leaves off the main path. It must’ve fallen off and washed away in the rain. Sammy saw me on his way to get his phone from the auditorium. I gave it to him to give to you and told him to say he found it.”
There’d been a giant storm that night. The worst storm they’d seen during their year in Shanghai. The mental image of Blake rummaging through the bushes, searching for her necklace in the pouring rain, wrapped around Farrah’s chest like a vise and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. “Why would you do that?”
Blake smiled a sad smile. “Like I said, I never stopped loving you. But I didn’t want you to know.”
Dammit. Farrah was going to run out of moisture in her body before the end of the night. She blinked back another onslaught of tears and asked the biggest question of all. “Why? If you still loved me, why did you break up with me?”
Blake’s eyes darkened with guilt. “Before I say anything, I want you to know—I’m not always a good person. I want to be. But I make mistakes.” He drew in a deep breath. “When I broke up with you, I told you I got back together with my ex-girlfriend over winter break and that I still loved her. That wasn’t true. Not really. We were both at a mutual friend’s party—Landon’s party, actually. Cleo and I grew up together. My parents always pushed me to date her, even though I never saw her as anything more than a friend. But I caved in college, and we dated for a year. I broke up with her right before I left for Shanghai. When I saw her again on New Year’s, I wanted to make things right. We’d been friends for a long time, and I hated the way we ended things. She agreed to be just friends, even though I could tell she still had feelings for me. We drank the night away and…” His voice trailed off. “Well, we got hammered.”
Acid sloshed in Farrah’s stomach. She had a feeling she knew where this was going.
“The next morning, I woke up in one of Landon’s family’s hotel suites. I had no recollection of the previous night, save for a few random flashes here and there. I rarely black out from alcohol, but I went in with an empty stomach and I drank a lot. At first, I thought, no big deal. I was hungover as shit, but it’s nothing I haven’t experienced before. But then Cleo came out of the shower and…” Another hard swallow. “She said we slept together.”
Blake watched her closely, like he expected Farrah to bolt any second.
She should. She’d known he’d cheated on her that winter break—he said so himself—but it was excruciating to hear the play-by-play of how it happened, even if he hadn’t meant to do it.
Nevertheless, something glued Farrah in place.
“Go on,” she said dully.
“I came back to Shanghai, and I felt so fucking guilty for cheating on you and lying to you. I wanted to tell you the truth, but I loved you so much, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you.” Blake’s voice cracked. “I know it’s not an excuse, but I honestly don’t remember that night. I have no idea what happened, or how I ended up sleeping with Cleo. I just know the secret killed me inside. That was why I acted so weird the first few weeks after we came back. I’m not proud of it, but I thought I could hide it from you. Then Cleo called me and…” Blake’s jaw clenched.
Farrah’s pulse drummed in warning. “And?”
“She told me she was pregnant. With my baby.”
The acid in her stomach turned to ice. Farrah’s breath rose and fell in rapid gasps as she tried to process the information. Blake got his ex-girlfriend pregnant while he and Farrah had been dating and he never told her.
She scrambled to her feet, needing to do something, anything, to release the rage and restless energy coursing through her. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth instead of feeding me bullshit about still being in love with your ex?”
Pain carved itself into Blake’s face. “Because I didn’t want you to know how badly I’d fucked up. Because I wanted you to have a clean break. My life was a mess, Farrah. I was about to graduate with no career prospects except a wild dream about owning a bar, and I was going to have