TEMPORARY MATES PERMANENT CRAVINGS novel Chapter 224

Two hundred and twenty four

Life moved on anyway.

I became pregnant again. Lawrence was ecstatic.

He started making plans for a bigger house. For the first time in years, I started imagining a future too.

Nolan’s nanny, who was kind enough to occasionally update me on his progress, described something she had seen under his pillow during a phone call.

Something wrapped in cloth sat beneath the edge of my son’s pillow. Symbols had been stitched into the fabric with dark thread. She sounded more curious than concerned. She seemed to think it might be some sort of protective charm and wondered whether I’d left it there during one of my visits and forgotten to mention it.

I hadn’t.

The image stayed in the back of my mind long after the conversation ended, but wasn’t even allowed to investigate further because three days later, my son collapsed.

The call came while Lawrence was mowing the lawn. I still remember screaming and rushing to the van, with Lawrence running after me shirtless.

“Calm down, Cassidy,” he said, reminding me that I was pregnant and eventually insisting on driving.

Rain hammered the windshield. The roads blurred. Lawrence pressed harder on the accelerator.

A horn sounded, then another.

Everything after that broke apart into noise.

When I opened my eyes again, the world smelled like antiseptic.

My entire body hurt. Machines beeped nearby. My blurry vision slowly cleared, revealing my mother and Kieran standing near the window.

“Lawrence?”

Nobody answered.

My heart started pounding.

“Where’s my husband?”

Kieran looked away.

I stared at my stomach and felt a terrible emptiness.

Something cold spread through me.

“No.”

My voice barely worked.

“No.”

My mother started crying.

“Cassidy…”

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• 15 Benus

“No.”

I pushed myself upright despite the pain.

“No.”

The word became a scream.

Kieran rushed forward.

“Cassidy.”

“My baby.”

The room blurred.

“My baby.”

Nobody corrected me.

Because there was nothing left to correct.

Lawrence was dead.

My unborn child was dead.

My Nolan was dead.

The future I’d spent months rebuilding was gone. 1

Something in me snapped when I spotted Vanessa walk in.

She stood near the foot of the hospital bed clutching a bouquet. Her face was swollen from crying. Mascara stained the skin beneath her eyes. She looked frightened and completely lost.

“You did this.”

Kieran stared at me as I pointed at Vanessa.

The room went silent.

“What?”

“You did this.”

“Cassidy…”

“You took Kieran.”

My voice shook.

“You took my son.”

“Cassidy, stop.”

“And now my husband and baby are dead.”

Her hand went to her mouth, and fresh tears spilled down her cheeks before I had even finished speaking.

“Why would you say that?”

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+15 8gnus

“You expect me to believe you’re innocent?”

Kieran stepped between us.

“Stop this, Cassidy. This was an accident.”

I laughed. The sound scared even me.

“An accident, you say?”

Nobody spoke.

I looked directly at her.

“What did you do?”

Vanessa covered her mouth.

“I swear I didn’t do anything.”

The argument didn’t end in the hospital. If anything, it grew worse after the funeral.

I told everyone I knew about the phone call and the nanny mentioning the object beneath Nolan’s pillow. I repeated the story so many times I could recite it in my sleep.

Vanessa denied knowing anything about it. Worse, the nanny denied ever mentioning it.

By the end, I sounded like the only person who remembered the conversation at all.

Weeks later, at the elders’ tribunal, the nanny wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“I think you’re confused,” she said.

Confused.

The word nearly made me laugh.

My son was dead. Lawrence was dead. My baby was dead. Yet somehow I was the one being questioned.

The more people denied it, the more certain I became that something had happened. I started paying attention to everything Vanessa did, Where she went. Who she met.

At first, I told myself I was looking for answers.

Months later, I wasn’t sure whether I was searching for answers or feeding an obsession.

Kieran noticed.

One evening, after another argument, he rubbed a hand across his face and looked at me with something that felt dangerously close to pity.

“Cassidy, you’ve suffered multiple losses in a very short period of time.”

I stared at him as he continued carefully.

“Grief can affect perception.”

The room went silent.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not only did he think I was wrong, he thought I was imagining things.

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My mother tried too.

+15 Benus

Every few weeks, she would sit beside me after closing and watch me sort through notes, names, dates, and scraps of information that never led anywhere.

“It’s been months, Cassidy.”

I turned another page.

“You need to stop living inside this. Lawrence and the children wouldn’t want this.”

I looked away.

“They don’t get a say. They’re dead!”

My mother reached across the table and squeezed my hand.

“You need your spark back.”

I pulled my hand free.

Because the truth was that I no longer knew where that spark had gone.

All that was left was the bitterness, and every day it grew a little larger.

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