Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
He’d mouth the words “I love you” each time, and that would settle me down some until the next time it happened. And now he was gone, and I was back to feeling like I was missing a limb.
Ever since the call from Sydney, the one that Ryder had done his best to distract me from, I’ve been tempted to break my own rule about social media, and within an hour of him leaving me, I gave in and went diving into the muck and mire.
There was too much information to process all at once, and it was hard to know where to begin. There was a lot of talk about Janie, but surprisingly I was more interested in Rachel and what she had done while pretending to be my friend.
I wasn’t exactly running from the Janie thing, but there are way too many triggers involved when it comes to her and our history, and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to deal with that right now. But I was dying to know the extent of what my friend had done to me.
There wasn’t much about her, just a few snippets here and there, and by the time it was time to head to the set, I was more frustrated than anything. I still wasn’t sure how I felt or, really, how to feel about what she was purported to have done.
I do believe Ryder; there’s no reason for him to make up such a thing about her, knowing that it could be easily disproven, but I’m not the kind of person who can just so easily discard years of friendship without a second thought.
I want answers; I want reasons and explanations. There must be a reason behind her actions, certainly. Maybe I have done something along the way to offend her. Maybe there was a need I overlooked. All of these things ran through my head now that I was without my anchor.
Ryder had gone out of his way all weekend to make sure I didn’t dwell too much on the situation, and the fact that I picked up on his preoccupation kind of took my focus off of Rachel’s betrayal. But now I had nothing to do but think and dwell.
I’m a born professional, so I threw myself into my work, pushing everything else from my mind. But as soon as the cameras were off, I was back to overthinking again. It was safer for my peace of mind to dwell on Rachel than it was to ponder what Ryder could be hiding from me.
I’d unblocked her number, but there was no answer on her end, and it seemed as if her phone was turned off. There was no one else I could reach out to since I didn’t want to give away her doings to our other friends, not yet anyway.
By the time I got back to my apartment in the city, I was a mess. It was times like this that I wished I could be the perfect, unbothered person my fans and the rest of the world expect me to be, but the truth is that I’m not far from it. The more I thought about everything Rachel and I had shared and the trust I’d had in her, the more I felt stupid and enraged.
Stupid, because I never saw it in her and had trusted her to look after my social media accounts and other aspects of my life that had been too hard for me to handle for the past five years, and enraged because of the way in which she’d betrayed that trust.
The most hurtful thing of all that she’d done was the lies she’d told Ryder about me. The lies that had sent him running into someone else’s arms. I don’t hold him guiltless, of course, but I can understand why he would’ve believed her. He knew her to be my friend, someone I trusted more than most.
He’d known the ins and outs of our relationship, mine and hers, when he and I were together before, so there was no reason for him not to believe her. When I think of how he must’ve felt hearing those words and the words that I had gotten rid of his child, a child that we would’ve both wanted, it breaks my heart all over again.
No one else knew that Ryder and I had been planning to take a break to focus on starting a family. I never told anyone for fear of jinxing it. Not only that, but I knew it was a big step and not everyone would agree with it; that is why I had held off on sharing that little tidbit with even my mother.
So how did she know to use that lie? How did she know the damage it would’ve done to him and our relationship to hear such a thing? I know why she’d lied about the affair. Ryder has always been jealous of Evan for some inane reason, and we’d had a fight or two over the years about it.