Reborn at Eighteen The Billionaire's Second Chance novel Chapter 256

Reborn at Eighteen: The Billionaire’s Second Chance

Chapter 256

7 discovered I was pregnant,” I said, and my voice was steady now, detached, as if I were recounting someone else’s tragedy. I didn’t gat into college. Couldn’t even take the SATS because everything fell apart so quickly. The family brought me back to Blackwood Estate, and t

had a daughter. Lily.”

Her name caught in my throat, the way it always did, but I pushed through. She was the little girl whose hands are in my painting. She loved to watch me paint even though by then I could barely hold a brush.”

The car had gone very quiet, filled only with the sound of Julian’s ragged breathing and the distant hum of the garage ventilation system. When I glanced at him, his face had drained of all color, his jaw clenched so tightly I could see the muscle jumping beneath his skin.

I couldn’t stop now. The words were pouring out like water through a broken dam, and I had to let them flow. “In that life, I was kept isolated. No freedom. Tristan said I had postpartum depression and forced me onto medication that made me… foggy. Compliant. Like a ghost in my own body.”

My voice began to shake despite my efforts to control it. “Sloane used that state. She forced me to be her ghost painter, to create works she’d claim as her own. She threatened that if I didn’t cooperate, I’d never see Lily again.”

Tears were sliding down my cheeks now, hot and unstoppable. “I agreed. I agreed to everything, did everything they asked, as long as I could keep my daughter with me.”

ldn’t paint anymore–the drugs destroyed even that–so they took Lily away. Put her in foster care.” I closed my eyes, de the memories sharper, more vivid. “She died there, Julian. She had a severe peanut allergy, and the foster parents Sil she ate something with nuts in it. She went into anaphylactic shock. By the time they called for help…” I couldn’t finish ce. Didn’t need to.

silence that followed was absolute, suffocating. Then I heard a sound I’d never heard before–a broken, inhuman noise from Julian’s throat, somewhere between a gasp and a sob. When I opened my eyes, he’d released the steering wheel and covered his face with both hands, and his shoulders had begun to shake.

I watched in stunned silence as tears leaked through his fingers, catching the dim garage light. Julian Vane was crying–actually crying- and the sight of it shattered something inside me that I’d thought was already broken beyond repair.

But I wasn’t done. If I was going to do this, I had to finish it completely.

“The worst part,” I forced myself to say, my voice barely above a whisper, “was that in that life, you never believed Lily was yours. You married Sloane instead. You had a son with her.” I had to pause, had to breathe through the pain. “On your wedding day, I took an overdose of pills and walked into the ocean with Lily’s ashes in my arms. And I drowned there, Julian. I killed myself because there was nothing left worth living for.”

“Then I woke up, I finished quietly. “Back here. Back to before it all went wrong.”

Julian dropped his hands from his face, and the devastation I saw there was so complete, so absolute, that for a moment I couldn’t

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Chapter 256

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