The Transient Wife

Chapter 33

She hated waiting. It was never a virtue she learned to perfect but in this case she did. But it was taking so long for Philip to make a move—any move.

Waiting for her phone to ring or her door to rattle with a knock was plain agony on her part.

Cassandra finally reached the acceptance phase of her grief by the end of the second week. She finally accepted that Philip would not come to her and beg her to come back. It hurt. Hell, it hurt more than that time she found out her father willingly gave her away. But she had to face it.

She never answered any calls from anyone, not even her mother or Chanty, who seemed to sense like there was something going on because she had been sending her text messages asking if she and Philip were okay.

She never replied, not intending to.

Her mother was the first to panic when she learned that she was back to her own house.

"Mom, I am fine. Philip and I just had a fight. That's all. I need some time to be on my own and think," she told her over the phone.

But she knew her mother would not just stop there.

The next day, Cassandra found her father at her doorsteps.

She sighed, opening the door wider. "Dad. If you're here to beg me to go back to him and pretend that we are okay like what we've been trying to act all these months, this is not your lucky day."

"Let's go for a drink, shall we?" her father said with an awkward smile.

"Say whatever you have to say," she said an hour later. She and her father found a silent pub near her place and they were down to their second bottle.

Kurt Anders sighed and leaned back against his chair. He took his precious time to look at his daughter in the eye and a gentle smile slowly formed on his face. "I am not going to force you to go back to him. What I did months ago was the first and last. Now that everything's over, now that everything's been taken care of, you are free to do whatever you want, Cassy."

She frowned. "What do you mean everything's over? What has been taken care of? Oh, wait, I don't know." She shot him a sarcastic look as she said that. "Because no one cared to tell me the truth. He gave me the divorce papers. That must mean your chess game is over earlier than expected, right? And he told me you will tell me the truth once it is."

Her father leaned forward and looked at her patiently, confusion flashing on his face at her mention of the chess game but he did not ask about it. Instead, he sighed and held her gaze. "I was in deep, serious trouble last year. I made deals with the wrong people and before I knew it, I was trapped. It was never in my plan to be tangled with such dangerous people."

"Dangerous?"

"At first I didn't know. They just came to me and asked if I would be willing to provide them with a packing service."

"What do you mean, dad? You sell plastics for a living."

"I was," he said, "Until last year when I said yes to these guys and packed their goods for them."

Cassandra stared at her father in disbelief. Her eyes widened and she hissed, "You're telling me there are illegal goods inside your plastics?"

"It was too late when I found out," her father hissed back, his face red.

"What the hell, dad!" she cried out, horrified.

Her father looked away from her guiltily. "I didn't know! It was only when I noticed a lot of discrepancies with the product shipping that I started investigating. And when the result of such investigation came, I was already in serious trouble."