Chapter 112 He Must Be Wrong
Cedric’s chest tightened as he asked, “What’s wrong, Angie? What do you mean? Why are you crying?”
On the other side of the table, Madeline smirked. Here we go, she thought without looking even the slightest bit surprised.
She couldn’t help glancing over at Sebastian, only to find that he was looking at her as well. They exchanged a knowing smile as though musing over an inside joke, but they were the only ones at the dining table who looked happy.
The rest of the Wendels were stone-faced as they stared at Cedric, waiting anxiously to hear more so they could discern what the matter might be. While they had made up their minds to send Angie away and reunite with Madeline so that everything could fall back into place, it didn’t mean they had packed up their affections for the former. After all, she had spent over twenty years in their family, and she had been a daughter and a sister to them until recently. Such sentiments were not so easily discarded.
At least for now, Angie still held a higher place in their hearts than Madeline did.
On the other line, Angie was sobbing as she said, “Cedric, I… I was in a bad mood, so I talked to Nicholas. W-We drank a few glasses of wine after that, but then… but then…” She broke off in a distraught wail and cried, “I don’t know how things ended up like this… Cedric, what should I do? What am I going to do now?”
She barely said anything of note in the midst of her sniveling and crying, and her words were incoherent at best. Despite that, Cedric could already guess what she was trying to tell him.
However, he refused to believe that his guess could be right. Nicholas and Angie were cousins, and they couldn’t have done what he thought they did. No, he told himself firmly. No, I must be wrong!
With that in mind, he urged, “Angie, stop crying and tell me what happened. “What happened between you and Nicholas? Did you guys get into a fight? Was there a disagreement?”
“N-No…” Angie sniffed and sobbed again as she explained in a thick voice, “I was drunk, and I don’t know how I ended up sleeping in Nicholas’ bed, but when I woke up, I found out that he and I… We…”
She trailed off like the rest of the sentence was too hard for her to word out. Then, she added another abrupt piece of information by saying, “Alina saw us. She got really mad and wanted to beat me up, but Nicholas took her away. Cedric, what should I do? If word of this gets out, my reputation will be ruined…”
Cedric was in complete, utter shock. My sister… slept with my cousin.
Nicholas and Angie were not related by blood, but they had been cousins for over twenty years. The truth of her birth story had only just been uncovered days ago, yet she was found in bed with him after presumably a night’s worth of tussling.
The sudden and fast-paced change that had happened in the course of a few days hit Cedric like a ton of bricks. He held his phone in one hand as he sat looking dumbfounded at the dining table.
When Michael saw that Cedric had gone silent, he pressed, “Cedric, what happened to Angie? Why is she crying?”
Cedric clutched his phone as he gazed at his father with a distant look in his eyes. For a moment, he had no idea how he should answer that question.
At the sight of his blank and somewhat odd expression, Michael grew even more anxious as he demanded, “Come on, spill it! Don’t just sit there like a log!”
Cedric licked his lips and finally stammered, “A-Angie said that she… she and Nicholas… they are together now. W-Well, Alina found them and…”
To be exact, Alina didn’t find them; she had caught them in bed.
She was Nicholas’ fiancée, and they had been engaged for over a year. They had plans to marry right after Alina graduated from university, but now, that was a distant dream.
“What did you just say?” Michael stood up so abruptly that his chair screeched as it scraped against the floor. He shot his son a bewildered look as he asked, “What do you mean they’re together now? What do you mean Alina found them? For heaven’s sake, Cedric, you aren’t making sense!”
However, he knew Cedric did make sense, even if vaguely. He knew precisely what had happened through the bits and pieces of Cedric’s explanation, but he just didn’t want to admit it.
The daughter he raised for over two decades had only been out of the house for a day and had already slept with Nicholas, his nephew. What am I supposed to make of that?
Meanwhile, Cedric was so flustered by the news that he didn’t want to stay here and talk about it anymore. He rubbed his face tiredly and hung up the call before he started to walk outside. “I’m going over to Aunt Erin’s to see how things are.”
He needed to do so. Right now, Alina was probably furious, and he didn’t want Angie to get hurt.
With Cedric gone, the others didn’t want to sit around and wait either. Michael turned to Sebastian and Madeline before saying, “Sebastian, Maddie, the both of you should carry on with dinner. I’ll go check up on Angie.” With that, he walked out the door while Jonathan, Joseph, and Connor followed suit.
After they left, Sebastian looked at Madeline and asked, “Are we going?”
“Of course,” she said with a pleasant smile. “Erin is always going on about how kind, considerate, and bright Angie is. She’s clearly enamored with the girl, and I’m sure she’d love to have someone as wonderful as Angie become her future daughter-in-law. I ought to go over and congratulate her.”
Sebastian gazed at her thoughtfully. He used to think that Madeline was great in every way conceivable, but her fatal flaw was how kind and honest she was. It was precisely because of this that the Taylors took delight in bullying her and abusing her.
As of now, he realized that he had been wrong about her.
She was not as naive as she seemed, for she had a little bit of a wicked side in her.
When she allowed the Taylors to hurt her the way they did, it was probably out of sentiment or some kind of gratitude.
There was nothing wrong with being sentimental or grateful at all, but a girl as brilliant and kind as Madeline deserved to be loved and cared for. Sebastian couldn’t promise her a lot of things, but for as long as she stayed with him, he vowed to keep her safe. That would be his resolve.
Soon, the Wendels gathered at Erin’s place, and Nicholas was presently in the living room frantically explaining himself to Alina. Angie, on the other hand, was seated on the couch. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, and her face was tear-stained. At the same time, her hair was still dripping wet.
Sebastian and Madeline were the last ones to arrive; Cedric already had an arm around Angie while he comforted her by the time they entered the door.
Angie huddled in his arms like a wounded animal as she sobbed hysterically. If one didn’t know better, one would think she had been abhorrently wronged.
Meanwhile, Nicholas was beside himself with clueless panic, for he wasn’t sure how things had ended up like this.
When he and his parents had brought Angie home the day before, they had lunch, after which he escorted Angie to the guest bedroom and told her to get some rest.
Then, he went back to the other guest bedroom and took a shower. When he was done, he was ready to call it a day.
He and his father had rushed back to Wendel City the night before, and he was too worn out from the journey and the lack of sleep to even think straight.
However, just as he had changed into pajamas and was about to go to bed, Angie knocked on his door and came in.
She was wearing a nightgown and holding a bottle of wine. Judging by the dazed look in her eyes, she had drunk a considerable amount of it.
Having walked into his bedroom, she perched at the foot of his bed and started telling him about how sad she was.
He had felt sorry for her, and when she asked him to drink with her, he did not refuse.
They talked over glasses of wine, and he eventually got drunk. He blacked out after that, and his memory failed him.
Nicholas had been woken up when ice-cold water was splashed on his face.
He was sound asleep in bed, but the bucket of icy water tipped over him had him drenched and shivering.
Nicholas yelped and bolted upright, only to find his fiancée, Alina, standing at the foot of the bed while holding up an empty bucket and staring at him with red-rimmed eyes.
He had sat up in bed without clothes. Next to him was Angie, who had been jolted awake by the icy water and was now sitting upright without clothes as well.
For a moment, Nicholas’ mind felt as if it had imploded.
Alina said nothing as she hurled the bucket at his head and stormed out of the room.
Nicholas cared about nothing else at that moment; he merely reached for his dressing robe and pulled it on before he rushed out after her. When he caught up to her in the downstairs living room, he persuaded her to stay and had been explaining himself to her ever since.
He told her about what had recently happened in the Wendel Family, and he emphasized Angie’s sad backstory.
