I didn’t think it was possible, but her eyes narrow even more at that. Ethan’s mother definitely doesn’t like being on a first name basis with me. It’s a feeling that is completely mutual. But no way does she get the advantage here. No freaking way.
“It is. Nice to see that you have no problem making yourself at home in my son’s house.”
“Yes, well, he’s a generous guy. And since we’re practically living together anyway …”
“Are you, now?” She looks past me and for the first time I realize I’m still standing in front of the fridge, the door wide open. Damn it. Stupid wine tasting. Faced with this—with her—it doesn’t seem nearly as fun as it did just a few minutes ago. Not when I know I’ll need every last one of my wits about me to deal with her.
I move to close the fridge, but my balance isn’t quite right and I end up stumbling backward with the door, bumping my hip on the handle.
“Good Lord, you’re drunk. And it’s only two-thirty in the afternoon.” For the first time, she doesn’t bother with the mask and simply lets her disgust shine through.
It’s a lot of disgust and I can feel myself wilting under her disdain. The knowledge infuriates me and I straighten my spine. Force myself to maintain eye contact. Keep at bay the memories of that long ago day in the lawyer’s office when she was so icily polite and horrendously rude all at the same time. She has no right to judge me. Not this woman who has done so many truly awful things.
“Look, Vanessa,” I say, forcing myself to put my big girl panties on and deal with the situation at hand instead of lingering in the past that seems to be closing in on me from every side. “Ethan isn’t here right now. But when he gets back, I’ll be sure to let him know you sto—”
“Are you kicking me out of my son’s house?” she interrupts and for the first time I see a flicker of surprise on her overly Botoxed face. It actually looks more like incredulity, but I’ll take what I can get.
“Don’t think of it as me kicking you out. Think of it as me uninviting you until a later date.”
“Oh, Chloe. What makes you think you have the right to uninvite me from anything in my son’s life? Ever?”
Even as recently as a couple of weeks ago, my resolve would have faltered in the face of all that disdain. All that superiority. But that was before I’d faced Ethan’s secrets, before I’d had to learn what I could live with and what I couldn’t. And while I can live with a lot for Ethan, this woman isn’t one of those things—and she never will be.
“Because Ethan’s with me now. And if I don’t want you here, I promise you, you won’t be here.” They’re brave words, though I don’t know how true they actually are. It doesn’t matter, though. Nothing does at this moment but getting her out of here before I lose it completely. I thought I could handle it, thought I could handle her, but already the panic is crawling up the back of my throat. If I was sober I could do this. But drunk, I’m no match for her and I’m smart enough to know it.
Amazingly, my little display of bravado works. I can tell that I’ve scored by the way her shoulders straighten and the way her spine gets even more stiff. Well, that and the way her lips twist together like she’s been sucking on a particularly sour lemon.
“You don’t actually think I’m going to let you get your hooks into another one of my sons, do you?”
“My hooks?” It’s my turn to stare at her incredulously. “I’m not a fisherman. And for the record, I never had my hooks—or anything else of mine—into Brandon.”
“But you don’t deny that you have them in Ethan.”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way, Vanessa.” She almost flinches at my use of her given name this time and it gives me an unspeakable amount of joy. “Ethan and I are together and we’re going to stay together.”
“I know you’re playing for keeps this time, but let me assure you, Chloe, my son will never marry the likes of you. You may think that you’re going to end up with access to all of his money and property, but I can promise you that that’s never going to happen.”
I don’t want access to his money, never have, never will. But I don’t feel like telling her that. Besides, it’s not like she’ll believe me. The tabloids might call me a gold digger, but Vanessa Frost Jacobs has trophy wife written all over her too-smooth baby face.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what I have access to in six months,” I tell her smoothly. “And what you no longer have access to.” It’s a bluff, pure and simple, but there must be something in my demeanor that convinces her because the cool façade crumbles right in front of my eyes. What’s left is a fire-breathing dragon that I’m not sure won’t go for my eyes at the first opportunity.
“How much?” she asks after several interminable seconds drag by.
“For what?”
“You know very well for what.”
“I don’t, actually. You’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
Her jaw clenches and unclenches then, much like Ethan’s does when he’s annoyed with me. Or worried. I don’t like knowing that about her, don’t like anything that connects her to him at all. Somehow it makes all of this just seem all the more real.
“Very well, then. How much is my son going to have to pay to get rid of you this time?”
“Your son? This time?” I ask, confused by her wording. “I don’t want a penny from Brandon. I never have.”
“We’re not talking about Brandon.” I see it then, the triumph in her eyes. And for the first time, I realize that I haven’t been holding my own against her at all. She’s just been drawing me in, playing with me, like a spider with a fly, and now I’m caught in her web just as she always intended. “We’re talking about Ethan.”
And though I know it’s a bad idea, though every instinct I have is screaming at me to walk away, to not fall into the trap, I can’t help myself. Can’t stop myself from clarifying even though I know no good will come of it. “I’ve never taken a cent from Ethan and I never will.”
