A/N: Hi everyone! I know it's only been a few days since the last update but I think we're all on the edge of our seats, wondering just where this all going to go. So here's the next chapter.
This is shorter but it's going to spin us on our heads, I think.
Thank you to all who found strength in Charlotte's character. I think in this chapter, we're all going to remember that despite all the things we admire about her, she's just as human as the rest of us.
Don't forget to vote and comment! =)
***
When the Maxfields threw a party, they really threw a party.
The family's old but magnificent neo-classical mansion was already a highly coveted real-estate piece with its history and sheer size—a rare find in the bustling heart of downtown. In the muted dusk, the grand house seemed to glow and shimmer. To be admitted behind its gates alone was quite a privilege.
The fact that the celebration was for Martin Maxfield's birthday made the event a definite must in the calendar of anyone who was financially, politically and socially important in the city, if not the country.
For all his normally buoyant yet occasionally sly tendencies, Martin was a well-respected figure in the business world, having gained the favor of both the private and public sectors.
It was no surprise that all kinds of people turned out.
I expected businessmen, politicians, celebrities, socialites, and all kinds of important people.
What I didn't expect was... my mother.
Louisa Samuels in the flesh.
"Charlotte? Are you okay?"
The sound of Brandon's voice seemed warbled and dulled, as if he were somehow speaking to me through a bottle.
I blinked and glanced up at him, his handsome face, creased with concern, coming into focus.
"I need to... I need to leave." My voice was no better—it was raspy and broken and trembling at some parts.
I vaguely noticed Brandon's large, warm hand settle on my shoulder. "Babe, what's wrong?"
"She's here," I whispered, backing up a step only to be reminded by the cold, hard wall behind me that there was nowhere to go. I was trapped in a small, discreet alcove where I'd run for cover the moment I caught sight of her face in the crowd.
I was such a coward but what was I supposed to do?
My mother was so far removed from my reality that she may as well be literally a ghost from my past.
Except that ghosts blur with the smoky fringes of the other world. Your mother looks vividly real.
A sense of panic was surging up through me like a nasty acid reflex and I wrestled my shoulder away from Brandon’s firm grip, wanting nothing more but to get away—to dissolve into the wall if I had to.
He wouldn’t let go though. He kept staring at me as if I were a really complicated Math problem he was sure he’d solved before. He didn’t understand that I had to go.
“She’s here,” I hissed urgently, clamping a hand around Brandon’s wrist and wrenching his grip loose. “I don’t know how… I have to go.”
Scowling, he effectively blocked me from where I would’ve launched into a sprint, cradling me close to his side as he swept his gaze around the vast room full of guests.
“She’s here, Brand,” I choked out, squeezing my eyes shut and pressing my face against his black suit, not caring if my make up smudged all over it. “I can’t…”
And suddenly, Brandon’s arm tightened around me. I felt his body tense up as he gently extricated me from the tight clutch I had of him, his hand tipping up my face so I could look up to his.
His hazel eyes were sharp and bright—like the blinding glare of the sun in high noon.
“Your mother.”
I nodded and ran a shaky hand through my hair, uncaring of the moussed and teased mess it raked through.
I lifted my eyes to peek just past Brandon’s shoulder, knowing what I didn’t want to see but looking for it all the same.
“Yes.” I bit the inside of my bottom lip until I tasted the tang of blood, my attention zooming in on the lone figure that hovered just by the door, draped in a soft lilac evening gown, her head following the slow sweep of her eyes as she scanned the party.
Even from across the room, her face looked nearly exactly as I remembered it, and it wrenched painfully at something inside of me. The sunniness of her curly blond hair, the oval-shaped face rendered attractively by the neat features that composed it—apparently, the years didn’t cause her looks to deteriorate as much as they did whatever happy memories I had of her.
“She’s here,” Brandon said.
“I know. She’s—” My eyes suddenly narrowed as I glanced up sharply at my husband. “Wait. How did you know my mother’s here? You don’t know what she looks like. Or that she would be here.”
Something flickered briefly across Brandon’s somber face. “I do know.”
I slowly backed a step away from my husband and he didn’t lock me in place this time. “Why would you know such a thing?”
I felt it coming—that sharp but somehow hollow pain that blunted through my chest like the strike of a fist at the very centre of me.
