10. Dead Weight
Chapter ten
Dead Weight
Afew days later
It was strange, but after the chaos from my failed wedding, I’d thought something drastic would change in my life. Maybe a part of me had expected people to point their fingers at me and call me a ‘frigid bitch’ like Daniel had.
Instead, absolutely nothing happened. The moment I walked out of the reception on Saturday night, I had blocked Daniel and Harper on every platform.
Daniel had tried to access the condo on Sunday, but his key fob was deactivated.
Security turned him away at the lobby. And since then, I’d had nothing but radio silence.
On Monday, my coworkers had been a little awkward around me. Some had been present at the wedding. Others had heard. But by the end of the day, we’d all started focusing on our projects. The ruin I’d made of my private life no longer mattered.
On Thursday morning, I arrived at my office just before eight o’clock. The sprawling drafting floor was quiet, my coworkers still filtering in for the day. I unlocked my private office, stepped inside, and walked straight to the windows to pull the blinds open.
Resting my hands on the edge of my desk, I looked down at my left ring finger. The bare skin still felt strange. At the same time, whenever I looked at my hand, I remembered the look on Daniel’s face. I knew I’d done the right thing.
My cell phone vibrated against the wood. Marcus Reed’s name lit up the screen.
“Good morning, Marcus,” I answered, sitting down in my leather chair.
“Good morning, Marianne,” the lawyer greeted me. “I wanted to give you a quick status update. The process server officially handed Daniel the annulment petition yesterday afternoon.”
“Did he cause any issues?”
“None that concern us,” Marcus said smoothly. “As we anticipated, Vincent Sterling terminated his employment immediately after reviewing the financial dossier I forwarded on Monday morning.”
I let out a slow breath, the tension in my shoulders dropping an inch. The trap had held perfectly. Daniel was locked out of my home, barred from my bank accounts, and stripped of his career.
“Thank you, Marcus,” I said. “For everything.”
“It was my pleasure. I’ll let you know when we receive a response from the court.”
I ended the call and set the phone down. Picking up my pen, I pulled a set of commercial blueprints toward me, ready to finally dive back into my work.
I spent the next few hours completely buried in the schematics, grateful for the distraction. It was just past noon when the intercom on my desk buzzed.
“Yes, Chloe?” I asked, pressing the button.
“Ms. Brooks, your mother is here,” my receptionist said. Her voice sounded slightly strained. “She doesn’t have an appointment, but she insists it’s an emergency.”
I paused, capping my pen. A sudden ache settled in my chest. The last time I had been alone with my mother, she’d given me my grandmother’s pearls and spoken about how much she loved both her daughters. She’d been horrified at the wedding, but I hadn’t heard from her at all.
I had a feeling I knew where she’d been—and whom she’d been comforting.
“Send her away, Chloe,” I said. I didn’t have the patience for her favoritism.
My receptionist probably tried, but Margaret Brooks had never been a woman easy to dissuade. A minute later, my office door opened, and my mother walked in.
She wore a tailored beige trench coat and carried the leather handbag I had bought for her last Christmas. She looked exhausted, the lines around her mouth pulled tight with severe stress.
She shut the door, walked over to the chairs opposite my desk, and sank into the leather without waiting for an invitation.
“Hello, Mom,” I said quietly.
“Marianne,” she sighed, dropping her handbag onto the floor and rubbing her temples. “It took me forty minutes to find parking. This city is a nightmare.”
I waited, giving her the perfect opening to ask how I was doing.
She just took a shaky breath. “It has been an absolutely horrific week. My phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
Half of our family is demanding to know what happened, and Susan Vance called me twice, crying hysterically. The gossip is out of control.”
“I imagine it is,” I said.
“And Harper,” my mother continued, her voice trembling with genuine distress. “Harper has been crying for five days straight. She and Daniel have no money, Marianne. His credit is completely destroyed, and Harper is too sick from the pregnancy to work.”
