Chapter 20: Filthy Lies: Chapter 20

My feet root to the hospital linoleum.

“Natalie.”

She stands frozen, clutching those yellow daisies—my mother’s favorites. Her hair is longer than I remember, tied back in a messy ponytail. Dark circles shadow her eyes.

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” she says softly. “I was just bringing these for your mom. The nurses told me she’s not doing well.”

The normalcy of her tone makes my blood boil. Like we’re still friends. Like she didn’t spend years lying to my face.

“How thoughtful,” I reply, my voice arctic. “Spying on my dying mother now?”

Natalie winces. “I deserve that.”

“You deserve a hell of a lot worse.”

A nurse passes, glancing curiously at us. I step closer to Natalie, lowering my voice.

“What are you doing here, Nat? Really?”

She shifts her weight, eyes downcast. “I’ve been visiting Margaret every couple of weeks. Since before… everything happened.”

“You’ve been visiting my mother?” The betrayal somehow cuts deeper. “Without telling me?”

“She was kind to me when my own mom died, Row. I couldn’t just abandon her because…”

“Because you were exposed as a paid informant?” I finish for her. “Because your entire friendship with me was a lie?”

“Not all of it,” she whispers.

An orderly pushes an empty gurney past us. The squeak of its wheels against the floor sounds unnaturally loud in the charged silence.

“Let’s not do this here,” I say finally. I nod toward a small waiting area down the hall. It’s empty, with uncomfortable-looking chairs and a dead plant in the corner.

Natalie follows me, still clutching those stupid daisies like a lifeline. We sit opposite each other, eyes not quite meeting.

She sets the flowers on a nearby table and clears her throat. “I’m so sorry, Rowan. For all of it.”

“I don’t want your apology. I want an explanation.” I cross my arms. “Was anything real? Any of it?”

Natalie takes a deep breath. “It started in college. Junior year. My dad lost his job, and then my mama got sick. Brain tumor. The medical bills were crushing us.”

I remember this part. Her mother’s illness, the family’s financial struggles. I’d even helped her apply for hospital payment plans.

“One day, this guy approached me on campus. Said his employer had an opportunity for me. Easy money.” She laughs bitterly. “All I had to do was befriend a certain girl in my marketing class and report back occasionally. ‘Nothing illegal,’ he promised. ‘Just keeping tabs.’”

“And that girl was me,” I say flatly.

She nods. “I didn’t know why they were interested in you. They just said you were connected to something important.”

My mind races back to college—to the shy, broke girl who’d sat next to me in Marketing 301 and somehow became my closest friend. The same girl who’d later helped me get the job at Akopov Industries.

“Jesus, Natalie. You engineered our entire friendship?” The thought alone makes me sick.

“No!” Her voice cracks. “I mean, yes, I approached you because they told me to. And yes, I recommended you for the job at Akopov because they wanted you there. But Row, somewhere along the way, I forgot I was being paid to be your friend.”

“How convenient.”

“It’s the truth.” Her eyes fill with tears. “Remember when you caught the flu during finals week senior year? I stayed up all night making you soup and quizzing you for exams. That wasn’t for them. That was for you.”

I do remember. Natalie had camped out on my dorm room floor for three days, force-feeding me Tylenol and chicken soup.

“Who was paying you?” I demand, though I already know.

“I never met him directly. Not until after you were married.” She twists her hands in her lap. “I reported to an intermediary. A man named Arkady.”

The pieces click into place. Vince had been tracking me since college, long before I walked in on him and his secretary. Long before I fell in love with him. Everything—my entire adult life—had been orchestrated.

“What did you tell them?” My voice sounds hollow even to my own ears.

“Basic stuff at first. Your schedule, who you were dating. If you ever mentioned the name Akopov or anything about the Bratva.” She looks down. “Later, it became more specific. They wanted to know if you seemed interested in Vincent. If you ever talked about him.”

“And did I?”

A hint of a smile touches her lips. “You know you did.”

The humiliation burns hot on my cheeks. All those late-night conversations—me drunkenly confessing my inappropriate fantasies about my boss—had gone straight to Vince himself.

“So when he hired me as his assistant…”

“He already knew everything about you.”

“And you just… went along with it? Watching me fall into their trap?” The anger rises in my throat. “Is that why you didn’t come when I called you that day? Right before everything went to hell?”