It was a feeling I was well acquainted with—a feeling that had struck me only twice in my life: first when I realized, a couple of years later when I was old enough to understand, that my mother had abandoned us instead of just disappearing at the sprinkle of fairy dust, and second when I finally felt my father’s drunken brutality, after I’d thought that nothing could’ve hurt me more than his neglect.
It was the kind of betrayal that nearly drove me to my knees, brought down by the power only those I so very carefully chose to love could possibly have over me.
That’s the truth of things, isn’t it? When you love someone, you give them the choice to love you back or break you. And you’ve been broken each time, Charlotte, haven’t you?
Before Brandon could even speak the words I could already read in his eyes, tears were rolling down my cheeks, burning narrow, little paths down my cold skin.
“Did you ask her to come here?” The small but hard voice that spoke didn’t sound like me but it must’ve been because each word was lodged painfully at the base of my throat where the sobs threatened to burst from. “Did you, Brand? After I told you that she was dead to me? You had no right!”
He flinched, his face draining of color like someone who was fast losing the blood that kept him alive.
“I wanted you to be happy,” were his faint, trembling words as he reached a hand out to me. “Charlotte.”
“You think seeing her would make me happy?” I demanded incredulously. “Do you even know me at all, Brand?”
“I know that despite your bravado and your adore-me-or-abhor-me attitude, something is still hurting, Charlotte,” he snapped back, grabbing me by the elbow, his eyes fierce once again. “Something is still broken.”
I twisted my arm away in disgust. “So you wanted to fix me? I thought you loved everything that was broken about me, Brand. Suddenly, you want to patch me up. I hate to break it to you but you there’s no point in putting a Band-Aid on an old wound that had scabbed over so many times it no longer bleeds.”
And before he could grab me again, I turned on my heel and ran down the narrow hall next to the alcove, oblivious to the frantic clicking of my heels and the loud swishing of fabric as my dress rustled around my legs, slowing me down I might as well have been wading through the waves in the ocean.
I practically stumbled into the library which was lit intimately by the soft glow of the wall sconces that surrounded the warm, cozy space.
The fact that it abruptly ended the path I was willing to run on as fast as I could for as far away as possible, suffocated me.
I scrambled to the tall windows, shoving the drapes back and fumbling for any kind of lever that would let me crack it open.
Fuck!
The damned dead-end was stifling hot and my breath was stuck somewhere in my chest, trying to pound its way out.
“Charlotte!”
I distractedly heard Brandon’s voice but I ignored him as my hands found purchase and gripped a latch. With furious effort, I twisted it whatever way I could until one pane cracked open.
The soft gust of the cool evening breeze nearly knocked me over and I limply leaned against the window frame, breathing hard and fast.
“Charlotte, look at me.”
I didn’t realize how close Brandon had come and I backed up a step at the sight of him, holding a trembling hand up to stop him in his tracks.
“Don’t.” I swallowed against the lump of tears in my throat, blinking rapidly through the watery vision I had of my husband. “I’m not some injured animal you pick up from the side of the road, Brand. I’ve been on my own, out in the wild for so long, without you, without anybody, and I’m fine being that way.”
Brandon’s lips clamped tightly into a thin line, his expression so stormy I was sure lightning was going to streak the sky outside followed by a roaring thunder, but he kept his ground.
“You can feed me and care for me all you like but taking me to a mother who’d long abandoned me isn’t going to change a damned thing,” I spat out, so so angry that the one person I thought would understand me the most and accept me, scars and snarls and all, was the same person who’d stuck a hand into a wound I didn’t mind having for the rest of my life, pulling at stitches so old and worn, I was starting to bleed all over again.
“I’m not trying to change you, Charlotte,” Brandon ground out, his jaw clenching with the effort. “I’m simply trying to change some of the things that surround you in hope that you wouldn’t have to hurt any more or forever second-guess your worth. While your self-deprecating attitude amuses other people, I know it comes from somewhere painful, no matter how easily you brush it off like it’s nothing.”
I bristled. “You couldn’t fix me before so now you’re going to attempt it? I will never feel like I deserve everything, Brand, because I don’t, and I don’t see that as an issue. You don’t have to put the pieces of my life back together. I like it the way it is but if it’s not good enough for you, you’re going to have to ask yourself why, and maybe the answer is because I was never good enough for you to start with. Now that you’re stuck with me, you’re trying your best to polish away all the scuffs I came with.”
