Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 61563 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 308(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61563 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 308(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
I may have been born a Thatcher and I’ll die a Thatcher, but I refuse to be anything like my father. Not today, not ever.
“I won’t forgive you.” I force my body to relax. I’ve said what I came to say. This ends now. “I never will.” I start to walk out, accompanied by the sound of my heart racing.
Just as my hand grips the doorknob, I finally get the balls to ask him.
One last thing to say. One final question.
Walking back to his desk with confident steps, I imagine his answer as if I already know it. He turns slightly from facing the window, still curled up on the floor behind his desk, looking at me as if he doesn’t trust me. He shouldn’t. Not with how I’m feeling at this moment.
I stop on the opposite side of the desk, my mind racing as I go back years and years. Back to only a boy who lost his mother. Scared, confused … and angry.
“Mom didn’t die from an overdose.” The statement comes out accusatory and it’s meant to. He wipes the blood from his mouth with the bright white sleeve of his dress shirt. He doesn’t look me in the eye, doesn’t acknowledge what I said in the least.
I take one step toward him, a large step that gets his attention. His gaze whips up to me. “Did you have her killed too?”
“How dare you!” His nostrils flare as he pins me with his gaze. “How dare you, you fucking …” he trails off and doesn’t finish. His shoulders are hunched forward as he grips his desk chair for balance to stand.
I’m struck by the powerful way he’s affected. I’ve wondered for so long, months now. If he had Avery killed, maybe he did the same with my mother.
I flex my hand and swallow thickly, feeling the need to explain. My question was prompted by a gut feeling more than anything else. I don’t remember much from around the time she died, but I remember how I felt. How the air between them was tense. How scared my mother was that he would find out her dirty little secret. “I know she was cheating—”
“Get out!” My father shouts at me, not holding anything back as he throws his chair to the side, putting all of his weight into it. It crashes against the bookshelf, several of the books tumbling to the floor as he slams his fists against his desk.
I turn my back on him, my fist pulsing in agony from the punch and my chest hurting with a pain I can’t explain.
He pounds his fists again and again on the maple desk as I force myself to walk away from him.
Leaving my father alone in his office and promising myself never to see him again, never to speak to him, never to trust him. And never to be like him.
Never again.
Julia
I stare down at the neat piles of papers to my right in the dining room. My back is killing me and my shoulders are screaming in pain. It’s so wrong that now that these contracts and files are sorted out, my first thought is to call Mason, to see if he’s free and tell him that I miss him.
God, do I miss him.
He could ease my physical pains, but also that sick lonely feeling I have after going through three years of finances.
Three years of hard evidence of Jace cheating. Three long years compiled in black ink on white pages.
I glance at the email still open on my laptop. Mr. Walker will have more for me tomorrow. It makes my stomach lurch because I know I’ll see more credit card statements for hotel charges during the day when he was supposed to be working, along with charges for jewelry and everything else he bought the women he kept on the side. I don’t need to see it. That’s the messed-up part of it all.
Selling the apartment and being done with it is the last of all the problems and loose ends Jace left.
I’ll be fine financially; everything is going to be okay on that front. But I want to know how long it went on. I want to know at what point in my life I wasn’t good enough for him anymore.
The wine in the glass is almost gone and it’s late, but I pour myself another. We all have our vices and it turns out mine are cabernet and Mason Thatcher. My lips curl into a pathetic weak smile and then I take a sip of the sweet wine.
I stare at the open newspaper on the table. The one with a photograph of Mason and someone else. Someone new. It’s not hard to admit that it hurts to see it, to think that he’s moved on already. It hasn’t even been two weeks since I saw him last. It has their picture but the accompanying article is about me being used by the playboy bachelor and left brokenhearted. They know nothing and I couldn’t care less about what they think happened. What matters is that I am heartbroken.