Chapter 185 Chapter 185

Chapter 185 Chapter 185
ADORE

I had not been feeling well for three weeks.

Not dramatically unwell, not the kind that put you in bed, just off, waking up some mornings and feeling the world tilt slightly before it righted itself, turning away from food I usually liked and tired in a way that sleep did not fully fix.

I had been pressing it down and attributing it to the house and the quiet loneliness of days that looked the same as the days before them.

Then one morning I could not get off the bathroom floor.

I sat there for twenty minutes and felt my body doing something that had nothing to do with loneliness and everything to do with something else entirely and when I finally got up I drove to the hospital and sat in the waiting room with my hands in my lap and told myself it was probably nothing still felt very anxious.

The doctor was kind and thorough and when she came back into the room and told me I sat very still for a moment, my heart pounding so hard with tears streaming down my cheeks.

I was pregnant, I and Angelo are going to have a baby.

The happiness arrived so suddenly and so completely that I pressed both hands against my mouth and sat there in the examination room and cried.

I was carrying a piece of Angelo, someone that will keep me company in my lonely days, someone I can love both secretly and openly.

My baby.

Angelo's baby.

I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the test results on the passenger seat and thought about Angelo's reaction when he hears about this, he will be very happy about the news and we'll be complete home, no more loneliness, a little bundle to lighten up the house was all we needed.

I reached for my phone at a red light and dialed his number before I had decided to dial it and listened to it ring and went into voicemail.

I dialed it again, still he didn't answer, he might be in a very important meeting and here I was, calling to deliver the news about our baby.

No...not like this.

Not over the phone while he was in a meeting and I was sitting at a red light.

I need to think of a memorable way to break the news to him.

I just got home when my phone rang, it was Angelo calling, I answered and told him it was nothing and ended the call.

I sat in the sitting room and held the test results and thought about how to do this properly, how to make it a moment rather than an announcement, how to give him something real in the middle of everything else that was always happening in our life.

An idea occurred to me, the study.

I would leave the results in his study and he would find them when he came home, I could already picture the look on his face when he sat on his study chair and find the results among all his work sheets

I smiled as I went upstairs and pushed the study door open.

The room was exactly as he always left it, files on the desk, his chair pushed back slightly like he had just stood up from it and the lamp on even though it was afternoon.

I walked to the desk and placed the results down carefully, face up, in the centre where he would see it immediately, and stepped back and looked at it and felt the happiness sit in my chest and smiled to myself and turned to leave.

Something caught my eye.

A ledger on the edge of the desk, partially open, the kind of ledger that had columns and figures and names written in the margins in handwriting I recognised as Angelo's, and I would have kept walking, would have walked out and closed the door and gone downstairs to wait, except that one of the names in the margin was my father's.

I stopped, went closer and looked at the ledger properly.

My father's name was not alone, it was in a column alongside figures and dates and operation names.

I stood in Angelo's study and felt the happiness thin and felt something else arrive in its place as I read, cold and slow and completely without the warmth that had been in my chest sixty seconds ago.

Operations, warehouse locations.

My father's operations, my father's warehouse locations, his rotation schedules, his cargo movements, all of it written in Angelo's handwriting in a ledger on Angelo's desk in Angelo's study with a stamp that goes by the name, Gelo E.

I stood very still and suddenly felt cold.

My mother's voice came back to me from years ago before I got married to Angelo.

"The person targeting your father goes by the name Gelo E," and I had told her she was lying, had told her she was wrong, had stood in front of my father and given him every instance of Angelo protecting me and my father had nodded and said "we must have gotten it wrong" and I had left the compound feeling lighter than I had when I arrived.

Why the hell will he say that when he knows the truth?

I looked at the ledger in my husband's study and felt devastation of someone who has just understood that the person they defended completely was the person being accused and the accusation was true.

My hands were shaking.

I had never questioned Angelo, I was so blinded with love that I do everything he asked me to do and that includes staying in secret as his wife, now, I was beginning to question everything.

I put the ledger back exactly where it had been and looked at the test results sitting in the centre of the desk and felt the happiness from the hospital sitting somewhere very far away from where I was standing right now.

I felt so hurt and betrayed, I had loved Angelo unconditionally and he has been lying to me? What more has he been hiding from me? Now, I started wondering why my mother was hell bent about me not ending up with him, she had accused Angelo of so many things, were they all true?

What else was he hiding.

What else had he been hiding since the beginning. The question kept ringing in my head.

I needed to think and I could not think in this study and I could not think in this house and I could not sit here and wait for him to come home because I needed answers right away.

I needed my parents.

I needed answers that Angelo was not going to give me willingly and my mother had been trying to give me answers for years and I had refused every single one of them.

I walked out of the study and down the stairs and picked up my keys from the table by the door and went to the car.

I told the guard who was about to follow me to back off.

I did not take the test results with me. I left them exactly where I had placed them on his desk.

Right now, I needed answers and I was going to get them.