Chapter 7 #2
“And if you couldn’t trust him for that little bit of time, what difference does it make? I mean, obviously he wasn’t right for you, and you didn’t really love him, or it wouldn’t have been so easy to snap it apart.”
Gail stared at her mother, then pointed to her front door. “I want you to leave now, please.”
Her mother shook her head. “No, I’m not walking out like that.”
“So much for your agreement when you walked in here. But I guess I can have the police escort you out too. I’ve already been advised to get a restraining order keeping Dad away from here, so I can add your name as well.”
“And if you do anything of the sort”—she laughed—“you will pay for it.”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “It would probably be a good thing if I did. I mean, obviously I’m an asshole of a person too. I don’t deserve to be loved. I don’t deserve anything like that because my family did something so horrible, all the while thinking I would be completely okay with it.”
“And you were,” Mom declared.
“No, I wasn’t. I never knew about it. How could I make a proper decision without being fully informed?”
Mom frowned at that, stared off in the distance for a moment, then shrugged. “He said he told you.”
“Yeah, well, Dad’s a liar, as you well know.
Words of convenience for him,” she snapped.
“But you didn’t care enough to talk to me directly?
Just as you didn’t think it important to tell me about the fact that Debbie lied.
I mean, … it’s taken me a goddamn long time to forgive her for her part in this, but I understood finally because she was so scared of what you and Dad would do to Simon and her. ”
“Well, she’s been cut off from the family wealth because of it,” Mom shared, “and that’s exactly what’ll happen to you if you push this in the wrong direction.”
“Pushing it in the wrong direction? If I thought that I could get Dad arrested for this and have a big public mockery trial and show people exactly who you two are,” Gail vowed, “rest assured I would do it in a heartbeat. Don’t think your money can buy me.”
Her mother looked at her in shock, clutching her pearls.
“Unfortunately I don’t think there’s any tribunal for the assholes in this world,” she declared, staring at her mother.
Her mother’s face hardened, and she declared, “You don’t get to speak to me like that. Everything we’ve ever done has been for you.”
Gail laughed. “I hear that a lot in your words these days. We did everything for you. We love you. Hell no, you two don’t love me.
I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.
To you it means, we just want to control you and to make sure that you do what we think you should do.
I don’t get to make any decisions. I don’t get to have anything nice unless you declare I can have it.
I will only have that which you want me to have.
” Gail smirked at her mother. “No more.”
“Oh, stop it. Marriage isn’t about love.
It’s not about happy-go-lucky emotions and holidays.
It’s not as if you’ll wake up in a year and still want the guy beside you,” Mom explained.
“For God’s sake, it’s a business decision, and the one that you have on the table right now is very much the business decision facing you. ”
“It’s not facing me at all,” she declared. “Peter didn’t even contact me.”
“I told him not to,” her mother admitted. “I shared how you were going through a tough time all of a sudden and to just give you some space.”
“And, of course, he listened to you, right? I mean, it’s not as if he checked in with me to see if you were right about all that.
It’s not as if anybody cared about me. It was all about you.
He didn’t even have the guts to contact me himself,” she declared, staring at her mother.
“What the hell does that say about him?”
“It says that he was smart enough to listen,” she replied immediately.
“That’s why you want him in the family, because you think you can control him. You want him as your son-in-law because of what? Let me think now. It’s a good business move.”
“Of course it’s a good business move,” she stated. “It’s a merger of two highly important companies, and you might want to remember that.”
“No, not particularly,” she argued, staring at her mother. “According to you, in just a year, I won’t like waking up next to Peter either, will I?”
“And it won’t matter by then. Give him a couple of kids, and you’ll be off the hook, and you can do what you want.”
Gail snorted. “Oh my God, sounds like the British aristocrats from a long time ago,” she noted, with a hard glance at her mother. “Is that what you did? Roll over and lie on the bed, stare up at the ceiling while he does his thing so you can have your two kids and be done with it?”
Her mother’s face paled and then turned bright red. “That is uncalled for.”
“Why? Why is it uncalled for? It’s okay for you to say shit like that to me, but it’s not okay for me to say that shit to you? Got it,” she whispered in a lethal tone. “The door’s behind you, Mother. Use it.”
