Chapter 2The Calm Goodbye That Ended Our Love

Those eyes of hers were so beautiful. Looking into them, I could almost see the Lena I'd known as a kid, before all the dirty tricks—back when she was just a girl who wanted a decent life.

She'd grown up in an orphanage, but when she reported the director for skimming donations, they threw her out. She was a teenage girl with nowhere to go. She fought stray dogs over scraps and was covered in bruises. She was nothing but skin and bones.

The wind cut right through her, and she had no home.

But I liked her. I took her hand and brought her home, knowing full well I'd catch hell from my grandma for it.

"I can barely keep you fed, and now there's another one? You looking for a smack?"

"She's not my problem. You dragged her in, you take care of her."

Nana talked tough but had a soft heart, and she took Lena in all the same. To make life a little easier, we hauled bricks and cement at construction sites.

Between the two of us, we made 30 dollars a day, and sometimes we didn't even get paid that. Life was hard, but we scraped by.

That was until one of the old crew wanted to bring his nephew on, and we got kicked out for good.

We couldn't hold back the tears. Lena wrapped her arms around my waist, her jaw set and her eyes fierce.

"Don't cry. You've got me. I'm going to give you and Nana a good life.

"People should be fair. We're never going to turn into people like them."

From then on, she threw herself into everything with a drive I'd never seen before. In her senior year of high school, she sold a robotics invention and earned her first real money.

In college, she started a company and went out pitching to every investor who'd listen. I backed her in whatever she wanted to do. Every dollar I earned went to her, and she took me everywhere she went.

Every new city she went to, she'd buy me a gift. She always made time to take me on the Ferris wheel. I was the only person who got to see her like that, with her guard completely down, like a girl with nothing to hide.

At the top of the ride, she'd hold my face in both hands and kiss me, soft and careful.

"Jude Colby, after all these years, thank you for never giving up on me. Trust me, we're going to be happy for the rest of our lives. We'll never, ever be apart."

She turned away plenty of people who tried to cut corners or play dirty. The road was brutal, and it took years of clawing her way up, but she made it.

She always said that when she became a businesswoman, she'd run things with integrity. She'd make sure every person who worked hard got what they deserved.

She did become a businesswoman. But her fairness ended up going to someone else.

At 25, she had her own company. She was the youngest, most prominent CEO of her generation.

She bought a house and put only my name on the deed. She bought the most expensive car on the lot, just as a casual birthday gift for me.

That same year, my cousin Austin Colby turned up at my door, fresh out of the backwoods with nowhere else to go. He stood there in torn-up clothes, stumbling over his words with a thick country drawl, fidgeting like he didn't know what to do with his hands.

Weathered and gaunt, he looked like a wolf that had been run out of the pack.

I was born in those same mountains, to people who couldn't afford to keep me. They had too many kids, so they gave them away, boys and girls alike.

When they gave me up, Austin had just been born. If Nana hadn't taken me in, I probably would have died. That kind of shared history made it impossible not to feel for him.

Lena, who rarely spoke up about these things, hooked her pinky around mine.

"Poor thing. He reminds me of how we used to be.

"Let him stay. It's not like we can't afford it. Think of it as paying it forward for our kids someday."

"The world's not fair to people like us. If we can help even one person, we should."

I was glad she hadn't forgotten where we came from. I truly believed that the girl she'd been at the start would carry us through for a long time.

She pressed a kiss to my throat.

But I had no way of knowing that it was the beginning of Austin's new life, and the beginning of my nightmare.