Chapter 14 #3
Luca sat back in her seat. When she let herself sag like that, she was so…
feminine. Gone was the illusion of her long, broad shoulders and the elegant lines of her legs.
She was just another woman confessing her sins in Manhattan.
We’ve all been there. Sarah picked at more garlic bread crust. Luca wasn’t interested.
She only continued to stare at the liquor on the table.
It was a solemn stare.
“Long story short, Jill got pregnant by one of her boyfriends. He ditched as soon as she told him. The way I imagined strangling him.”
Sarah kept her mouth shut.
“I loved Jill. I would have done anything for her, the fool that I was. If you ask Danica, she’ll tell you I was the most insufferable lovesick fool at Princeton.
What’s sad is that she didn’t even go there anymore.
She was doing grad school in Britain, and I had decided to stay at Princeton.
But she visited often enough to see how I had changed.
She was also the first person I told when Jill announced she was pregnant.
She told me to break up with her, because when you’re heiresses like us, you can’t get away with that kind of drama in your twenties. ”
“Only in your sixties, right?”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking when I said that.”
What was with this woman and all the apologizing? Luca said sorry more than anyone under the Moreaus’ employ. “So, you married her.”
“Or offered to pay for… you know.” Luca was suddenly incapable of eye contact.
“But when she told me she intended to keep the baby, I planned a celebratory getaway and proposed to her. She was shocked, of course. Didn’t think I would do something like that.
” Luca thrust her head back against the leather lounge chair she occupied, a guttural sound clogging her throat.
“She figured out then and there that I was the one obsessed with her. I would give her anything. My heart, my soul… all my family’s money.
For a kid that wasn’t even medically mine. ”
“You must have been attracted to settling down, even in your mid-twenties.”
“Hm. Well, we got married three months later. I finally bested Danica at something, and it was having the biggest pregnant bride at my wedding.”
“She’s gotten bigger since then.”
“My ex has become skinnier.” Luca shrugged.
“Wish I could say that we got married and gradually fell out of love from there, what with my career taking me back and forth between two, sometimes three countries, and suddenly having a kid to adopt and take care of, but things didn’t go quite that smoothly. ”
Her voice quieted. Sarah shifted uncomfortably in her seat, as if Luca were about to tell her about wicked conspiracies.
Close.
“I had always known that Jill is… ill. She’s not well, let’s put it that way.
Part of the reason she visited her grandfather so often was because of her own tumultuous past. She was mercilessly bullied at her boarding school growing up.
Said it started because she was late to develop, and from there it spiraled until she was the class whipping girl. She coped by drinking.”
“I see.”
“She was in recovery from a lot of things when I met her. Her grandfather paid for her treatments since he was the one who paid for the boarding school and felt responsible for her trauma. He was a good man. I was upset when he died a year ago. Anyway…” Luca continued to search for more bourbon in her glass.
She would have to order another, but that required summoning a server, and she was too deep in her personal story to bother.
“I don’t know what triggered it. Might have been motherhood, or the fact that I wasn’t around that often.
All I know is that one night I came back and she was in the middle of a bender. ”
Kind of ironic to be talking about this while they drank alcohol, but here they were, and Sarah seriously considered getting drunk to deal with it.
“I put up with it for two years. Two years too long, Danica said. She had the misfortune of coming over to our place in Copenhagen and seeing how bad Jill had become. Our son wasn’t even being looked after by her anymore. Sonia moved over to Denmark to take care of things.”
“That’s messed up.”
“But you know what? Because I was an idiot and still in love with her, I tried everything. I hired the best doctors, tried to get her to go to the best programs. I wanted her sober for Victor’s sake.
And for mine, of course, but by then I was realizing that our marriage was over.
We would never be able to recover from it, because during one of her benders, she cheated on me with a rival family’s oldest son.
It was a giant fuck you to me and my family.
When I confronted her, she called me the most vicious names.
Claimed I had done things I never did. Threatened to take my son to a place where I would never see him again.
Then she had the gall to say that she had gotten pregnant on purpose.