She laughs then, actually laughs. “Some might call you naïve, but I prefer to call things like they are. You’re stupid, Chloe. Stupid and ignorant and weak. If you weren’t so determined to land one of my sons, I might even feel bad for you. But you are and I don’t.”
She crosses the kitchen then, until her bloodless, smiling face is only a few inches from mine. And that’s when she says it. That’s when she blows my whole world apart.
“Five years ago, Brandon’s father was in the middle of a cash crunch. It happens sometimes, when most of your wealth is tied up in real estate and industry. Be that as it may, we didn’t have three million dollars to spend on a little slut who thought it would be a good idea to accuse our son of rape.”
I’m not a slut. The words are right there, on my tongue, but instinct has me holding them back. Has me keeping quiet because I know something worse is coming. Something terrible.
“That’s when we turned to my genius son from my first marriage. Ethan had just patented blueprints for a couple of very important biomedical machines and then sold them to established companies for enough capital to start Frost Industries. His baby brother had a problem that we needed cash to make disappear. He had the ready cash at his disposal. Do you need a road map, dear, or are you finally clueing in?”
Oh, I’m clueing in, all right. The money that bought my silence. The money that bought my parents out of institutional poverty and my brother into his lab. The money that took my soul and with it, my will to live. It hadn’t come from Brandon’s parents at all. It had come from his brother.
It had come from Ethan.
Chapter Twenty-two
“Well,” Vanessa says after several long seconds. “It appears you aren’t quite as stupid as I thought you were. You’re at least capable of putting the puzzle pieces together.”
I nearly laugh at her wording, at the mere idea that I could put a puzzle—any puzzle—together. I, who have spent the last five years trying to put myself back together only to
fall apart every damn time.
I thought this time was the charm. I thought, after finding out about Brandon’s connection with Ethan, after breaking up with Ethan and then getting back together with him, after finally accepting what had happened to me and moving past it, I thought after all that, I had finally figured things out. Thought I had finally found a way to put the pieces of myself back together again. By combining them with Ethan’s. By making something new and dazzling and whole out of the remnants of the past.
It should have worked. It really should have worked.
Except it turns out, it was all an illusion brought on by one indisputable fact. I can’t be fixed. I can’t be made unbroken. Not then. Not now. Not ever. I’m as jumbled of a mess as I ever was, the pieces of me too cracked and torn up and jagged to ever, ever, ever fit together again.
I don’t know how I could ever have thought differently—even for a moment. Or how I could have believed that Ethan—Ethan—would be the one to help me hold the pieces together. Not when, at every turn, I find out another way he’s been the one tearing me apart.
A laugh wells up inside me, loud and powerful and real. It batters against me from the inside, strikes out at me with clenched fists and sharpened claws, desperate to get out.
Desperate to be free.
I hold it in with sheer will alone. Sheer will and fear, because I know—I know—that once I start laughing, I’ll never stop. The edges of madness that I’ve been skating around for so long are right there, beckoning for me to step over the edge into oblivion. And if I do, this time if I do, I’m smart enough to know I’ll never find my way back.
And yet, there’s a part of me that wants that. That wants to let go and give up. That wants to stop fighting, stop trying, stop trusting, because it hurts too goddamned much. It rips you open, tears you up, leaves you bleeding out from a wound you never saw coming until it’s far too late to stop it.
Far too late to save yourself.
That’s me, now. Ripped open. Bleeding. Unsalvageable.
And then there’s Ethan. Beautiful, brilliant, duplicitous Ethan. My obsession. My addiction. Until this moment, my everything.
But not anymore. Not now. Not ever again.
The knowledge grounds me, helps keep the pain at bay. At least until my phone starts buzzing, letting me know I have a text. I don’t need to look at the screen to know it’s from Ethan. Just like the one that comes in next. And the one after that. And the one after that.
Suddenly I can’t handle it. Can’t stand this connection between us, no matter how tenuous, for one second more. I yank my phone out of my back pocket, carry it over to the garbage disposal. Drop it in. And then turn the thing on.
Like everything else in this kitchen, the garbage disposal is heavy duty, industrial grade. Though it makes a terrible noise, it only takes seconds for it to break my phone to pieces. To break it down to its most basic, rudimentary form.
Like me. Always like me.
I pause at the thought, at the knowledge that every broken thing has something in common with another broken thing. Here, now, I am that broken thing, the pieces of me as ill-equipped to deal with my environment as the remnants of my phone now are to deal with theirs.
Ethan’s mom watches the drama and its aftermath with raised brows and pursed lips and a hint of glee in the depth of her eyes. Just a hint. It’s enough to make me stop, enough to make me stand perfectly still in the middle of the kitchen and pretend for a moment that my world hasn’t come crashing down around my ears.
She waits it out, trying to decide—I think—what crazy stunt I’m going to pull next. When I give her nothing, when I hold myself together with a very short shoestring and an even shorter prayer, she shrugs, seems to give up. And then she’s shaking her head, walking out of the kitchen. “Stupid, ignorant, pathetic girl,” she says as she heads down the hall. “You never even stood a chance.”
