The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(79)

“What the fuck?” I whisper.

Gemma asks if I’m okay and I can’t even answer her. I stare at the paper in front of me as my stomach slides to my feet. “Oh my God.”

“Keeley, answer me! Are you okay?”

“No,” I tell her, my voice breaking. “Gemma, he’s thinks I’m going to let him buy my kid.”

“What? That can’t be true. What does it say?”

“I, Keeley Maureen Connolly—” I begin and then I start to cry.

I, Keeley Maureen Connolly, do hereby voluntarily and irrevocably relinquish all legal and physical custody of (name) to Graham David Tate.

“Oh God, Gemma, this is bad. It’s really bad.” There’s a paragraph about compensation and a paragraph about visitation—at his discretion but generally discouraged for the welfare of the child.

“I’m on my way.” She’s using her stern lawyer voice, but behind it, I hear a hint of worry. “Stay there and don’t jump to conclusions. I’ll read it over. It can’t be the way it appears. I know him, Keeley. You know him. It can’t be as bad as it looks.”

I desperately want her to be right. I’m just not sure how she could be.

Twenty minutes later, she’s sitting at Graham’s desk, her mouth moving as she skims the contract, her brow furrowed. And then she picks up his pen jar and slams it against the wall.

“I’m going to kill him,” she says.

I sink onto his bed and bury my face in my hands. He’s on his way home right now. He thinks he’s going to waltz in here and pretend everything’s good. The way I guess he’s been pretending all along.

It feels as if I should have a response, but instead I’m just…empty. There’s nothing inside me right now but shocked, echoing silence.

“Are you going to call him?” she asks. “He needs to explain this.”

“He’s flying home right now,” I whisper. I truly can’t even grasp what’s happened, can’t make sense of it. And I’m not sure there’s an excuse or explanation in the world that’s going to make this okay. He thought he could give me a million dollars to have no contact with my child, ever again. He really thought I’d sign this. Even Shannon, with her sickeningly low opinion of me, wouldn’t believe that.

So what has this been, these past few months? Was he was stringing me along all this time, simply to gain my trust? Did he really want us to stay married and get a house? Or were all these things just little insurance policies for him? A homeless, unemployed mother could be made to look unfit pretty fucking easily.

It seems impossible, but it would be na?ve, at this point, to think anything else.

No wonder he wasn’t worried about sharing custody. He never fucking planned to.





He calls when he lands, and I let it go to voice mail. He texts, with more of that worry of his, the worry I thought was legitimately about me as a person and not about me as the vessel for his seed.

God, I was such an idiot.

I go put on makeup and the cutest dress that still fits and then sit on the couch.

He opens the door and the sight of his face breaks my heart a little. He looks so convincingly…besotted. I thought he couldn’t lie to me. It never occurred to me he might just be really, really good at it.

His smile fades. “Hey,” he says slowly. “Is everything okay? I texted you.”

I climb to my feet and set the folder on the counter closest to him. “I went to your file cabinet because Gemma wanted me to check the lease on the apartment. This is what I found instead.”

He flips the file open, and the moment he realizes what it is, I know there won’t be a good explanation. I’d held out the ridiculous hope that someone else had placed the contract there, but he isn’t surprised by what it says. He’s just surprised he got caught.

“It’s not how it looks,” he says quietly. He turns, reaching out a hand.

I take a step away from him. “Really? Because it looks like you thought I was the kind of person who’d sell you my child.”

His eyes fall closed. “Keeley, when I first came here you weren’t even sure you wanted to have a kid. You were talking about drinking at Coachella.”

He isn’t wrong, but doesn’t he know me better than that by now? Doesn’t he realize I didn’t mean it? “I was fucking with you, and you’ve had months and months and you never got rid of this. Which suggests that you were just holding onto it, waiting to see if I’d fuck up.”

“That’s not what it—”

“Out,” I say quietly. “I want you out.”

“Keeley—”

“I’m not interested in a goddamn thing you have to say. Gemma’s taking care of the annulment and I’ll be in touch when the baby is born.”

“Keeley—”

“Look, I’ve got a date. Be out by the time I get home.”

He stares at me. “You’ve got a date,” he repeats flatly, his voice hoarse. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“You were going to take my baby,” I reply, and I have to swallow hard so the words don’t turn into a sob. “Don’t think for a minute you get to judge me now.”

I turn away from the pain in his face. Good. I hope it hurts. He can’t be nearly as hurt as I am.