribs were breaking. "Why her? She left you! She hates you! She doesn’t even want your name anymore!"

"Because she’s my wife," I said, turning around slowly to look at her one last time. "And you’re not."

Lillian stood there, her chest heaving in ragged, uneven hitches as the weight of everything finally settled over her like lead. The desperation in her eyes died out, replaced by a deep, hollow emptiness that seemed to age her ten years in the span of a single breath. She wiped her nose with the back of her trembling hand, looking at me like I was a stranger standing in my own office, like every memory she had of gentleness between us had just been rewritten in front of her.

"You’re not even sorry," she said, her voice barely a whisper now.

"No."

The simplicity of it seemed to wound her deeper than any insult could, deeper than anything I’d said in the entire conversation.

"You don’t care."