Chapter 2

Bronwyn's POV

I almost passed on this apartment. The fresh updates and easy commute were tempting, but the rent was a massive stretch for a recent grad.

Gideon had taken my hand and said, “You already work so hard. If you can’t even come home to a decent place, I’ll never forgive myself for dragging you into the broke life with me.”

That one sentence was all it took. I signed the lease by myself, and I took on all the cooking and every bit of the housework without being asked.

At first, he lived here and split the rent with me.

Then he started saying work was crazy. He’d disappear for days at a time, and he never paid another cent of rent.

When he did come home, it was usually in the middle of the night, to wake me up and have me make him something to eat.

And in the end, all of it had become, in his eyes, a bad investment.

“Gideon.” I could hear my own voice shaking. “Our five years. What are they actually worth to you?”

I’d thought I’d cried myself dry in that hospital room.

Three nights clutching that ultrasound photo, listening to the monitors beep, lying awake until morning.

But now, watching the man I’d loved for five years tally me up on a calculator, the tears came anyway.

Panic flashed across Gideon’s face. “Hey—I was just throwing out a number. You don’t have to take it so—”

Romilly cut him off.

“Didn’t I tell you? Some people aren’t girlfriends. They’re leeches.”

“Cry a little, make you feel sorry for her, and squeeze you for even more.”

She said it with the crocodile bag—bought with my money—hooked over her arm.

My face was still wet.

But all I felt was how absurd it was.

I didn’t understand how Romilly could invent so much out of thin air.

They kept calling me a gold digger, over and over. But the most calculating people in this room had always been the two of them.

And there was Gideon, completely convinced. Again.

I laughed. And just like that, I was calm.

“Compensation?”

“Romilly. Gideon. You took a hundred and twenty thousand dollars out of my account without my permission. That’s theft. At that amount, it’s a felony.”

“If you’d rather not see me at the police station, every cent goes back into my account by tonight.”

I turned to leave. Gideon grabbed my wrist.

He looked stunned. And, bizarrely, hurt.

“Bronwyn, since when can’t you take a joke?”

“A hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar bag is nothing to me and Romilly. You’re seriously going to drag the cops into this?”

Seriously? Yes.

The ultrasound flashed through my mind again. That bean-sized shadow.

The words were right there in my throat.

But I didn’t want to give him a single one of them.

That child had existed. He didn’t even deserve to know that much.

Some people, you just can’t reach.

Even if he once sat up all night by my bed when I had a fever that wouldn’t break, changing the cold washcloth on my forehead again and again.

Even if, when I sprained my ankle, he fumbled his way through cooking for the very first time and made me a pot of tomato soup scorched on the bottom.

The Gideon I knew was gone. Maybe that man had never existed at all.

“Gideon, I think we should break up.”

The second I said it, all I felt was relief.

His expression changed instantly—wounded, then furious.

“You’re breaking up with me? Based on what?”

“Who said you get to end this? If anybody’s ending it, it’s me!”

He always had to be the one on top. As if dating me had been a favor he’d been generous enough to grant.

I looked at him, my voice completely flat.

“Then go ahead. End it. I agree.”

“This way you don’t have to put on an act around me anymore. You don’t have to keep worrying I’m after your money.”

“And you don’t have to slum it here. Go find someone in your own tax bracket. Go back to your penthouse.”

I didn’t want to say another word. I went into the bedroom and started packing.

A good thirty seconds passed before he growled from behind me, barely holding his temper.

“Bronwyn. You’re going to regret this.”

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t flinch when he slammed the door on his way out with Romilly.

For five years, I’d thought of love as the icing on the cake—something sweet, never something you keep score over.

So I never counted what he spent on me. I never demanded he take my struggles seriously.

But the money I’d fought so hard to scrape together to save a life—he didn’t even see it. And at the moment it mattered most, he took it with his own hands.

I finally understood. A love that was never equal ends one way: with one person kicking the other while she’s down.