Chapter 124: Chapter 124

"I don't think that what you are doing makes any sense at all, Carol," Donald said worriedly, looking at his daughter, who averted her gaze and tried in vain to stop the tears welling up in her expressive blue eyes.

"Why do you say that, dad?" Carol asked him, wiping away her tears.

"Well, maybe because you're pregnant and you choose to slave away at doing a regular job instead of taking proper care of yourself."

"A lot of pregnant women work at regular jobs, dad."

"I know that, but not a lot of them have huge lumps of money lying in their bank accounts untouched while they look malnourished. Why are you punishing yourself this way, my dear? I mean, it's only been one month since you left Sebastian. In that one month, you've become almost as thin as that girl Jessica., whom we do not like at all."

At this, Carol burst out laughing despite herself. Her father was acting like a gossipy teenage girl.

"Ah-ha, there. That's much better. You now look more like the Carol I used to know. I'll go fix you something to eat, okay? It's not good for the baby that you're starving yourself, you know. It's not good at all."

"I'm not starving my..." Carol began to defend herself, but he was gone. She sighed and leaned back in her chair, wiping at the remaining tears on her cheeks. How time flew by! She could not believe that a whole one month had passed by since she left Sebastian's house. Each day, the pain was fresh as though it had only been yesterday that he had driven her away, and had forgotten about her as though she had never been in his life, while she tortured herself thinking about him and thinking about all that they had shared every blessed day ever since then.

She was now almost eighteen weeks pregnant, and according to her doctor, everything was fine with her baby boy. A boy... she was going to have a bouncing baby boy! She could not believe that in five months' time, she would be holding her healthy, handsome child in her arms, a boy who would look exactly like Sebastian ... or maybe it was better that he looked like her father, or even a male version of her so that she would not drive herself crazy looking at him and seeing Sebastian all the time.

The pain of the heartbreak was getting better by the day, although she knew quite well that it would never be fully gone. She would only be able to suppress it as much as she could and relegate it to the background. On lonely nights, however, she knew that the pain would spring up from the recesses of her heart, where she had shoved and buried it, to come to torment her again.

To think that she had been so gullible to think that Sebastian would come looking for her after she had just left. That he would realize his horrible mistake, and move the ends of the world if needed, to find her and offer her his unreserved apology. God! She was so stupid and was such a hopeless romantic. He had apparently not been bothered to look for her or even care that she had left, after all, that was what he wanted. It wasn't even as though she was hiding. No, she wasn't. She was right here living in the open in her father's house, a small apartment that she got for him after he got separated from Belinda.

It was time that she moved on, after all, she could not live with her father for the rest of her life. She was a grown woman, so she could take care of herself. In fact, she wanted her father to try to find love as soon as possible again because even though she was here with him, she could always sense the crippling loneliness that gripped him every time, a type of loneliness that she was all too familiar with herself.

Carol tried not to think too much about the huge sum of money that was in a special account that was created for her by Sebastian and Mr. James, but it was difficult not to think about it. It was surreal to think that she was worth over five hundred million dollars. Apparently, the will that Mr. James had kept at home was only a copy of the real thing, which was with his lawyer. Carol's name had been mentioned in it, and he had left a hundred million dollars to her, apart from her father's debt, which he had paid in full just after she married Sebastian. He had also left a note for her, which she still kept in a file in which she kept all of her important documents. The letter read thus,

"Dear Carol,

By the time you will be reading this, I will be gone. I don't really have much to say. I just wanted to thank you for bringing a smile to my Sebastian's face once more... a real smile, I mean. I also wanted to let you know that in the short span of time that we knew each other, you became the daughter that I always wished for, but never had. Oh, and you don't need to worry about your father's debt. I already settled everything a long time ago and was only pulling your legs...or more truthfully, trying to make sure you had no reason to leave until the time of the contract had elapsed. You may say that a dying, rich old man had too much money that he did not know what to do with, was bored, and wanted to play games with it. I hope that you will always be happy, with or without Sebastian.

Love,

Mr. James."

The letter had been written in his handwriting, and she somehow knew that it was during his final days that he had penned it to her. The letter had been sent to her father by Mr. James's wife, who asked him to greet her when he saw or heard from her, so apparently, she did not know that Carol was living with her father. Sometimes, Carol tried to encourage herself that maybe Sebastian did not know where she was, either, but then, she would shoot down that idea. Even if he did not know where she was, he could at least ask her father about her whereabouts, but he never did anything of the sort, so she guessed that he was very comfortable not being with her, and she had to learn to do the same.

"Here," Her father said, holding out a dish of steaming spaghetti, the dish he could make best, to her, and then going back to the kitchen to pick up his own food.

"This is really delicious, thanks," Carol told him with her mouth full. For the first time in a month, she had an appetite and was ravenously hungry. It seemed as though her body wanted to replace all the food that she had refused to eat in the past month. Within mere minutes the food had disappeared from her plate, and her father got up to top off the food on her plate. Once they had finished eating and Carol got up to do the dishes, she came back and sat down opposite her father, knowing that he would not like what she was going to say next.

"Um, dad. I need to tell you something." She said, at last, wiping at her mouth in satisfaction.

"Why don't I like the sound of that? What do you need to tell me, anyway?"

"Well, I need to leave here. Like get my own apartment, and be able to stand on my own two feet. Also, I'm getting the apartment far away from here, and I'm also not going to divulge where I'm going to you."

"What on earth are you talking about? I thought that you enjoyed living here with me. Who is going to take care of you when you're over there at God knows where all by yourself?"

"I can take care of myself, dad. I've been doing it for a long time now, and I promise to take better care of myself. If nothing else, because of the baby."

"I have a feeling that there is more to this than meets the eye. What is going on, Carol?" Donald asked worriedly.

"This text just came in on your phone. It's from Sebastian." She informed him, tears welling up in her eyes as she watched him read the text and saw his face blanch and drain of all color.