Natalie’s face drains of color. “What? No—I did come, Rowan.” She looks down, fingers trembling. “But I was too late. By the time I got there, you were gone. Arkady wouldn’t tell me anything,” she continues, tears streaming now. “I showed up at the Akopov estate screaming, demanding to know where you were. I threatened to go to the police with everything I knew about them.”

“You did?” My voice is barely audible.

“I thought they’d killed you, Row. And that it was my fault for getting you involved with them in the first place.”

I don’t know what to say, so I stay quiet.

“I tried to protect you,” Natalie insists. “I left things out of my reports. Downplayed how attracted you were to him. When they wanted me to encourage you to accept his assistant position, I actually tried to talk you out of it at first, remember?”

I do remember. Natalie had seemed strangely concerned about me working directly for Vince.

“I even warned you about Vince’s reputation,” she continues. “I thought if you knew he was a womanizer, you might keep your distance.”

I bark a bitter laugh. “Fat lot of good that did.”

“By then, I think he was already fixated on you. Nothing was going to stop it.” Natalie wipes a tear from her cheek. “And then you got pregnant, and everything went crazy, and suddenly, you were married to him, and I couldn’t⁠—”

“And you still kept reporting to them?” I cut her off.

She nods miserably. “They had over eight years of leverage on me by then, Rowan. Videos of me accepting money. Recordings of my reports. If it ever got out what I’d done…”

“So you sacrificed me to save yourself.”

“I thought you were okay!” She leans forward earnestly. “You seemed happy with him. You were having a baby. I told myself I wasn’t really hurting you anymore.”

The irony isn’t lost on me. I’d made similar justifications when I discovered Vince’s criminal activities—that loving him wasn’t wrong, so long as I wasn’t directly involved in his darker world.

“And then you disappeared,” Natalie continues. Her voice breaks. “I thought you were dead, Row. I thought I’d helped get you killed.”

The raw pain in her face gives me pause. Whatever else she might be lying about, this grief seems genuine.

“Natalie called my phone fifty-three times while you were missing,” a deep voice interrupts from the doorway.

We both look up to find Vince standing there. His face is unreadable as he stares at Natalie.

“She also came to our house, demanding to know where you were,” he continues as he approaches. “Arkady had to physically remove her from the property.”

Natalie doesn’t flinch under his gaze. “I thought you’d killed her.”

“And now?” His eyebrow arches.

“Now, I think you actually love her,” Natalie answers simply. “Though I’m still not sure that’s a good thing.”

An uncomfortable silence falls as I try to absorb everything. I look at Natalie—my friend, my betrayer—and feel the tangled emotions warring within me. Rage at her deception. Pain at the years of lies.

And underneath it all, a reluctant thread of understanding I can’t bring myself to snip.

After all, haven’t I made my own compromises for financial security? Haven’t I closed my eyes to certain truths about my husband to preserve the life we’ve built?

“Arkady’s waiting in the car,” Vince says to me. “We should go.”

I nod and stand.

“Rowan.” Natalie rises, too, desperate. “Please. I know I can’t undo what I did, but our friendship was real. At least for me. And I swear, I tried to help you that day. I would have done anything to stop what happened.”

I look at her—really look at her. The girl who held my hair back when I drank too much at college parties. The woman who brought me coffee during all-nighters before big presentations. The friend who’d stood beside me through breakups and job interviews and my mother’s cancer treatments.

Maybe some of it was real.

Maybe.

But not enough.

“I can’t do this right now, Natalie,” I say finally. “I’ve got a dying mother, a newborn daughter, and my biological father camping outside our house with an army. I don’t have room for your guilt, too.”

Her face crumples. “I understand.”

I move past her toward the door where Vince waits. But something makes me pause, my hand on the doorframe.

“The daisies,” I say without turning. “Mom likes them in a blue vase. There’s one in the cabinet under the sink in her room.”

It’s not forgiveness. It’s barely even acknowledgment.

But it’s something.

“Take care of yourself, Nat,” I add softly. “And thank you… for trying to help me when it mattered.”

Then I let Vince guide me out of the hospital, his hand warm and steady at the small of my back.

Another day, another betrayal revealed, another crack in the foundation of who I thought I was.

But at least this time, I’m the one who gets to decide what happens next.