Her mother, her face still half in shock over Gail’s words and at losing the conversation so quickly, didn’t know what to say and just stood there.
Grabbing her mother’s arm, Gail led her to the door, pushed her out, and slammed it shut.
Then she opened it again and repeated, “Don’t call me, and don’t come again without an invitation.
I won’t let you in next time. In fact, I doubt I’ll ever let you in again.
I’m calling off the wedding, and, if I get a chance, I’ll do everything in my power to beg Riley for forgiveness, hoping there’s a chance to gain his trust again.
But you? … And Dad? … Never. I’ll tear down that facade for the whole town to see, for the whole world to see.
Now go. I don’t want to see your face again. ”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Mom wailed urgently, and this time fear filled her voice.
Gail thought about that and asked, “Why is that again? Is it because you’re afraid of Dad and what he might do?
Because that I could see. I mean, the man who was here the other day was not the father I was raised with, but, then again, of course he was.
It’s all about the facade, isn’t it? Making sure everybody sees what you want them to see, and it doesn’t matter about the monster within.
But thanks to you guys, I can see the monsters within very clearly.
” And, with that, she slammed the door once more in her mother’s face.
And just when she thought she could take just a moment to rest and deal with the emotions coursing through her, her phone rang. Peter. She stared at the Caller ID on her phone, then gave a bitter laugh. Maybe this was perfect timing after all.
“Peter,” she snapped into the phone. “We’re done. I don’t want to see you, hear from you, or know anything about you ever again. Do you understand?”
Shocked silence greeted her.
She snorted. “Yeah, I’m really breaking up with you.
Better yet, you can crawl over to my mother like you always do.
A marriage to you would have been a three-way relationship, with her guiding your actions.
Well, you can fuck off. You are a class A asshole, and today is my day for taking out the garbage. You are a part of that.”
“Now that’s not fair,” he protested. “I was listening to your mother. She said you needed space.”
“Bullshit. You listened to yourself, too scared to call me. What a wimp. I am not my mother, but no way I am staying with someone who only thinks of himself. Lose my number—or better yet, find a Dumpster and jump in.”
And, with that, she ended his call, then blocked his number, as well as her parents’ too.
Riley had no sooner gotten off the phone when another call came in. He stared down at it, frowning, not sure he knew the number. He answered it cautiously, then was surprised as Debbie spoke up.
“I know you have no reason to talk to me,” she began, “and, in all this time, I’ve never once contacted you, but I am worried about Gail.”
He straightened as he looked down at Cain at his side. “I don’t know what the problem is, but I doubt it has anything to do with me.”
“It has everything to do with you. Since she had coffee with you, she’s done nothing but blow up her world.”
“Maybe it’s time,” he suggested. “You guys are certainly good at blowing up other people’s worlds. I hope there’s a lesson in there somewhere for your family.”
“I get it. I get that you hate my guts and rightly so. Back then and still today, I deserve absolutely everything that you could possibly throw at me. But what I want you to understand is that, once Gail found out what our father did, she has basically been breaking everything that she possibly can in their world to make them suffer.”
He frowned at that and shrugged. “Again, I’m not sure what you expect me to feel or to do about that. She’s entitled to do whatever the hell she wants when it comes to that shit.”
“Yeah, and I get that you would probably be okay if everything in my family completely blew up, but Gail’s also blowing up her own life, and she’s so full of guilt that I’m seriously worried about her.”
“When you say, worried—”
“Yeah, worried,” she repeated, “as in worried-worried.”
“Are you thinking she’s gonna hurt herself?” he asked in astonishment.
There was a pause before Debbie finally spoke. “I would hope not, but I know that right now she’s busy screaming at our mother, and she’s already had our father escorted out of her apartment building by the police, and her fiancé hasn’t even contacted her, and she’s like, good riddance.”
He snorted at that. “If the fiancé’s smart enough, he’ll just stay the hell away.”
“Peter’s not worth mentioning. What you are not hearing is that Gail needs you. At one point, you guys were head over heels in love.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes things don’t exactly work out so well.”