Chapter Twenty-Four Derek #2
“Derek, honey.” My mother’s deep, velvety voice called across her foyer.
“I’ve been worried about you.” She wrapped her arms around me before holding me away from her so she could inspect me for damage.
“Bags under your eyes, skin and bones.” She bent over to greet Tora with a pat on the head before beckoning us toward her sitting room.
Three days had passed since my phone call with CJ.
Two days had passed since I received the phone call from my mother asking to see me and letting me know that my older brother had given her the full rundown of the past three months of my life.
They were details that I’d intentionally kept from her because I thought telling her about Jasmine Morgan would dredge up painful memories for her, but it turns out that I wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.
“You know I’m always happy to see you, but I’ve been dreading this visit.
” She settled into a large armchair. “Christopher told me happened at MasonCorp and that you’ve been flitting all over the world to avoid your difficulties.
You are so much like your father.” She sighed, and my head snapped to attention.
“How am I like Dad?”
“I didn’t mean it in a derogatory way, sweetheart. Your father just has a tendency to run from his problems instead of facing them head-on”—she shrugged—“until he has no choice.”
“Ma, I need to know what happened between you and Dad and the Morgans.”
“I’d always hoped I could shield you boys from this, but when I learned that you and Jasmine had reconnected, I knew I’d have to talk about this eventually.
“Your father was having an affair,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if she were telling me the weather.
“Dad was having an affair with Celine Morgan,” I said causing my mother to turn to me in slight shock. “CJ told me.”
“I think I’m gonna need a cocktail if I’m gonna tell the rest of this story.” She pressed a button on the intercom next to her chair. A voice crackled back, and Mom responded ordering a martini for herself, a whiskey neat for me, and a bowl of ice water for Tora.
“I met your father when we were studying abroad in Barbados. The only thing we studied was each other… Grow up, sweetheart,” she added upon seeing my expression.
“We didn’t have an all-consuming love affair and we certainly weren’t soulmates, but we had something better; we had friendship.
We returned to the US, and a few weeks later, I discovered I was pregnant with Christopher, so we got married.
“Your dad was a great husband and father, and we had a really good life. I was pregnant with you the first time he introduced me to Celine and Jasper. My instinct always told me that something was off about her friendship with your father, but I ignored it. Celine and Jasper were completely in love and trying desperately for a child. Maybe that’s what endeared her to me.
“The three of them got the idea to start a real estate firm. I was never what you would call a career girl, but what I did have was capital. I convinced my father to let me use a part of my trust fund for an investment, and the Morgan Carter Group was born.
“The next twenty years were good. The business thrived. Little Jasmine came along. Your father and I got closer.”
“So what happened?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure when it started.
I began to notice cracks in Celine and Jasper’s relationship when Jasmine was about six or seven.
They’d been trying for years to have another child.
Celine had suffered a number of miscarriages and invasive procedures.
Things got progressively worse over the next few years until their issues began to trickle into my marriage.
It started with small inconsistencies until they became hard to ignore.
I hired a private investigator who caught them in the act, and I filed for divorce. ”
“But the company?”
“The company was started with my money. I wanted a clean break. Jasper and Celine reconciled, but they wanted to cut all ties with Christopher. The only thing that made sense was to dissolve the company.”
I was reeling from this information. All these years, I’d built up this narrative based on rumors and lies.
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“Because we wanted to protect you.”
“Protect me from what? Chris was twenty-five. I was twenty-one. We were adults.”
“Yes, you were adults, but you were still my children. Sparing you from pain was, and will always be, my first and only concern.”
“So cutting us off from people we’d grown up with with no explanation and letting us believe all the rumors was sparing us pain?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, Derek. I dealt with this whole”—she waved her hand dismissively—“situation the best way I knew how. It was handled quickly and quietly, and everyone got on with their lives.”
“How can you say that?” I asked incredulously. “It tore our family apart. Not just me, you, Dad, and Chris. Jasmine was our family, too.”
“You are directing your anger at the wrong person. I loved that girl, but I did not tear our family apart. Your father and Celine Morgan did that. Talk to them.”
I knew what I had to do as soon as my mother said it, but I was dreading it. Calling Chris for advice would have been my next move, but I was afraid he’d talk me out of it.
Our parents seemed to have the perfect marriage, and then in the blink of an eye, it was over with no explanation.
I knew I’d spent my adult years avoiding commitment as a result of the divorce and, though he denied it, I suspected CJ had done the same thing.
I wondered how he’d felt when he learned the truth.
Now wasn’t the time to ask him. I couldn’t handle one more emotional crisis.
I needed all the strength I had, plus four fingers of Jameson, to make the call I never thought I would.
The phone rang three times. I was about to end the call without leaving a voicemail when I heard a voice I hadn’t heard in years.
“Derek?”
“Hello, Dad.”
The true reason for my call was too jarring to open with so we spent the first ten minutes of the call trying to catch up on the past few years in the most superficial way.
Every sentence was devoid of substance, and every forced chuckle reinforced how fractured our relationship had become.
