adorable girl and couldn’t wait to spend the rest of her life with her. Yes, they had just met and didn’t know each other that well, but Brianna felt it in her heart that they were going to go all the way.
Brianna felt terrible for Kyle, but there was nothing she could do about it. The heart wants what it wants. After all the sacrifices she had made for her little brother over the years, Brianna felt it was time to be a little selfish and put herself first.
Brianna went to bed that night with a huge smile on her face. She had achieved an important career milestone by securing the lead in a prestigious Broadway musical, and she had also, for the first time in her life, found love. And it had all happened in a matter of a couple of weeks.
Maybe God doesn’t hate me after all.
With that thought and with a huge smile on her face, Brianna closed her eyes and drifted into a deep, peaceful sleep. That night, she had sweet dreams. Gone were the nightmares that used to keep her up at night. She was finally starting to get over all the horrific things that happened to her in Montana seven years earlier. And she had only one person to thank for that: the gorgeous and adorable Abigail Slone.
Chapter III
Back in Montana, Kyle couldn’t sleep, so he spent most of that night sitting in front of his laptop and obsessively refreshing his browser to see if the location of Abby’s phone had changed. Kyle saw Abby did not leave her apartment that night, but he still couldn’t stop staring at the computer screen like a hawk.
He still couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that Abby was cheating on him. He still didn’t know for sure, but he had a gut feeling that she was. He could hear it in her voice, in the easiness with which she was lying to him.
Kyle gazed away from the computer screen and his eyes landed on a portable hard drive sitting next to his laptop. The hard drive contained videos and photos from when Abby was a child. When Kyle was in Michigan the day before, Abby’s parents had given him hours of video footage and dozens of photos. Kyle was going to include those pictures and videos in a montage he was making for Abby. The montage was going to be part of his marriage proposal extravaganza.
Kyle picked up the purple thumb drive and held it between his fingers. He felt as if fate was playing a cruel joke on him. He thought he was going to spend those days at home catching up with family and friends and preparing one of the most epic marriage proposals the world had ever seen. Instead, he was spending those days held up in his bedroom, chugging beer and spying on his girlfriend.
Overcome with blinding rage, Kyle shot to his feet with the hard drive in his hand. He walked over to the open window, and without giving it a second thought, hurled the thumb drive into the warm, summer night. There wasn’t going to be a proposal anymore. There wasn’t going to be a wedding. There wasn’t going to be a happily ever after for him or Abby. Kyle felt like such an idiot and wondered how long Abby’s affair had been going on. He racked his brain trying to figure out if the guy Abby was cheating with was someone he knew but couldn’t come up with a single suspect.
Even though it was clear that Abby was not going to leave her apartment that night, Kyle continued to stare at the green dot on the computer screen while compulsively hitting refresh.
Just before dawn broke, Kyle had consumed all the beer in the house, but the location of Abby’s phone had not changed. Unable to keep his eyes open any longer, Kyle decided to shut his computer down and go to bed. With his clothes and shoes still on, he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep instantly.
Kyle got no more than a couple of hours of sleep that morning. As soon as he woke, he was back sitting in front of his computer, spying on his girlfriend. He did not see anything out of the ordinary that morning. Abby went to work at the bookstore and stayed there