Brandon opened his mouth to speak again but I was far too gone, my anger sending a jolt of adrenaline through me with the strength of an electric shock.
“I have some news for you, Brand. My mother isn’t a little scuff. She’s a big rip at the bottom of my shoe that I will always notice no matter what,” I said vehemently, my voice gathering momentum. “And I’m alright with that. You know why? Because it reminds me to never get too comfortable, and it has served me well in the last twenty years of my life. You just never know when someone will suddenly think you’re not good enough for them and decide to walk away from you.”
“I am not going to walk away from you!” Brandon practically yelled, a muscle in his cheek ticking. “This is not a question about whether or not you’re good enough for me, Charlotte. I just want you to be happy.”
My lip curled up in one corner as I attempted a smile.
My next words came out softly, “I bet that’s what my mother told herself as she was packing up to leave me, Brand. I’m sure she thought I was worth the whole world to her and that by leaving, she was doing me a favor because she wanted me to be happy. After all, what child would be happy with a mother who so obviously wanted me be somewhere else?”
A bitter laugh bubbled out of my throat as I looked away and stared out into the dark night, remembering countless times when I’d done the same as a child, wondering what my life would become as my father drunk himself to death in the next room, hardly sparing me a thought. “I was happy, alright. I was really happy living with a ghost of a father who readied his grave one drink at a time. It was as every ideal childhood should be—full of wonderful dreams—because there wasn’t a single night I didn’t wish I was someone else, living a different life somewhere far away where there were great kings and happy princesses instead of alcoholic fathers and little girls who became adept at mopping vomit off the floor before even she put on her first beginners bra.”
“You blame her,” Brandon said in a surprisingly gentle voice. “You blame her for everything you went through.”
I lifted heavy, wet lashes to look at him. “It’s an opinion formed on a logical sequence of events, Brand. She went and started an affair with someone else, walked out on her family, drove my father to drink, left me at the mercy of a man who had more conversations with his gin bottle than his only child, forced me to depend on myself and endure no matter what. What alternate deductions can you arrive at?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment before his expression steeled with resolve. “Maybe she can rectify her mistakes.”
“Rectify her mistakes?” I scoffed with an incredulous laugh. “I’m now the highly esteemed Mrs. Charlotte Maxfield, with the world at her feet. I should write her a thank-you card. Without her mistakes, I may have never struck out as well as I did. I’ve made do with what she’d broken. I don’t need her, or you, to fix me.”
I levelled my gaze steadily at him, my chin thrust up in defiant challenge. “If you can’t live with that, Brand, then let me go, because I’d rather be who I am now than subject myself to my mother’s good intentions for the sake of her redemption and your misplaced sense of nobility.”
Without another word, I strode past him, my shoulders squared and my head held up high with as much dignity someone walking away from a death sentence could muster.
After all, I’d given him my heart—the battered and bloody thing—and it would seem, upon closer inspection, that it wasn’t good enough as it was.
The prince may love the pauper but she will never be a princess—not with her calloused hands and her gruff ways. She will never forget who she is, despite the crown and pretty dresses and the endless round of parties, and that’s the truth the prince will have to accept.
Blind with the storm raging through me, I marched out of the library and headed for the guest bedroom Martin had given us for the night. I paced for a good half hour before I made up my mind.
I would’ve stayed for Martin’s sake but I couldn’t bear the thought of running into my mother and ruining everyone’s night.
I was just rummaging through our overnight bag when my phone rang.
“What?” was my curt answer with barely a glance at the call display.
My stomach dropped when I heard a familiar sob on the other line.
“Charlotte… it’s me.”
Bessy.
“I lost it,” she whispered shakily. “The baby.”
Cold dread filled my veins like ice as I started pacing, my hand clutching the phone so hard I wondered vaguely if it would shatter.
“What happened?” I asked in an even voice when I wanted to demand out loud and pull my hair. “Bessy, tell me. What’s wrong?”
“H-he was at my apartment… so angry at me. I didn’t think he’d mean to…” Bessy sobbed. “But now I think… he did. He meant it. So that I lose the b-baby.”
“Okay, okay!” I grabbed my clutch and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind me. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Which hospital are you in? I’ll be there. I’ll call Layla and—.”
