Page 151 of Everything After

“Stay here with Kara, I’m just going to call Lily.”

When I told my wife who had been responsible for starting the rumor about her and Cody, I was met with silence on the end of the line.

“Lily? Did you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she said quietly.

“Just… yeah?” I asked, expecting at least a small rant of injustice from her.

“I guess, I should have known,” she muttered.

“Known what?”

“You know she’s not my favorite person, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know why I was suspicious of her?”

“Not that again,” I remarked, thinking Lily was going to bring up my relationship with Sienna again.

“What again? You have no idea what I was about to say.”

“Okay, sorry. What did you want to say?”

“She once warned me to watch out because one day she’d destroy our marriage. She said I’d never see it coming, and she was right. I didn’t suspect her for a minute in all of this.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this? When did this happen?” I asked frowning.

“At your sister’s wedding. She… She cornered me in a bathroom that evening.”

The rage I’d been containing spilled over and I punched a dent in my car’s rear door. Fortunately, that incident occurred seconds before two media guy’s I had run ins with over the years walked down the road toward me.

“Hi, Alfie. This is a surprise. You wanted to speak to us?” the smaller, less offensive of the two paparazzi men asked.

My gaze shifted between the two and settled on the bald-headed, beady-eyed photographer, who I knew for a fact had previously sold ambiguous images of me. “I do. I have a true story for you. Get your recording equipment ready because I’m about to set the record straight about something.”

CHAPTER 77

LILY

Any doubts I’d ever had about how Alfie saw Sienna were obliterated when I saw him destroy her in the video Oscar recorded for Alfie’s legal rep.

His attack on her character was brutal in the sense that he’d told the reporter recording on his tablet, how Sienna had previously warned me that she would destroy our marriage.

I was so stunned by what I’d heard that I played the video again.

“Did you or did you not take part of a private conversation I had with Cody Vickers and make it into something it wasn’t?”

“I guess,” she mumbled as she and Alfie sat side by side on her sofa.

“No, Sienna, that’s not good enough. No one is guessing about anything. You need to be honest here with the facts. I’m giving you one opportunity to set the record straight.”

“Yes, alright, I did… but I thought?—”

Alfie cut her dead. “Then you thought too much. Do you realize the misery you caused my wife… me? Even Cody, putting him on the spot like that with reporters.”

“You must admit the way they behave when you’re not around…”