Chapter 79 Drowning Beside Him!

Chapter 79 Drowning Beside Him!
Celia POV

I forced myself to remember that time. Jacob had been gone for three full weeks. It had been during the harvest season, when his absence could easily be explained and easily forgiven.

When he returned, he looked exhausted. Even his embrace felt stiff, as though his body was guarding something from me. He told me he had rushed away after hearing that his father was ill. He said he had stayed with his family until his father’s condition improved.

At the time, I believed him. Or perhaps I chose to believe him. My concern for his father had been stronger than the small unease stirring inside me.

But now, every word of that explanation came back to me and hung in the room like the smell of something rotten. What I had accepted as duty began to look like concealment. What I had taken for exhaustion began to look like guilt.

A new doubt opened inside me, sharp and merciless. If Saintilia had told the truth about the scar, then what else had I refused to see? And if Jacob had lied to me then, how much of our life had been built on the ground of that lie?

The most condemning evidence was the story he had used to explain his absence.

I struggled to remember what I had once accepted as truth. When Jacob and I first met, he told me he was an orphan who had grown up on the streets. The story about his mother dying was one we invented later, only so my parents would accept him. Yet when he disappeared for weeks, claiming he had gone to care for his sick father, it never occurred to me to question it.

His father.

The word struck me now with cruel force. How had I missed that? How had I not remembered that he had once told me he had no family at all?

Everything began to crash down around me. The scar. Saintilia’s words. His sudden absence. His return, tired and guarded. And then another memory came back to me. Around that same time, Jacob had stopped wearing the sleeveless shirts he had always loved.

I felt stupid. Bewildered. Sick with myself.

How could I have missed all of this?

The thought had never once entered my mind. The idea that my husband, the man I shared a home with, the man I had built a life beside, could have been involved in what happened to Saintilia felt impossible. It did not fit the man I thought I knew. He was not that kind of man. At least, that was what I had always believed.

But the question began to eat at me, a painful whisper I could not silence.

Why?

Why would he hurt Saintilia?

She had done nothing to deserve such cruelty. She was more than a girl Jonas had asked us to watch over. She had become part of our family. We had watched her grow under our own roof. She had taken a place deep in my heart, and I had truly believed she was like a daughter to us.

I had believed Jacob felt the same.

That belief made the pain even sharper. If I had not lost our baby, our own child would have been only a year younger than Saintilia. The thought crushed me. The weight of it settled on my chest like stone, heavy and unmoving.

In my despair, I looked upward, my voice breaking as I whispered a quiet prayer to God for strength.

My mind kept returning to the past, to all the times I had seen Jacob with Saintilia. I remembered his smiles, his gentle ways, the patience in his voice when he spoke to her. It had all seemed so real. I had believed, with all my heart, that he loved her like a father.

Then came the cruelest thought of all.

If my own pregnancy had not ended so tragically, our child and Saintilia might have grown up together like siblings. That realization made his betrayal feel like more than a crime. It felt like a violation of the family we had almost been.

The weight of what I had discovered pressed down on me until I could barely think. I sat there cold and shaking, helpless in the dark, with no idea which way to turn.

“Oh God, what should I do?” I whispered.

The words came out broken, carrying all the fear I could no longer hold inside. I was losing a battle against the terror and confusion rising in me, and I could not calm myself.

The night seemed to stretch forever, filled with silence and hidden truths. Each minute felt longer than the last. The secret I now carried was like a stone tied around my neck, pulling me under. I searched my mind for someone, anyone I could trust with this nightmare.

But there was no one.

Not a single soul in the world I could turn to.

Confronting him felt impossible. The truth was too painful to speak, as if saying the words aloud would make them real in a way I could not survive. So I lay there in the stillness of the night, unable to do anything but endure. My mind was a storm, but I did not dare let my cries escape. I stayed silent beside him, alone with what I now feared, praying for sleep to interrupt the torment in my mind.

But sleep did not come.

Every minute stretched like an hour. In the darkness, I whispered a prayer for dawn to break, for morning to come quickly, and for the new day to give me the strength I did not have.

Time Skipped

It was mid-afternoon, and the sun poured a brilliant, heavy light over the village. The worst of the day’s heat had finally faded, leaving the air warm and still, a perfect time to be outside. I was walking along the riverbank, a place I had not visited alone in a long time. Ever since the incident, Emilio had insisted that someone else fetch our water. He had it delivered every day, a silent, smothering kindness meant to keep me safe, but one that sometimes felt like being kept in a cage.

My thoughts were slow and peaceful, still lingering on the coolness of the water and the quiet sound of the current. Then I saw her.

Celia was at the riverbank too. She had always been a cheerful woman, the kind whose laugh could light up a room. But not today. Even from a distance, I could see it. She smiled when she saw me, but it did not reach her eyes. A deep, quiet sadness hung there, a shadow I had never seen before.

I wondered what had happened to make her look that way. I knew if I asked, she would probably deny it and tell me everything was fine. Celia had not been my teacher for years, and that part of our relationship no longer seemed important. By then, we were simply neighbors, almost friends, bound by a quiet familiarity that had existed even before she taught me.

Continue..........