Damn! She skipped out on Martin’s party because her father was arriving in town to meet Riley.
“No, don’t,” Bessy pleaded. “I don’t want to burden her m-more. I deserve this. I deserve it for all the b-bad things I did. I won’t make a good mother anyway.”
“You don’t know that,” I snapped at her as I hurried down the hall toward the staircase. “There’s no manual for parenthood. People will make a lot of mistakes but they don’t always mean to.”
The rest of my words dived back into my throat when I saw the two people I did not want to be within fifty meters of—Brandon and my mother.
They were having a hushed conversation by the staircase, their words indiscernible to me over the music playing at the party downstairs. My mother was frowning in concern and my husband was speaking with an apologetic grimace.
Great. Now you’re trying to smooth her ruffled feathers because she didn’t get a warm welcome? Whose side are you on?
They both paused and looked up, as if they sensed my arrival even though I’d stopped in my tracks quite a ways back from them.
For the first time in the last fourteen years of my life, I met my mother’s gaze.
Her eyes were still the same startling aquamarine blue. The flicker of emotions in them seemed sincere but I only had six years of knowing this woman, most of that time having been too young to really understand anything, so I had very little reason to trust her.
Despite the rush of anger though, my last statement to Bessy rang clear in my head again.
Sure, people make mistakes when they don’t mean to. But her leaving me wasn’t a mistake—it was a decision she made knowing what it would do to me, whether I even found out the real reason or not.
Parenting manual or not, it didn’t change a damned thing in my opinion.
“Just hang tight. I’ll be there,” I said softly to Bessy on the phone before ending the call.
I averted my gaze from my mother and continued on my way with dogged intent, ignoring Brandon even as he called my name.
I was just trying to get past him after he’d planted himself in my path when I heard her speak.
“Charlotte.”
After fourteen years, having last heard it when I was just six, the sound of my name as she said it had a paralyzing effect on me.
How do you hate something you craved for so long?
It was like an invisible hand grabbed my shoulder and pivoted me around to face her.
Her familiarity, her concerned demeanor, her proximity—they crawled under my skin like a very bad itch.
“I’m sorry. Do I know you?” My voice was amazingly steady and nonchalant.
While I suspected that my eyes were still a bit puffy and red-rimmed from crying earlier, I didn’t have to give her the satisfaction that she could still affect me. Just like a ghost, she couldn’t touch me.
She stiffened, and I could feel her withdraw from the conversation, her cheeks flushing a deep red.
Brandon sucked in his breath audibly, his voice chiding. “Charlotte, don’t.”
I turned to him with what I hoped was a glacial smile. “I’m sorry if I interrupted what appears to be an important conversation. Please carry on without me. I need to see to the party.”
“You don’t have to pretend you don’t know me,” her voice croaked out, small and simpering.
I raised a brow at her. “Oh, I’m good at pretending. Ask my husband. After all, it’s a talent I inherited from you. Isn’t that right, mother?”
Her chin was trembling as she turned to Brandon. “I should go. It was a mistake for me to come here—“
“Oh, please, stay,” I interjected coolly. “Enjoy the party. Enjoy the world that the daughter you pretend doesn’t exist, is now queen of. As for me, I have to go and see to my duties. I’ll simply pretend you’re not really here—something I have plenty of experience doing. Excuse me.”
When Brandon attempted one more time to block my way, I shot him a murderous glare that stopped him in his tracks.
“If you care for me at all, Brand, you’re going to let me walk away right now,” I said in a deceptively soft voice. “If you don’t, I might just walk away for good.”
I was still seething at his betrayal, itching to pick a fight, but I had to remind myself that there were other people around us who didn’t deserve to be dragged into this ugly, hateful mess that was mine and my mother’s reunion.
Brandon didn’t move another inch but his eyes bore deeper into my soul, right into the gaping hole where my heart used to be. “This is not like you, Charlotte.”
I let out a short, harsh laugh. “Makes you wonder if you really knew me at all, doesn’t it, Brand?”
Without waiting for his answer, or a backward glance at my mother, I marched away.
I avoided the heart of the party and took a slightly circuitous route to get out of the house but as walked past the back porch, the silhouette of a man leaning against one of the columns popped out of the shadows and startled a small shriek out of me.
