Chapter 2 - The First Confession
The scream tore through me, echoing off the tile walls and drawing alarmed, wide-eyed glances from a passing nurse down the hall. I stumbled backward, my back slamming against the cold drywall as my vision blurred with hot, blinding tears.
“Dear Big Sister, if you are reading this, it means I didn’t make it back, and Ben finally had to tell you the secret we’ve carried in our hearts for a very, very long time.”
Those words spun through my mind like a runaway freight train. I gripped the edges of the paper, my knuckles turning white, my breath coming in short, panicked gasps. I looked up at Ben, my chest heaving, betrayal and confusion warring violently inside my soul.
“What is this?” I choked out, my voice shrill and breaking. “What secret, Ben?! What did my sister know that I didn’t?!”
Ben didn't look away. He absorbed my fury and my terror without flinching, letting out a long, shuddering breath that seemed to deflate him entirely. He sank slowly into one of the waiting room chairs, burying his face in his hands for a long, agonizing moment before looking back up at me.
“Sit down, please,” he murmured, his voice hollowed out.
I didn't sit. I stood rigidly over him, clutching the letter to my chest like a shield. “Start talking, Ben. Right now.”
He rubbed his temples, his eyes bloodshot and haunted. “You remember when we were nineteen, right? Right after high school ended, when you left for college in Boston and I stayed behind to help your family manage your dad’s medical bills?”
The sudden shift in timeline caught me off guard. I blinked through my tears. “What does college have to do with this? You proposed to Rosie six years later!”
“I’m getting to that,” Ben said softly. “Everyone thought I was the noble best friend who stuck around out of loyalty. The local newspapers wrote articles about me when we got engaged. They called me a saint. But the truth is... I wasn’t a saint at all. I was a coward.”
He paused, his chest rising and falling heavily.
“The night before you left for Boston, we had that graduation party by the lake,” Ben continued, his voice dropping to a painful whisper. “You told me you couldn't stay. You told me your dreams were in the city, that you were going to law school, that you were never coming back to this small town to settle down. You told me you loved me like a brother.”
A sharp pang struck my chest. I remembered that night vividly. I had been terrified of tying myself down to a hometown romance when the whole world was waiting for me.
“When you walked away from me that night,” Ben whispered, tears finally spilling over his eyelashes and tracking down his cheeks, “my entire world ended. I loved you, Sarah. I had loved you since we were twelve years old. I planned to marry you. And when you left me behind to chase your ambitions, I felt like my life had lost its purpose.”
I froze. The breath caught in my throat. All those years of town gossip, all those assumptions that Ben and I were destined for each other—they hadn't been imagined. They had been real.
“So why?” I whispered, the anger instantly draining out of me, replaced by a hollow, sickening dread. “If you loved me... why did you marry Rosie?”
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Ben looked up, locking his wet eyes onto mine with devastating intensity.
“Because three months after you left,” Ben said, his voice cracking into a sob, “Rosie came to my house crying. She handed me a pregnancy test with two pink lines. And she told me who the father was.”
