15. Lily #2
“And you have the truth.” Lucas’s voice goes hard. “The world knows who she is now. No amount of money can bury that.”
“You underestimate the power of old money and short memories.”
“You underestimate yourself.”
I fall quiet, watching the highway lines blur past. He’s not wrong. But he’s not entirely right, either. Victoria Burton didn’t survive this long by giving up easily. She’ll regroup. She’ll scheme. She’ll find a way to come for me.
The question is whether I’ll be ready when she does.
“And Edward?”
Lucas is quiet for a moment, his eyes fixed on the road.
“He’s finished, Lily. Truly finished. Nobody will return his calls, the club found a polite reason to revoke his membership, and the friends who spent years laughing at his jokes pretend they don’t see him now.
He walks into a room and the whole place goes silent.
” His jaw tightens. “He lost every single thing he built. The same way he made you lose everything, piece by piece, until there was nothing left of you.”
And there it is. The thing I built my whole survival around. The moment I pictured on every bad night, lying awake on my side of a bed that always felt too big, listening to him come home at 3 a.m. smelling like someone else’s perfume.
I used to imagine this exact moment to keep myself alive - Edward ruined, Edward alone, Edward finally feeling one fraction of what he carved into me over three years.
I waited so long for it. And now it’s here, handed to me wrapped in a bow, and I keep waiting for the triumph to arrive.
It doesn’t come.
“I dreamed about this,” I tell him, and my voice doesn’t sound like victory.
It sounds like something hollowed out. “You don’t understand, Lucas.
I planned it. I rehearsed what I’d feel.
I thought it would be like finally being able to breathe after holding my breath for three years.
I thought it would feel like getting myself back. ”
“And it doesn’t.”
“It feels like nothing.” The words crack down the middle.
“He took everything from me - my confidence, my name, three years of my life I’ll never get back, the version of myself who still knew how to laugh without checking the room first. And ruining him doesn’t give any of it back.
He gets to be destroyed, and I still have to live in the wreckage he made of me.
How is that winning? How is that justice, when he gets an ending and I just get...
the rest of my life, trying to remember who I was before him? ”
Lucas pulls our joined hands to his mouth, presses a hard kiss to my knuckles, and doesn’t let go.
“Because winning was never going to be about him,” he says, his voice rough.
“It was never going to come from watching him fall. You’ve been pouring everything you have into hating him, and now that he’s gone, you’re standing in all that empty space wondering why it still hurts.
” His eyes flick to mine, wet and fierce.
“It hurts because you lost real things, Lily. Your grandmother. Those years. And no amount of him suffering was ever going to hand those back to you.”
The tears come then - not the quiet, careful ones I learned to cry in a marriage that punished noise, but the real kind, the kind that shake loose from somewhere I’d bricked over a long time ago.
For a while I just cry, and he lets me, his hand never leaving mine.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” I finally say. “I spent three years being angry. Planning. Surviving. And now it’s over, and there’s all this empty space where the fight used to live.”
“Maybe you’re not supposed to do anything with it yet.”
“That’s very zen of you.”
“I told you. Lots of therapy.”
I laugh weakly. “Maybe I need a therapist.”
“Probably.” He squeezes my hand. “But not today. Today you just need to breathe.”
Breathe. Right. Simple.
Except nothing about this feels simple. Nothing about this feels survivable.
My grandmother is dead. My fake marriage is exposed.
My real name is on every screen in America.
And the man beside me, the man I’m falling for despite every rational thought in my head, is the brother of the husband who betrayed me.
This is not a Hallmark movie. This is a disaster.
“Revenge isn’t a destination,” Lucas says suddenly. “It’s a door. You’ve walked through it. Now you get to decide what’s on the other side.”
“What if I don’t know what I want on the other side?”
He glances at me, and his expression is so tender it makes my throat tight.
“Then we figure it out together.”
Together.
The word settles into my chest like a key turning in a lock. Like a door opening. Like the first breath after nearly drowning.
“Together,” I repeat slowly.
“If you want.”
“What if I’m too broken? What if there’s too much damage?”
“Then we’re broken together.” His voice doesn’t waver. “I’m not going anywhere, Lily. Not unless you tell me to.”
“And if I tell you to?”
“Then I’ll go.” He swallows hard. “But I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I hadn’t.”