“Then I’m sorry for you, because I could never love anyone I didn’t trust and I do not trust you.”
Even as he spoke he felt a shaft of pain as a shadow of longing died deep inside. He released the lock on the elevator and the doors opened. As she walked away, he gritted his teeth and forced himself to hit the button that would close the doors and shoot him skyward to his office, to where she still lingered even though he’d ordered her things removed and her desk cleared.
It was over—the damage had been done. Which left one last task on his list.
Josh tossed the morning newspaper onto his breakfast table in disgust. Couldn’t they find anything better to report in the lead-up to Christmas? Did speculation about the consul appointment to Guildara really warrant such intense coverage?
Really, he didn’t know why he was so at odds. The media coverage was heightening interest. Interest that would fly off the Richter scale when he exposed the prime candidate for the kind of man he really was.
He stalked through to the living room and snatched his mother’s chest off the bookcase. He flipped it open; he hadn’t bothered to lock it again. What was the point? It was as if by locking it he could keep what had happened shut away inside, allowing it to fester and grow.
But the time had come to let it go. To use what was there and finally achieve some form of recompense for his mother’s hardship, and her early death. Today was the day he’d planned to release the letters to the media. He’d have bet his entire fortune on the fact they’d be falling over one another to decry the man they feted now.
He should just send the letters to the national newspaper and be done with it. Then he could just sit back and anticipate Bruce Palmer’s very public downfall with a deep satisfaction. Yet somehow, the satisfaction in what he knew would be the ultimate outcome was lacking. Against his will, Callie’s words to him echoed in his mind.
Promise me you’ll read the letters again. Really read them this time.
Unable to ignore the compulsion any longer, he carefully lifted the first of the less seriously damaged envelopes he’d retrieved and, after setting the box back on the shelf, gingerly slid the letter out from inside.
He dropped down into an easy chair and unfolded the charred sheet of paper, his fingers blackening as they held its damaged edges. His eyes roamed over the words. Words of love from a married man to his mother. Words that promised the earth, together with an undying love.
Josh finished the letter and reached for the next.
Ten minutes later his eyes burned as he read the second to last letter in the box. He was suffering eye-strain, that’s all it was, he told himself. But deep down he knew he couldn’t lie to himself anymore. With the maturity of his years and without the rawness of teen grief, he’d read the letters in a new light.
With each one his anger had lessened a degree. His bitterness paled. There were nuances in the letters he’d totally missed the first time he’d read them. Nuances that spoke volumes as to how miserable and unhappy Bruce had been in his marriage to Irene.
They weren’t the words of a man to a woman he saw as a casual fling. Every letter he’d addressed “To my dearest, Suzanne” and he’d signed off “Yours forever, Bruce.” While the rest of her life had undoubtedly been hard, his mother had genuinely known love. For that alone, Josh could find a glimmer of gratefulness.
Had Bruce Palmer really planned to leave his wife, as he’d promised? To make a new life with Josh’s mother? It had certainly appeared to be so. But what had happened to kill that? To have him send her away so callously?
Josh set down the letter he’d been reading and reached inside the box for the final envelope. He extracted the typewritten note on an early version of Palmer Enterprises letterhead and the company cheque that his mother had never deposited.
How had Bruce gone from a man devotedly in love to the cold, calculating creature who had sent this letter and cheque? Telling Suzanne to leave and to never show her face again. It just didn’t make sense, but it had made enough sense to his mother that she’d packed her bags and checked out of the boardinghouse where she’d stayed in Auckland, and seen her catch the first bus south.
He stared blankly at the now rusty staple that still attached the cheque to the letter and idly flipped the paper to look again at the sum of money Bruce Palmer had thought worth getting rid of his mistress forever. A paltry sum in today’s terms, but it would have made a difference for his mother back then.
It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. Suzanne was dead and no amount of revenge would bring her back.
Josh went to scoop the letters up and put them back in the box, but something stilled his hand. A niggle in the back of his mind that wouldn’t let go.