I used to fool myself into thinking that it was because there was no closure. That I was this angry because she never said a word to me about wanting to leave and, worse, never gave me a chance to fight for us. She was literally here one day and gone the next without explanation. I never got the chance to do anything to hold on to what’s mine.
When I took my vows, I meant for them to last forever. I never would’ve married her otherwise. She was meant to be the one and only Mrs. Calen Addison, the fourth. The divorce papers meant nothing, were no barrier against what I hold dear. The fact that once I put my ring on Giselle’s finger, she was mine and only mine, forever.
I’d spent the past two years being angry at her for walking out on our forever, blaming her for a betrayal that was never her fault. And now that I know the truth, the thought of what she’d been put through right under my nose makes me sick to my stomach. Obviously, we’re going to have to have a talk about trusting her man to protect her from all and sundry, to fight all of her demons for her, including her bitch of a mother.
I have no doubt because of what I’d learned from Gordon that it was her mother who’d sent her scurrying into hiding, and now I know how she’d found her. It hadn’t been hard to fit some of the pieces of the puzzle together once I got a little bit of her history from the older man who was very forthcoming, but there had still been a lot missing.
I’d already figured out that she’d changed her name somehow between the time she’d left the boarding school and when we met and that she’d done it to escape her mother. There didn’t seem to be any other reason for it. She’d been living under her new name for a good five years before we met, so how had her mother found her? That was the one niggling question left on my mind; now I know the answer.
The self-recrimination I’d felt on the way back home after learning all that I had in the last few hours was enough to make me hate myself, especially when I recall my anger at her after the hell she’d most likely been through. As of right now, that anger has been redirected, and now it burns even brighter than before.
I’m going to incinerate down to the ground everyone who had a hand in tampering with my wife and bringing about the destruction of my marriage. Everyone who played a part in robbing me of the first year of my son’s life. I won’t forgive anyone, no matter who or what past association we might share. I’m not sure how Dana convinced herself that I would choose her over my wife and kid. I never gave her the slightest indication that I saw her as anything more than the friend she once was.
I listened to her nonsensical spouting, wondering how the fuck I’d missed the fact that she’s out of her fucking mind. With each word, she came closer and closer to never making it off the estate alive. And when I recalled how she’d been there at my side after Giselle left, offering me comfort and a shoulder to lean on, I imagined snapping her neck like a twig.
I did a very good job of hiding my inner thoughts as I listened and heard what she really thought of my wife for the first time. I was putting together her words with what I’d learned from Gordon and came to realize that she didn’t know much about Ann Winthrop. She only knew that the woman posed a threat to my wife and went with it.
I want to go scorched earth, I want to leave a path of destruction in my wake, starting with this thing standing in front of me, but I keep reminding myself that my family needs me. And besides, I need to know all of it before I make a move. So I can’t throw her ignorant ass out the window, which for all that it was on the first floor was still a good ten feet up from the marble terrace down below.
So I kept my calm and turned back to face her finally. “So, you, under the guise of friendship, found her mother, and what? How did you know they were estranged, or that the mother would do what she did?” I couldn’t bear to look at her, so I kept my gaze trained somewhere above her head.
“It was obvious, wasn’t it? I mean, why else would she go to such lengths to keep her out of her life? Someone like her should’ve been announcing to the world that she was marrying someone like you, but instead, no one but that stupid friend of hers from college was here for the wedding and no one ever saw or heard anything about her family.”