“Charlotte, hey,” Jake said as he grabbed my elbow to keep me steady. “Where are you going? You look like you’re marching to war. You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I answered waspishly. It was dark out there except for what little illumination the lights from the house and around the property were providing. He wouldn’t be able to take one look at my face and notice the volcano that was doing a slow simmer inside of me. “What are you doing out here?”
“I’m trying to avoid murdering every man who’s circling around Tessa,” he explained, walking with me along the cobbled path throughout the garden when I resumed my near-sprint. “Did you see what she was wearing? She’s doing it on purpose—pushing me over the edge to see if I would snap. I just might, you know, but I’m doing my best not to.”
“Good for you,” I muttered absently, whipping out my cellphone to text Bessy and ask for the name of the hospital she was in.
“I think I’ll run away with her to Vegas.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah, sure.” My fingers were flying off the touch screen of my phone as I rapped out a message.
“We’ll have ten babies together and sell them to the black market.”
“Nice. That’s good.”
“Charlotte!”
I looked up at him and scowled because my ears were still ringing with the volume of his voice. “What?”
“You’re not listening to me,” Jake said sulkily.
I blew out a breath and rubbed the heel of my palm between my brows, so exhausted all of a sudden. “No, I’m not. I’m sorry, Jake, but I have to go. It’s Bessy. She’s at the hospital.”
Jake straightened like a rod. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Don happened,” I said grimly, my insides twisting into a tight, nervous knot. “He got to her.”
Jake let out a string of curses before quickening his steps. “Come on. I’ll drive you. Meet me out by the front steps. I’ll go get my car.”
He jogged away and left me to make the short trip to the side of the house, just by the entrance. There were a few people hanging around the entrance so I stayed in a discreet corner, impatiently checking my phone every thirty seconds until Bessy texted back with the hospital.
A few minutes later, Jake’s car pulled up.
I was just making my way to it when I heard frantic steps coming from behind me.
“Charlotte, where the hell do you think you’re going?” Brandon demanded as he caught up with me, catching me by the elbow. His grip wasn’t painful but it kept me in place.
“Jake and I have an errand to run,” I snapped, glancing longingly at the waiting car. “As much as I’d love to stay and fight with you more, Brand, I actually have more important things to do.”
“Yes. Important things like mysterious errands with my best friend,” he retorted, his expression harsh when he tipped his face up to the shaft of light coming from one of the lamps that bordered the driveway. “You’d rather go do that than stay here and face your mother once and for all.”
“I didn’t realize I was obliged,” I said with a mocking smile, twisting my arm free. “Entertain her yourself. She’s your guest after all.”
“Charlotte!” Brandon hissed as I turned to go.
I ignored him and scrambled toward the car as fast as I could.
“Everything okay?” Jake asked with a frown knitted between his brows. “I couldn’t hear anything but Brandon kind of looked upset.”
I barked out the hospital name to him, strapped on my seatbelt, and motioned impatiently with my hand for him to go.
“He invited my mother.”
“Your mother?” Jake repeated incredulously. “Your mother—the one who, um… you know.”
“Yes. The same one who walked out on me and rode off into the sunset,” I answered caustically, opening the windows to escape that oppressive heat that seemed to be coming out of me tonight. “You can imagine why I’m so thrilled.”
Jake was quiet for a moment before he gently said, “Brandon was just probably trying to help. You know he loves you.”
I snorted. “I really felt the love when he forced me to confront the one person I have no desire to ever be associated with again.”
“So he made you face your demons,” Jake said in such a diplomatic tone I almost laughed. “He took a page off your book. If there’s a master of good intentions around, it’s you.”
Well, that shut me up.
Somewhere in the back of my mind was a rational, logical argument that explained Brandon’s actions but I didn’t want to fish it out just yet.
Sometimes, in order to fix something, you’ll need to break it again. It makes you wonder whether it’s worth the pain when you’ve managed to limp along just fine.
***
I wasn’t a big fan of hospitals.
The few times I’d been to one, in my recollection, were unpleasant experiences: when my father lashed out on me, when Anna and I were mugged and beaten, when Martin had a heart attack, and tonight, when Bessy earned a busted lip and an array of bruises in exchange for the baby she’d lost.
It was so damned depressing.
Jake and I sat there as Bessy told us how she’d snuck back into her apartment to get a few things she wanted to take with her before flying out to stay with her sister in Florida. Don showed up ten minutes later, drunk and demonic, railing at her for making things worse with Layla who was in the process of getting a restraining order against him while her father was stirring up a storm in the company to get him fired.
