The Officer's Runaway Wife & Secret Son novel Chapter 42

It felt like a bucket of ice water had been poured over her head, the chill spreading from her heart to her limbs.

Clara flipped through the remaining photos. Most were of the two of them together. In the hospital, in the Johnson family courtyard, at the aquarium, at the amusement park.

In the photos, Rhys grew from a teenager into a young man. His features became colder and harder, yet whenever he looked at Margot, there was always a hint of softness in his eyes. And Margot blossomed from a sickly child into a delicate young woman. The way she looked at him remained unchanged.

Clara's gaze stopped on the final photo. It was from Rhys's graduation from the police academy. He stood tall and heroic in his crisp uniform, but standing beside him wasn't his family—it was Margot. She held a bouquet of lilies, smiling serenely, intimately linking her arm through his, her head resting lightly on his shoulder.

A perfect match. A golden couple.

This was a past that spanned his entire youth, a past she had never been qualified to touch.

Clara thought of herself. When she met Rhys, he was already a traffic cop. She had scoured all his social media but couldn't find a single photo of him in his academy uniform. She had once pestered him, asking to see what he looked like when he was younger. He had simply said, "I threw them out. Nothing worth seeing."

It turned out he hadn't thrown them out. He had simply treasured them in a corner she was never meant to find.

Her five years of what she thought was a winning romance turned out to be nothing more than a fool crashing into someone else's story without realizing it. Her passion, her persistence, her recklessness—it was all a joke.

Clara put the photos back into the tin box. As she closed the lid, she could almost hear the sound of her own heart breaking.

"Clara, are you unpacked?"

Startled, Clara panic-shoved the tin box deep into the drawer and slammed it shut. "Yes, yes, I'm done. Come in, Auntie."

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify