Brandon's Notebook (A TMMM Bonus Material)

Journal 12: All That Light

That was the first thing that hit me. 

For a Mrs. Maxfield, this was appalling and unacceptable. 

For Charlotte, this was a shame and a tragedy. 

She's the strongest girl I know, my best girl. 

To see her broken like this made me want to lash out and hit something. 

But all that violence ebbed away when she walked toward me and I just stood there in some kind of trance. 

 When she went up on her toes to brush a soft kiss on my lips, knowing what the effort cost her, I swear I felt all the motion of the world warp into a standstill. The few rare times Charlotte initiated a kiss had all felt this way but today, there was something a little different about it. 

 She was still as vulnerable as she'd been last night and this kiss had something that hadn't been there before—trust. That in her condition, after everything that had happened, she trusted me to be there, to keep her from being broken even more, to make it better. 

And I'll be damned if I didn't do any of those things. 

 So I kissed her back with all my unworded promises. 

Doing it in front of the other execs might not have been the wisest idea but then again, maybe it was. 

I'm fiercely proud of Charlotte and I don't have to tell anyone why when it comes to her, I have no rules. 

 Okay, maybe one rule—never fail her. 

And it me hard that I couldn't turn back time and retroactively enforce this rule. If I could, maybe I would've been able to save her all those years ago from her father's callous and cruel treatment. 

That was the second thing that ripped through me like daggers. 

 Listening to her tell me her darkest, most painful memories and watching her try to be light about it, like it didn't hurt as much as it did—it's amazing that I didn't destroy everything in the kitchen. 

 I know that logically, I couldn't have failed her then and that frustrated me. What's ridiculous is that she seems to think she failed herself then, when she didn't fight back or get justice for herself. 

 None of it was her fault. If anything, all she'd been trying to do was live a different life somewhere far away from her toxic family or lack thereof. She shouldn't have been made to feel small or blame herself for having been weak, or God forbid, human—a child. 

I couldn't beat up a dead man and it angered me that I had no way to avenge Charlotte because I would if I could. No father—or any parent for that matter—had any right to brutalize his child, no matter his problems. 

 And maybe if Charlotte hadn't met a different kind of father—mine—she wouldn't have known better than what she'd lived with.

I had no idea of what my father had done for her. 

 He saved her, gave her a way out before life could destroy her. 

I owe Dad a tremendous amount of gratitude—not just for bringing Charlotte into my life but for making sure that she and all her light survived that hellhole. He was one of the reasons she still believed in people's capacity to be kind and good. One of the reasons that she'll probably keep believing it no matter how many more times she'd be let down. 

And I forced her to betray him through the lure of money which she'd desperately needed. 

No wonder she hated me for it.