He knew that Bessy didn’t go through with the abortion but that he was going to make sure he got rid of any evidence himself.
Bessy, defeated and damaged as I’d never seen her before, went on to tell us that she was passed out for a while before waking up in a pool of blood on the floor, knowing well before the doctors confirmed to her, that the baby was gone. She’d wrapped herself up in a blanket and took a cab to the hospital because Don had taken her cellphone as another insurance that she wouldn’t be able to show any proof of their affair.
I pleaded with Bessy, over and over again, to press charges, but it seemed that she lost her strength along with her baby. She was so drained she couldn’t even shed tears anymore. She told us the entire story with dry but haunted eyes, curling into a ball afterwards when it was over, saying nothing more until she finally fell asleep.
Jake and I sat there for hours. When the clock struck six in the morning, I finally messaged Layla to tell her what happened to her cousin. Bessy didn’t want her involved but she was her only family at the moment.
Layla arrived half an hour later, grim-faced but amazingly calm.
“I’ll deal with it, Charlotte,” she told me as we stepped out of the room to talk privately. “I thought we could all get out of this mess without a scandal but Don has gone too far.”
“He deserves to rot in jail,” I agreed. “This is the last straw, Layla. I won’t be shutting up any more after this.”
Layla closed her eyes briefly as she sighed, her face etched with the evidence of her emotional exhaustion. “I know, Char. And you won’t have to. I’m going after Don. I’ll make sure he gets everything he deserves.”
“Battles are ugly, I know, but we fight them for a good reason,” I told her gently.
Layla’s smile was faint and haunted. “Do you know why Don and I never had a child?”
I shook my head.
“I got pregnant a couple years ago but he caught me sneaking out to see Riley,” she said in a voice filled with aching sadness. “He wanted to teach me a lesson I would never forget. He beat me senseless. I lost the baby too. Since then, I never voluntarily became intimate with him. Besides not being able to stand his touch, I didn’t want to subject a child of mine to a monster of a father, and it seems that fate agrees because I don’t think I can have a child anymore.”
A tear rolled down Layla’s cheek and she brushed it off, bravely smiling at me despite her suffering.
I had no words so I gingerly took a step forward and gave her a hug, willing for some of her pain to go away.
By the time Jake dropped me off at the condo, I was tired, hungry and emotionally wrecked.
I longed for a comfortable bed and a few decent hours of sleep where I could forget every bloody bad thing I had to deal with in the last twelve hours.
At least Brandon would be at his father’s house—I could postpone our fight for a few more hours.
That was what I thought anyway, and apparently I was wrong.
I was just making my way to the bedroom when I spied a figure hunched over Brandon’s desk through the open door of his office.
I stopped in my tracks, instantly recognizing the thick dark brown hair and the broad shoulders. Gone was his tux jacket but with the state of his wrinkled white dress shirt and the unruly mop of his hair, it looked like Brandon had been sitting there for a while, his face buried in his hands.
I felt an unbearable ache in my chest and I nearly pounded on it with a closed fist. Instead, I sucked in a breath and approached him.
He must have heard the click of my heels because he looked up, arresting me on the spot with bloodshot eyes that looked hostile.
I finally noticed the glass and the nearly empty bottle of brandy he had sitting on his desk and the sight filled me with dismay.
“What are you doing here?” I asked in not the friendliest tone.
I should walk away and reserve this discussion when we both had clear heads but despite my physical fatigue, I was still wound up tight emotionally.
“I live here,” Brandon answered with equal distaste. “I’ve lived here in relative peace and quiet for several years before you brought havoc to my life.”
I didn’t miss the bitterness in his statement. “Thanks for making me sound like the plague. You and my Mom must’ve been swapping notes.”
I couldn’t help the swipe at him. If it hadn’t been for him, the dam inside me would’ve stayed shut and well sealed and I wouldn’t be feeling like I was barely holding my head up through the devastating currents of hurt both past and present.
“We couldn’t have,” he replied, leaning back in his seat and surveying me with inscrutable eyes.
I was still clad in last night’s dress, my hair a fright and my face possibly smudged with what was left of my make-up. I was about as equally disheveled as Brandon except he still looked unfairly seductive despite the odd light in his eyes and the stony profile of his face shadowed with the start of a stubble.
“After your spiteful speech, the sobbing woman hightailed out of there to go hide in her hotel.”
My mouth curled into a sneer. “No surprise. She’s quite good at running away.”
“Another talent you inherited from her, it would seem,” Brandon said bluntly and deliberately. “You run away when you can’t handle it—like you did whenever you couldn’t take your father’s drinking anymore, when you hopped on a plane to move to Paris and leave your old life behind, when you walked out on me as I was trying to help you find closure with your mother.”
The remark stung because there was some truth to it, and truth was often like salt flung on top of a bleeding wound.
“It makes me wonder if you’ve inherited more of your mother’s talents,” he said, reaching for a cluttered pile on his desk and shoving them forward in my direction.
I frowned, looking at what seemed to be a pile of large photographs turned face down on the desk.
I picked them up and froze the moment I turned them over.
On top of the pictures was a black and white print-out that simply said: The truth is sometimes right under your nose.
The first picture was of me standing outside of the family clinic with Jake. He was holding me by the elbow and by the looks on our faces, we seemed to be fighting, which we were, because we were arguing about what I was doing there.
The next photographs were more shots of us outside the clinic, the images selected in a way that portrayed us like quarrelling lovers. There were more of us inside the clinic, visible through the glass door even through the slightly grainy quality of the zoomed-in image.
The rest were more photos of me and Jake at the entrance of his condo, a couple of them showing us embracing.
The photo collection was a perfect storyboard for a treacherous love affair.
“They were handed to my driver last night by some guy in a hoodie who quickly disappeared. I sat here and looked at them for hours, refusing to believe what I was seeing.”
My heart was already beating a frantic tattoo, my hands ice-cold but steady despite the sharp and ugly churn of my stomach as it dawned on me what Brandon meant when he referred to other talents I inherited from my mother.
“All those hushed, furtive conversations, those meaningful glances like you two knew a secret no one else did, your growing distance from me, the bleeding heart Jake wears on his sleeve—I must’ve been blind or just plain stupid.”
I swallowed against the painful lump in my throat, biting the inside of my lower lip to keep it from trembling as I raised my eyes to meet Brandon’s own—a golden gaze that burned with fiery hate.
I had a thousand words to say to him—words that might just save us—but I couldn’t find my voice through the nearly lethargic feeling of defeat that seeped into my bones.
And just like that, the trust you thought would stand the test of time crumbled into dust. There would be no explanations—not when the truth is whatever he wants to see.
“I called up my guy in the security department to find out what the clinic does because it doesn’t come up online,” Brandon continued, his voice rising as his accusations piled up like heads on a pike in front of me. “Guess what the shabby little shack’s specialty is—back-alley abortions.”
His gaze wavered from mine as his eyes dropped to my stomach, and the pain that flickered across his face was so raw and potent, I had to gasp out a breath.
“So what’s the story, Charlotte?” he asked bitterly the second he recovered, the mask of disgust and anger back on his face. “Were you Jake’s woman problems? Fooled around together and got knocked up by him? Tried to get rid of the evidence? Did you two fight about it? Did you talk about how poor Brandon shouldn’t know about any of it?”
“Did you go and fuck him while you’re married to me because maybe the very thing you’re afraid of is not your mother but the fact that you might just be exactly like her?”
I stumbled back at the sheer volume and vehemence of his last statement, barely able to recognize the agonized and tortured face of the man who stared back at me.
This wasn’t the man I married—the man who tied the laces of my sneakers when my high heels wore me out, the man who stood up to his family for me when our dirty secret came out, the man who bought me a house I only once dreamily gazed at when I walked the streets alone at night to escape my depressing childhood. This was a man who had made his mind up about me without the slightest doubt or hesitation, even after all that we’d been through together.
For someone who never backed down without a word in, I didn’t have a lot I could say that would mean anything now—even the truth.
They say love hurts. No one warned me it could kill.
It surely felt like dying or something similar because I lost all kinds of feeling in my body except where my heart was pumping out its last supply of blood in a laughable attempt at survival.
If there were tears on my face, I didn’t notice and I didn’t care as I slowly set the photos down on Brandon’s desk.
“That was the cruelest thing anyone has ever said to me,” I said quietly. “And I’ve had so many people give it their best shot.”
