“No, Liam.” I stare into his eyes. “I mean, I don’t understand how someone could have you and want anything else. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
Something flickers in his eyes, and it has my heart beating faster. But it’s gone as quickly as it appeared, and he’s no longer looking at me.
“Clearly, I wasn’t enough for Kate. Maybe she wanted Jeremy right from the start. Maybe I was a way to get close to him. I don’t know. What I do know is, Jeremy wasn’t willing to give her the things she could get me to give her—marriage…and kids as well, I’m assuming. She always was good at manipulating me into giving her what she wanted. Apparently, she was in love with both of us—or so she claimed.”
“How did you find out?”
“If you’re thinking Kate or Jeremy told me, then you’d be wrong. If she were still alive now, I’d probably be the dumb fuck who knew nothing—married to her, giving her half of everything I’d worked hard for. And she’d have still been fucking him. No, I found out after she died. The night before her funeral.”
“Jesus, Liam.” I can’t think of anything else to say.
“It was six months before we were supposed to get married. She’d gone to Switzerland on a skiing trip with her girlfriends. I was in America at the time—Boston, of all places.” He looks at me. “I was setting up the office we have there for the airline. I got the call in the early hours of the morning. She was an experienced skier, but she took a hard turn. She fell off a ravine. She broke her neck. They say she died instantly.
“I flew straight there. I packed up her things in her hotel room, but I didn’t go through them. I just packed, and then I left. I arranged everything else. I brought her body back home, so her parents could bury her.
“The night before her funeral, I was going through her things. I guess…I was missing her. Her phone was in her bag. She’d left it in her room. The battery was dead, so I plugged in the charger. There was a bunch of text messages. Some were from friends after she’d died, just saying how much they missed her. I scrolled back to see if there were any from before she died.
“There were two texts sent before she died while she must have been out skiing. One was from me, saying that I’d call her when I woke up. The other was from Jeremy. It wasn’t odd to me, that they texted, as they were friends, just like she was with Cam and Eddie, too. But this text was different. It said for her to call him when she was back. His dick was hard because he was thinking about her. He missed fucking her.
“I opened the message and then started reading back through their string of messages. There was…a lot of things said, and there were pictures.”
I close my eyes, feeling his pain like it’s my own.
“I got obsessed with finding out how long it had been going on. I knew, if I asked Jeremy, he’d just fucking lie. He’d been fucking my fiancée and lying to me about that, so I wasn’t going to believe shit he might have to say. So, I got into her emails. There was more in there. She had a secret folder, but I found it. And there it all was. Emails between them, dating back years. I read each and every email. They’d started sleeping together not long after she and I started dating. From what the emails said, he wouldn’t give her what I would. A few times, they’d called it off. But then, it would start back up again.
“By the time I was done reading the emails, it was morning, and I had to go to her funeral. So, I got showered and dressed. I climbed into the funeral car, sat next to her parents, and rode to the church. And I stood there at the funeral, staring at her coffin, and when the time came, I stood up and read my eulogy. All the while, I knew what she’d done to me. How she’d lied and betrayed me for all those years.
“And he was there. Sitting in the pew, acting the part of the supportive and grieving friend. I couldn’t look at him. If I had, I’d have lost it, and I didn’t want to do that to her parents. They’d always been good to me.
“And when her funeral was over, I had to go back to her parents’ house for the wake. And I was so fucking ready for it to be over. But I went because, if I didn’t, I knew it would raise questions. So, I drank and talked to people and avoided Jeremy. Then, the stupid cunt just had to come over and talk to me.”
He lets out a hard laugh. “He stood in front of me and told me how he was there for me, no matter what. How sorry he was that I’d lost Kate. How he missed her, too.” Liam blows out a breath. “I fucking lost it. I hit him. He went down from the one punch. If he hadn’t, I’d have pummeled him to death. Then, I walked out of her parents’ house, and I didn’t look back.”