This man had been my hero, the person I’d looked to for guidance.
He could do no wrong, until he tore our family apart with no explanation before allowing himself to disappear from our lives.
“I spoke to Mom today.” I was tired of the meaningless small talk. “She told me the real reason for your divorce.”
“She did, huh?”
“How could you do it?” The whiskey wasn’t fueling my anger—I had more than enough before I’d picked up the phone—but it was definitely loosening my tongue. “We were a family. Mom loved you.”
“I loved your mother, too,” he said in a low voice. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Then make me understand. What about Jasper? He was your best friend.”
“I was in love with Celine before she met Jasper,” he shouted, leaving me stunned. “I’d been in love with her for over thirty years.”
A heavy silence passed between us, and I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m not proud of what Celine and I did. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, but until you’ve loved someone with every cell in your body, you won’t understand.”
Unfortunately, I did understand. That was exactly how I felt about Jasmine, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
No matter how much I loved Jasmine, I could never do what my father had done.
He tore apart two families for a teenage crush.
For a split second, I imagined Jasmine married to someone else, raising another man’s child.
The thought made my chest tighten, but I couldn’t excuse my father’s behavior.
“That’s no excuse.”
“I know that. I tried to move on. I left the country. I met one of the most beautiful, intelligent, and funny women in the world, and I married her. My life was perfect.
“Then Jasper reached out to me through some alumni group, and we had drinks. It was like we were in Princeton again. I loved Jasper as much as I loved Celine. We were like brothers. I missed him. I thought I was over her, but I was wrong.
“Fifteen years went by. Things were fine. I knew my feelings hadn’t completely gone away, but I was older and wiser. I thought I was stronger, until one night I wasn’t. One night became two, and before we realized it, two years had gone by.
“Two years?” I scoffed. “This went on for two years?”
“Once I started lying to myself, it became easier and easier to lie to everyone else. Celine wanted to end it. She wanted to rededicate herself to her marriage. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t want our affair to end, but she was right.
I had my chance, but I missed it. It wasn’t just about us anymore.
We had families and the business.” He heaved a deep sigh.
“None of that mattered, because your mother discovered what we were doing. You know the rest.”
My anger hadn’t abated. If anything, I was more angry. I was still angry at my father for what he did, but now I was also angry at myself because I understood why he did it.
“What do you regret more,” I asked, “not telling Celine how you felt when you were kids or waiting until you’d built a family with someone else to do it?”
Another long silence passed between us before he answered.
“Derek, I don’t even know how to answer that question.
I still think about what my life with Celine could’ve been, but hurting your mother and you boys was the worst thing I could’ve done.
I just don’t know if presented the chance again…
I don’t know if I would have done anything differently.
Like I said, unless you’ve loved someone like that, you wouldn’t understand. ”
I didn’t know how I expected to feel after learning the truth about my family’s rift with the Morgans.
Maybe I thought if I learned that Jasper and Celine Morgan were deceitful monsters who stole money and defrauded the company that I would feel better about my breakup with Jasmine.
Instead, I felt like an idiot. My parents’ marriage ended for the same reason a million other marriages end, and it had nothing to do with me or Jasmine.
My father destroyed his life because he was consumed by a love he was too stubborn to fight for. After the way I treated Jasmine in Miller’s Cove, I was destined to follow in his footsteps.
The package from Miller’s Cove was sitting in the same spot on my foyer table as it had been when I’d opened it a few days ago. I still had no desire to open the padded envelope containing Jasmine’s rings, but I took a closer look at the stack of papers that accompanied them. I sat on my sofa.
Jasmine had said she’d spent the morning at the library trying to find a way to save Miller’s Cove. From the look of the documents I was flipping through, she had been telling the truth.
“You said we would always trust each other. You said that we weren’t our parents.”
Jasmine had been right the entire time. She’d been right about everything. I should have chosen her. I should have trusted her. I told her that we would face whatever obstacles came our way together, and the first time things got hard, I abandoned her… again.
I got up to make myself a drink, and when I returned to the couch, Tora was lying across the cushions, covering all of Jasmine’s photocopies.
“Up, boy!” shouted and giving him a tap on the rump. “Get down.” Tora scrambled off of the couch bringing most of the papers down with him, scattering them across the floor.
I had bent down to pick them up, knowing that it was gonna be a bitch to get them all back in order, when something caught my eye.
It was a page of a contract signed by all three founders.
There were other agreements in the pile, each signed by one of the three founders, but this was the only one I’d seen so far that had all three.
It took me an hour to sort through all the papers to organize the documents. Then I spent another three hours reading them. At around one in the morning, I woke up the smartest attorney I knew to help me make sense of what I found.
“I can’t believe you woke me up for this,” Chris mumbled.
“So, you think it’ll work?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty standard in legal partnerships. The same thing happened when Mom and Dad dissolved the Morgan Carter Group. So what are you planning to do, leverage this information to get your job back?”
“I don’t want my job back.” I held the envelope containing Jasmine’s rings. “I want my life back.”