Brandon was probably expecting anger from me because at my words, he deflated, his eyes briefly closing in agony as he dragged a hand down his face.
“Charlotte, I’m…” He clenched his fists on the table and exhaled sharply. “I’ve had too much to drink and the pictures—“
I laughed—a sound so grating and crude it jolted me out of the dark anguish I was simply sinking into. “Congratulations, Brand! You’re now the second man to have ever used that excuse with me—the perfect intro to your explanation why you just couldn’t help but hurt me. Of course, you’ve had too much to drink! You stole my father’s line like it’s always been yours. Bravo!”
“What should I have done, Charlotte?” he demanded hotly. “What’s the etiquette on discovering your wife is cheating on you with your best friend? And that she’s possibly pregnant with his child? Huh? You’re the Championette. What’s society’s rule on that?”
“It doesn’t take etiquette classes to know that the first thing you should’ve probably done is ask me for my side of the story,” I returned in a biting tone, my anger back to full force. “The question is whether you’d even recognize the truth when you hear it because from the looks of things, you’ve already declared me guilty.”
I slammed my hands down on his desk, barely noticing the sting on my palm and the tremors that shot up to my elbows. “We both know I can lie well, Brand, and the photographic evidence is damning. And since you obviously think me my mother’s daughter—just as much of a whore as she is, if we use my father’s endearing description of her—why the hell wouldn’t I be cheating on you with your best friend? Why wouldn’t you think me capable of betraying you? Of stirring a torrid affair with a man who’s like a brother to me, even when all this time, I was so fucking in love with you?”
I was close enough that I could see the tears welling up in Brandon’s eyes.
I wanted to reach out and cup his face in my hands, to bring him close enough that I could press my lips against his forehead and tell him we didn’t have to hurt like this, but I didn’t move an inch.
“I don’t know what to think,” Brandon whispered, his head lowering in defeat slowly enough that I couldn’t miss the doubt seared in him.
The pain was crushing but I nodded, blinking back my own tears as I straightened and took a step back, wanting nothing more but to get away from the very place I considered a real home for the first time years. It felt oppressive, like the disappointment that felt like a chain looped around my neck, weighing me down into the cold, dirty ground where I was going to wait for my eternal torture.
Sometimes, what you thought was everything just isn’t enough.
“I’ll go.”
As if in a strange, lucid dream haze, I made my way to the bedroom. Through a vision that stung and swam with tears, I packed what few things I’d owned before I met Brandon into a small suitcase.
I paused by the open door of his office, knowing he was still sitting where I left him and that he could see me with the suitcase in hand, waiting without looking at him to see if he would stop me, call me back, tell me that we would be okay and that he would listen.
When nothing but agonizing silence stretched in the air, I took a deep breath, forcing it in so that it would fill what was so empty inside me right now, and left.
Clad and chilled in a wilted evening gown, staggering on high heels with bleeding feet, and clutching one of my old, battered suitcases that still had luggage stickers on it, I, the great Mrs. Charlotte Maxfield, got into a cab, my head down and my heart finally broken so completely the fine shards would’ve floated away with the crisp, autumn morning breeze as I left behind the life and the man I never thought I’d love so fiercely.
***
So, what do you all think?
Don't hate me. We knew there was going to be payback. Let me know.
By the way, hope you enjoy the song for this chapter. It's one of my favorites. It's really something to listen to.
♪♪♪ Chapter Soundtrack: Let Her Go by Passenger ♪♪♪
Well you only need the light when it's burning low
Only miss the sun when it starts to snow
Only know you love her when you let her go
Only know you've been high when you're feeling low
Only hate the road when you’re missin' home
Only know you love her when you let her go
And you let her go
Staring at the bottom of your glass
Hoping one day you'll make a dream last
But dreams come slow and they go so fast
You see her when you close your eyes
Maybe one day you'll understand why
Everything you touch surely dies
But you only need the light when it's burning low
Only miss the sun when it starts to snow
Only know you love her when you let her go
Only know you've been high when you're feeling low
Only hate the road when you're missin' home
Only know you love her when you let her go
Staring at the ceiling in the dark
Same old empty feeling in your heart
'Cause love comes slow and it goes so fast
Well you see her when you fall asleep
But never to touch and never to keep
'Cause you loved her too much
And you dived too deep