I should probably be offended, but I’m not. Because she’s right. I didn’t. The odds were stacked against me from the very beginning and I never even had a clue. I almost leave. I almost pack my one, measly pathetic bag and walk out of Ethan’s house, and his life, forever. I could do it. I should do it. There’s enough cash on Ethan’s dresser to pay for a cab to the airport. And if I feel icky about taking that—which I tell myself I don’t, but it’s just another lie—there’s always Rodrigo and Lucia. If I ask them for a ride, I’m positive they’ll take me.
I almost do it. I plan on doing it. I walk out of the house and even make it halfway down the hill to the wine-making barns where Rodrigo normally works, when I can’t go any farther.
I’m stuck, filled with a crippling sense of sadness and an even more crippling sense of what could have been. What should have been if this was a different life, if I was a different person, if Ethan … if Ethan wasn’t such a goddamn fucking liar.
It kills me that I can’t leave. Kills me that I still care, that I can’t treat him as callously as he’s treated me over and over and over again.
Oh, I know there’s a lot of good in him. Just like I know he’s treated me right in almost every way a man can treat a woman. But the ways that he’s treated me wrong—the ways he’s been wrong—they’re just too big. Just too much. I can’t live like this, knowing what he’s done. And I sure as hell can’t stick around and wait for the other shoe to drop. I already feel like a whole store filled with steel-toed boots has fallen on me. I’m not waiting around to see what else falls down. I may be stupid and naive, but nobody ever said I was a masochist.
And yet, here I sit on the family room couch watching the second hand spin the clock around. Watching the minute hand creep farther and farther around the face of the clock, until it, too, spins itself around. There’s a startling feeling of déjà vu, of having done this before.
Because I have. Less than a week ago. I waited and watched, watched and waited, as Ethan wined and dined clients of some sort. Today, I’m doing the same thing—only this time, there’s no hope left inside me. No fear that things won’t turn out all right. Because I already know they won’t, already know it’s over. I just need to give Ethan the courtesy of saying so face-to-face.
Finally, after what feels like days but is really a little less than two hours, the front door opens and shuts. “Chloe!” It’s Ethan, back from wherever he was. Ethan, calling my name like a crazy man as he comes charging through the house. “Chloe!”
Again, déjà vu.
“I’m right here,” I tell him from my spot in the shadows.
“Thank God. When you didn’t answer the texts I sent you and then didn’t pick up the phone, I thought something had happened to you.”
Oh, something happened to me all right. But I’m not ready to share it with him yet. There’s a part of me that wonders if I’ll ever be ready or if I’ll just tell him off and then walk away without ever letting him know that I know.
Except, it turns out, I don’t have that kind of restraint. The first words out of my mouth are, “Your mother stopped by.”
“My mother?” He looks at me like I’m crazy. “My mother lives in Boston.”
“Be that as it may, she was here about two hours ago.”
“Was here? As in not here now? She left without seeing me?”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure she did what she came to do.”
I can see the moment he figures it out, the moment he realizes just what went down here when he was out doing God knows what.
“Chloe.”
I can’t even look at him. All those minutes wasted waiting for him, planning what I was going to say and how I was going to say it, and I can’t even look at him. Can’t even open my mouth.
“Chloe, baby, please, it’s not like it seems.”
“Oh, yeah?” The anger breaks through and I finally manage to get some words out. They aren’t much, but they’re better than nothing. “Please, feel free, tell me all the ways it’s not like it seems. Because the way it seems is pretty goddamn awful, Ethan. I
’m just telling you that. I just want you to know. It seems pretty goddamn awful from where I’m sitting.”
“It is. I know it is, baby,” he tells me, dropping onto his knees in front of me. I’m still sitting on the couch, so we’re pretty much eye to eye, but it still feels weird to have him kneeling in front of me. Ethan’s never been the type to kneel for anyone and the fact that he’s doing it here, now … I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it means anything. But it throws me just a little more than I already am.
“I have no excuse for what I did,” he tells me frantically. “No excuse for the part I played in hurting you. If I could go back and do it over, I would in a second. In a heartbeat.”
“Why did you do it? Why did you give them the money? You didn’t know me then, but no girl deserves to be treated like—” My voice breaks and I don’t even try to continue. He doesn’t need me to say it. He knows.
He knows.
“My mother told me your father was blackmailing them. That he was a con artist and he’d set his sights on them and was using you to extort the money.”
“And you just believed them? How is that possible? You’re a brilliant guy. How could you just take their word for it, especially considering what a douche your brother really is? How could you just decide that they were telling the truth and I was lying?”
“Because I didn’t trust them at first. Because I did research. Because I found out your father really was a con artist. That he really did spend his life bilking money out of people he considered his marks. And that you were just another tool for him. Just another way to get that money.”
“You thought I was like him. You thought that made it okay.”
“I thought it was okay because I thought you were lying. I thought you were accusing Brandon of something he didn’t do.”
“You threw me under the bus.”
“I did. Yes. And I’m so sorry for it. I’m so sorry. I believed them because I wanted to. Because he was my little brother and I couldn’t imagine, couldn’t believe, that he would do something like that.”