“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.