You Were the One I Trusted Most

"I—" Veronica tried to speak but couldn't. The shaking throughout her body had yet to abate, and even if it had stopped, what could she say in response to that.

'Should I tell him it's only been a few months? Maybe since Anna joined, due to my jealousy?

'No, I should tell him the truth. After all, he could be testing me; who knows how much he's uncovered…

'But can I really tell him that I've been watching him at work since shortly after the company's conception?'

As Veronica deliberated, the ugly silence lingered.

"Wow. That long?" The silence was all Roland needed to hear. If it hadn't been that long, she would have responded in a heartbeat. "I knew it had been a while, at least a year or two, but from the looks of it, it's been even longer than that."

Disappointment clouded Roland's expression.

"When you said that you liked me, I was over the moon. It took me a while to realize it, but when I thought about it at that moment, I noticed it. It finally registered in my mind that you'd always been there for me. Whenever I need help, needed a friend, needed a pick-me-up, you were there for me.

"But now, that thought horrifies me; were you only there, only aware of my troubles, because you were spying on me?

"If that's the case, our very relationship has all been a lie. Potentially, my very love for you is a lie, built on an act you've been performing since day one."

With every word he said, the disappointment and sadness in his voice deepened. "Veronica, I've always trusted you; I have never trusted in a friend as much as I did you over the years, and when we started dating, that trust only strengthened.

"As much as I trusted in you yesterday, convinced that you couldn't be Nightingale, that is how disappointed and heartbroken I am right now."

Veronica's eyes shimmered as his words, the tears held within them threatening to overflow at any moment.

"But— but Roland, I did it all for you!" In her mind, after the initial shock, he should be thanking her. Nightingale had been the one to expose his company's weakness and help in areas that Roland missed, all the while hiding her identity and setting up so it would be Roland's merit. In a twisted way, it had been for him.

However, when Roland heard the first coherent sentence that had come out of her mouth this whole time, the anger bottled up within him started rage and ravaging his insides once more.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: the five stages of loss. Roland had experienced those emotions over the course of the day, but of course, recovering from the loss of a loved one, whether literal or metaphorical, took time, it wasn't something that happened in a day.

In the face of those words, those ignorantly infuriating words, he regressed straight back to the second stage: anger.