Chapter 13
Violet
I wanted to die.
“Did you hear me?” My eyes shifted to my father’s as he spoke so softly I almost missed the question. I shook my head, despite having heard him the first time.
“He was served this morning. His parents are with him.”
“What…?” I couldn’t get the rest out. I choked on the words. “What did he say?”
“Honey, what could he say? Ridge is as broken up about this as you are. You already know that bitch drugged him, got him drunk on purpose. Raped him,” Dad choked on that last bit and adjusted his collar as if the clothing represented the trapped feeling that word did.
“But he was there with her. He chose to be there, Dad. My husband believed the worst in me and his best friend. That was after he failed to tell me about Fiona’s offer of sex a whole year before. We had the rule in place exactly so something like this could never happen.”
“As much as I want to agree with you, people make mistakes, honey. Ridge’s father genuinely believes his boy thought it was a one-off joke and that’s why he didn’t act.”
“Yeah?” I questioned as the anger I had pushed down in favor of grief finally boiled over and bled into my voice making its way past the crippling sadness. “How did that joke turn out for everyone? For me?”
“I am behind you. Whatever you decide, but I don’t want you to act in haste and then regret your choice.
It hasn’t even been a full month yet. You have three weeks to go before a judge will even hear your case.
Are you sure you want to go through with this?
If he signs those papers, thinking it’s what you want, your marriage may very well come to an end, sweetheart. ”
“My marriage ended last year when he chose to keep Fiona’s confidence rather than honor our agreement. I just didn’t know it until now.”
Dad pulled me into his strong arms and held onto me so tightly, it felt like he might be able to push all my shattered pieces back together. The feeling only lasted a moment and then he leaned back to pull his cell phone free of his pocket.
“Your mom is having a difficult time with your brother right now.”
“I’m sorry. She mentioned that he’s acting out because he saw his hero in the worst light.”
My dad offered up a dubious look that said I was both right and wrong all at once.
I knew he was having trouble with what Ridge had done, but even in my state of falling apart, I understood that my brother was angry with me, too.
He had overheard enough to know that Ridge had been drugged and thought I was being a bitch for not being there for my husband.
Drake wasn’t wrong in thinking I was an asshole for not stepping up and standing by my man through that.
I felt guilty as hell. Ridge was raped. There was no way to pretty-up those words.
That’s what Fiona had done when she offered him drugged liquor and took advantage once he was too out of it to stop her.
It left me with an awful feeling in my gut.
There was the part of me that wanted to wrap my arms around my husband and tell him that everything would be okay.
I truly did. Then there was the other part who couldn’t get past the fact that none of it had to happen.
If he had held true to the promise he made me, that woman would have been out of the company last year.
She would have never had access to our lives, to him, and wouldn’t have been able to turn him into a victim.
Doubt crept in as I sat there thinking about how everything played out.
My dad was right. I should probably have waited to make the decisions I did.
They were all done from a knee-jerk reaction.
I was hurt, betrayed, and angry. There were so many levels to what happened that it felt like my head was spinning every time I pulled at a different thread.
Ridge thought I was cheating on him. My husband lacked faith in me after he lied to me for a year about his assistant not being a problem.
Everything that resulted from that shattered my trust in him.
I didn’t think there was a way to get that back.
Everything we had done, planned, and been through felt tainted.
How many other times had things like that happened?
Maybe not with his direct staff, but some of the artists he had to work with.
What if there were more high-profile versions of Fiona waiting in the wings to do the same thing?
What if they were staged just right, so they didn’t even have to go to the lengths his assistant did?
It wouldn’t take much to set him up now that it had already become a thing.
It would make our lives that much harder at a time when I couldn’t trust him to tell me the truth.
I didn’t want to live in a relationship where I would always wonder who would blindside me next.
And the one thing I kept going back to was that instead of talking to me when he started to question my loyalty, he went to her. He confided in her.
My husband chose to keep Fiona’s secret from me.
Everyone, my brother being at the top of the list, was so focused on the sex act.
They all thought that was what I was spun up about.
It wasn’t. I was angry on my husband’s behalf about that.
I was sick to death that something like that could happen to him.
I want to chop every part of her body that touched his without permission and stuff it into a meat grinder and then make her eat it.
I have never been a violent person, but that was how I felt about Fiona.
She was the worst kind of human, and she should be held accountable for what she did.
Her actions were not at the heart of why I filed those divorce papers, though.
Ridge chose to keep her secret. He chose to believe the worst in Moreland and me.
He chose to go to her when everything in his life seemed off kilter.
It wasn’t his wife he ran to. He didn’t ask me questions or try to get to the bottom of things.
Sure, he had made some off-handed comments, but we didn’t sit down and have a real conversation.
I would have given up the idea of a surprise party if he’d come to me with true concerns about where I’d been and with whom.
He didn’t, though. He chose to get drunk with her.
To have cake with her. To celebrate and commiserate with her.
All of that happened before she took advantage, and that was what I couldn’t wrap my head around.
Those were the reasons I filed for divorce.
I loved my husband with all my heart, and it was tearing me apart from the inside out to think of a life where we weren’t married and living happily ever after together.
I didn’t know how to stuff all those threads back into the box anymore.
It was like once they fell out, they grew in size and no longer fit.
How was I supposed to move forward and forget that those threads existed for that woman to tug on long before she pulled the final one and unraveled everything?