There are things you never imagine yourself telling someone. Things you just wanted to keep buried even though things have a way of coming out.
Things you'd just like to fucking forget, put in your rearview and get as far away from as possible.
Abigail was looking at me as if I'd grown two heads. "You didn't want to marry Charlotte? The love of your life? Your soul mate?"
"Yeah, wouldn't that have been nice if that were actually true? But nothing could be further from the truth. I had to marry Charlotte."
"It's not the eighteen hundreds, Kade," Abigail said skeptically. "You don't have to get married; no one can force you to marry someone you don't want to. No one could make me get married against my will."
For the first time, I got pissed at Abigail. She had no clue, no fucking clue, but she was already judging me and the choices I'd made.
"In some respects, that may be true, Abigail. But suppose your family's business is on the line, the same business that's been in your family for seven generations? Suppose your mother and sister would lose everything, and even then there would be huge debts to pay, and some of those debts, you discovered, were acquired through illegal channels? And suppose the debt collectors weren't nice people and broke into your home one night and told you how much your sister would be worth at auction? And maybe your mom wouldn't bring in as much, but there were some sick fucks out there who could make good use of her until she...wore out. Would you stay on your high horse then? Say, oh, what the hell, fuck Mom and Katie, I don't care what happens to them, they're on their own? Still gonna tell me no one could make you get married against your will?"
Abigail looked at me with wide, horrified eyes and I kept on.
"The only way I had any chance of keeping Katie and my mom safe, keeping the family business and paying off all of the loans was to marry Charlotte. So how much of a choice do you think I had there, Abigail? Sure, I could have walked away, holding tightly to my moral superiority, but what kind of man would that make me?"
This time I looked at her, silently demanding an answer.
"You couldn't have walked away," she said quietly.
"Exactly. So I did what I had to do, I did everything I had to do. And I didn't want to, but at the same time I was willing to do whatever the fuck I had to so I could keep my family safe."
"There are some conditions, Kincade," my mother said as she hung up the phone and turned to me. We were in Dad's study and he'd been old-school and had kept a landline in his office at work and at home. Now I wondered if there'd been some sinister reason other than being old-fashioned for the landline.
"And?" I hated her penchant for the dramatic pause. After having a knife at my throat last night, I needed this shit tied up, the money in hand and the debt collectors off our backs, and I didn't have time for my mother's games.
"You'll meet Charlotte tonight at a dinner with all of us. You know her mother and I have been the best of friends since college and have kept in touch all these years. You've met Emily when she was here for a visit and I've met Charlotte when I went there for a visit, but somehow we never once got all of us together."
"Right. Can we get to the conditions, Mother?"
"This will be love at first sight, Kincade. Charlotte must never know that you're being paid to marry her. You'll see her at dinner and be instantly enamored, and then after your first date tomorrow -- you couldn't wait to see her again -- you'll fall in love and in two weeks, on the anniversary of the day her parents became engaged, you'll propose to her. Then on her parent's wedding anniversary, you and Charlotte will be married. She must never find out this isn't the fairytale her parents experienced when they met and fell in love. It will be history repeating itself, another epic romance for the ages."