Just stopped taking her birth control, because her grandfather had gone into debt paying for her life, and she needed to make sure her family got money.
You see, the guy who knocked her up wasn’t as rich as me, but he grew up adjacent to some Kennedy branch.
She wanted to baby trap him, but he didn’t take the bait.
Instead, there I was, a fucking idiot who couldn’t stand the thought of being without her, even if marrying her was the dumbest thing I could have done.
And she took advantage of it. Maybe she felt her demons coming back and wanted to seal the deal before anyone found out the truth. ”
“That she was an alcoholic?”
“Among other things. I don’t know how much of it was her trauma and how much was her actual personality, but the more she drank, the more violent she became. I finally left her after she attacked me during one of her rages.”
“Jesus.”
“I took Victor with me. I couldn’t stand to think what she would do to our son, because that’s how I will always think of him.
He’s a baby, for God’s sake. Not that any child should have to deal with that, but one as small and helpless as that?
I didn’t want to think about what she could do to him, or what I could do to her if she ever did lay a hand on him. ”
Sarah didn’t want to imagine that, either. I’ve seen people in that protective mode. Nigel had done unspeakable things in the name of his sister’s safety. What was a woman capable of when it came to her own child? “Obviously, she cleaned up if she’s living here with your son.”
“Yeah. That.” Sarah could flash her some tits, and Luca still wouldn’t be cheered up after sharing a story like that.
“I filed for divorce. Part of the reason it took us so long to finalize the damn thing was because of custody. I was willing to give her whatever money she wanted, but I demanded full custody. My lawyers blew hers out of the courtroom, but by that time, she had gone through rehab again and sobered up. Even I was almost moved when she claimed to be a changed woman who needed her son to stay on the right path. Since Victor is so young and we lived in different countries, the judge decided to give her custody with the most ridiculous visitation rights you’ve ever seen for me. ”
“Hardly seems fair.”
Luca thought she was being sarcastic, but Sarah meant every word.
Luca probably didn’t have evidence of her wife’s rages and the possible danger to their child.
She was a woman who traveled all around the world for business, and Jill was a stay-at-home woman who hinged her recovery on taking care of her son. Good grief.
“I’ve borne it for the past year. Made sure they were well taken care of.
I hold no animosity toward her family, and I don’t hold much against Jill, either.
She’s stayed sober so far, but what if she slips again?
Besides, Victor is going to be old enough for school soon, and quite frankly, I want him in Denmark.
Unless I can convince my wife’s family to move back to Copenhagen, however, I have no choice but to fight for custody again. ”
Sarah could be as discerning as Ms. Blackbourne. “That’s why you’re here. Working with Ms. Moreau is a convenient cover.”
“Danica’s doing me a favor. She doesn’t need my help or expertise.
Nor do I need to ignore other business matters back in Europe.
But I need to be here to build a case. I need to be near my son.
When we end up back in a courtroom, I need him to be able to say that he knows me and loves me.
I can’t do that if I’m in the middle of Europe most of the time. ”
Sarah let out a low whistle. “Good luck with that. Seriously.”
They were quiet for a few minutes. Luca ordered another round of drinks and pondered her life in the bottom of her bourbon glass.
Sarah combed her flattened hair with her fingers and wondered what she would do if she were in Luca’s shoes.
Guess I’ll never know, will I? The thought forced her brows to furrow.
Life was such bullshit.
Luca reached across the table and lightly placed a hand on hers. A friendly gesture. Nothing more. “You’re not the only one trying to make sense of things. Forgive me for thinking that dating you might be a nice reprieve from everything going on in my life.”
Was that an honest apology? Because Sarah had been thinking the same thing. “Sorry for using you as an escape to empower myself.” Now she couldn’t say something like that. Oh, well.
“I’m sincerely sorry for snooping where my nose didn’t belong. I honestly didn’t think I would uncover what I did about you.”
“You mean the affair I had with my boss’s father and getting knocked up with his baby?”
“And the other stuff that happened after that.”
“Yeah, well…” God, what should she say? “Shit fucks you up.”
“I’m still missing quite a few details, of course. Not that I need you to tell me them.”