Chapter 66 Chapter 66: The Hidden Past Part 2
Cathy’s P.O.V
She took her life. That statement kept repeating in my head over and over, like a broken tape recorder.
She killed herself, ended her life because of a worthless man, because of a man who took advantage of her love and devotion.
I turned it over in my mind slowly. Sophia. A girl I had never heard of. A girl who had existed, loved, and suffered, all before I ever walked into Xavier's life. And he had never once let her name pass his lips in my presence.
"What happened to her, how did she even kill herself without no one seeing her, no one to rescue her?" I asked, my voice was barely above a whisper.
Hunter looked at me carefully, the way someone looks at another person before delivering news that cannot be taken back once it is spoken. He took a slow, deep breath and delivered the devastating news.
"Her body was found in her dorm room," he said. "In the bathtub. Both her wrists had been slit."
I stopped breathing for a second.
"And beside her," Hunter continued, his voice low and steady, "were all the gifts Xavier had ever given her. Every single one. Laid out next to the bathtub like she had gathered them deliberately before she did it."
The image hit me somewhere wordless and deep. A young woman in a bathtub surrounded by everything a man had ever given her to make her feel loved, everything that had turned out to be a lie, and choosing to leave this world holding onto the evidence of that lie. As if she had wanted the last thing around her to be proof of what had broken her.
My eyes burned. I pressed my lips together tightly and stared at a fixed point across the room until the feeling passed enough for me to breathe normally.
"What happened after?" I asked. “What happened to Xavier? Where there…any repercussions at all?”
Hunter sat forward, hands loose between his knees. "The entire college turned on him. News spreads fast the way it does in those places. Students knew enough, maybe not every detail, but enough to understand that a girl had found Xavier with other women and that she hadn't survived the heartbreak." He paused. "After that, it became impossible for him to exist on that campus. He couldn't walk from one building to another without students screaming at him. They would follow him across the courtyard and dump garbage on him in broad daylight. Block his path, chase him out of the common areas." He shook his head slightly. "He was completely isolated."
I sat very still and said nothing. A quiet, uncomfortable part of me registered that none of that was enough. That a girl was dead and the worst Xavier had faced was garbage thrown at him by strangers.
"Then his mother stepped in," Hunter scoffed, the sound harsh. "She transferred him to another college before the situation could get any worse." He stopped briefly, his expression shifting into something more careful. "But before she moved him, there were rumors about what she tried to do first."
I looked at him. "What did she try to do?"
I knew Lydia worshipped the very ground her son walked on. She would’ve fought the world to save him even if he didn't deserve it.
"There were rumors that she went to Sophia's family," Hunter sighed. "And she offered them money. A significant amount at that. In exchange, they would have to publicly claim that their daughter was suffering from depression. That she had been struggling with her grades and that the pressure of failing academically was what had led to her death. That it had nothing to do with Xavier."
Something moved through my chest. Hot and sharp. Despite every one of Lydia’s shortcomings, I had at least expected some compassion for a family that had just lost their child. Instead…
"She tried to buy their silence," I said, the words coming out harsh.
"That's what people believed," Hunter said. "She wanted Sophia's death repackaged into something that had nothing to do with her son. Bad grades. Academic pressure. Anything that would take his name out of the conversation entirely."
"And Sophia's family?" I asked, though I needed a moment before I was ready to hear the answer.
Hunter's expression softened slightly. "They refused. They didn't take a single penny of it." He looked at me steadily. "And then they threatened to sue Xavier directly. That threat was ultimately what forced his mother's hand. She couldn't risk a lawsuit dragging everything into public record, so she pulled him out of that college and moved him somewhere he could start over cleanly."
The room went very quiet.
I realized I had been gripping the edge of the sofa cushion beside me without noticing. I loosened my fingers slowly and sat back, but the tension in my chest didn't ease.
Sophia's parents had just lost their daughter. They were grieving in the most devastating way a parent can grieve and yet they had still looked at a pile of money being offered to them and said no. They had chosen their daughter's truth over comfort. Over whatever that money could have given them in the aftermath of something that would never stop hurting.
I thought about Xavier's mother, sweeping through that situation with her checkbook and her connections like Sophia's life was an inconvenience to be managed.
I thought about Xavier himself, packing his bags and moving to a new campus, leaving all of it behind. Starting fresh like nothing happened. As if Sophia had never existed at all.
"He never told me," I said, the words coming out flat and hollow. "Not once. Not a hint of it. We were together for two years before we got married. We had long conversations about anything and everything. I thought I knew who I was marrying." I shook my head slowly. "He told me his first serious relationship was with someone in freshman year of high school and it just hadn't worked out. That they dated for about an year and parted on good terms. That was everything he ever said about his past."
I laughed then, a short and broken sound that surprised even me. "Hadn't worked out. That's how he described it."
Hunter said nothing for a moment. He let the silence hold the weight of what I had just said.
"I didn't know," I said again, softer this time. Not to Hunter. Almost to myself. "I had absolutely no idea that a woman died because of him and that he just walked away from it like it was nothing."
"He worked very hard to make sure you wouldn't find out," Hunter said. "Xavier transferred colleges, moved cities, and built an entirely new version of himself from the ground up. Everything that connected him to Sophia was buried. And the people who might have said something were either too far removed from his new life or they had their own reasons to stay quiet."
I looked at him. "You knew."
"I found out through people who had been at that college," he said. "It took time and it wasn't easy to piece together. But yes. I knew."
"And you still watched him for a year, giving him the benefit of the doubt," I said.
"I watched him to be sure," Hunter said. "Because knowing someone's history doesn't always tell you who they are now. People change. I wanted to see whether he had." His jaw tightened. "He hadn't. He had just gotten better at hiding it."
I sat with that for a moment, absorbing all of it. Six years together…and I had no idea my world had been built on a lie. I didn't even know how I was going to face Xavier again after knowing what I knew now…
Then Hunter leaned forward slightly and his voice was careful when he spoke next, like he was choosing each word with deliberate attention.
"Xavier living the way he does, acting like that chapter of his life never happened, is not the behavior of someone who carries guilt for what occurred," he said. "If he had truly loved Sophia, even a fraction of what he had led her to believe, some version of that grief would be visible. Some part of him would bear the weight of it." He paused. "But there is nothing. He moved on too cleanly. Too quickly. Which tells me that she was never really the point."
I frowned slightly. "What was the point?"
"His inheritance," Hunter said. "Xavier's family rule that had makes it impossible for him to inherit his fortune without conditions. He needed to project stability, commitment, the image of a man who had his life in order. Sophia was quiet, devoted, the kind of young woman that a family like his would approve of. She served a purpose."
His voice didn't carry cruelty when he said it, just a tired and honest gravity. "When she died, that plan collapsed. He needed to rebuild it somewhere no one knew his name."
He looked at me directly.
"And then he found you," he said. "Someone gentle. Someone genuine. Someone who loved without conditions and always tried to see the best in people." He held my gaze. "Someone with the same kind of heart as Sophia, the kind of heart that trusts, and the kind that Xavier knew he could shape with the right words at the right moments."
The words moved through me slowly and settled somewhere deep and heavy. I thought about the first time Xavier had told me he loved me. How certain I had been. How I had built everything around that certainty.
Then I thought about Sophia in that bathtub. I thought about the gifts laying scattered on the ground while she lost her life slowly, painfully.
"He chose me because I was easy to control," I said quietly. Hunter didn't deny it. He held my gaze and said nothing, because nothing needed to be said.
And sitting there in his apartment, in the stillness of everything I had just learned, I felt something inside me shift.