I looked at the woman who had raised me. She was staring at me with the exact same expression she used when Harper failed a class or wrecked a car. It was the face that meant it was time for me to step in and handle the consequences.
“You made your point, Marianne,” my mother said gently, taking on a tone of patronizing reason. “You humiliated him. You ruined his career. You took away his car. They literally have nothing left.”
“They have each other,” I replied. And they had my mother, clearly. No doubt, she’d decided to start babying Harper again. And Daniel came with the territory.
My mother let out a sharp, frustrated breath.
“Don’t be glib. This is serious. She is twenty-four years old, and she is carrying a child.
She doesn’t have the money for prenatal vitamins, let alone rent.
You have a very successful firm. You have an untouchable trust fund now, apparently. You can afford to help her.”
I stared at her. The sheer audacity of the request hung in the air between us, so absurd it almost felt like a hallucination.
“You want me to pay her,” I clarified slowly. “You came to my office to ask me to give an allowance to the sister who slept with my fiancé.”
“I am asking you to be the bigger person!” my mother argued, her voice rising in defense. “She made a mistake! She was young and foolish. She is fragile, Marianne. She isn’t like you.”
“No,” I agreed quietly. “She isn’t.”
“You have always been so capable,” my mother pleaded.
She reached across the desk, her fingers brushing the sleeve of my blouse.
I pulled my arm back, resting my hands on my lap.
“You can handle anything. You bounce back. But Harper is going to drown out there. You have to forgive her. Set up a small monthly transfer. Just until the baby is born and Daniel gets back on his feet.”
The words hit me with a dull finality.
As I looked at my mother across the desk, the last remaining illusion of my childhood broke.
I’d always believed my mother’s affection for me was genuine.
But she fundamentally believed my pain was manageable, and Harper’s was not.
I was supposed to take the hit, pay the bill, and smooth everything over so the rest of them could stay comfortable.
I didn’t matter. Not really.
“No,” I said.
My mother blinked, pulling her hand back. “What do you mean, no? I’m not asking for thousands. Just enough to cover their rent and groceries.”
“I mean no,” I repeated. I wasn’t yelling. I was simply drawing a hard line. “I am not giving them a single cent. I will not pay Daniel’s rent. I will not pay for Harper’s life. They are adults. They made a brutal choice, and now they have to live with it.”
My mother’s pleading expression vanished, replaced instantly by defensive anger.
“How can you be so vindictive?” she snapped, shooting to her feet. “It’s a baby, Marianne! Your own flesh and blood. You are punishing an innocent child because your pride is hurt.”
“They lied to my face for months,” I corrected her. “And the baby is their responsibility. If Daniel can’t afford to feed a child, he should have thought about that before he blew a quarter of a million dollars playing pretend.”
“He made a mistake!”
“He conned me,” I countered sharply. “He actively planned to steal half of my firm. And Harper knew it. She literally asked him on video when he was going to dump me.”
My mother waved her hand dismissively, casually brushing off everything they had done to me. “She was just insecure. She wanted him to prove he loved her. She didn’t mean it.”
“She meant it enough to stand beside me at my wedding and zip up my dress.”
“You are being incredibly hard, Marianne,” my mother accused, her face flushing with anger. “You have no empathy. This is exactly why people find you so difficult. You treat your own family like a business transaction. You cut people off the second they don’t serve your bottom line.”
For years, I had worried that my intense focus on my career made me cold or unlovable. Daniel had preyed on that exact fear. My mother was trying to attack the same weakness.
“You’re right,” I said calmly. “I do treat things like a transaction when people treat me like an ATM. And since we’re talking about money, let’s talk about your bills.”
My mother frowned, thrown off by the sudden pivot. “My bills? What are you talking about?”
“Three years ago, you couldn’t afford the property taxes on the colonial house,” I reminded her. “You were going to lose it. I stepped in. I paid off the remaining mortgage, and I have covered the property taxes, the maintenance, and your homeowner’s insurance every single year since.”
“Because I am your mother!” she hissed in indignation.
“I also pay your car lease,” I continued, ignoring the interruption. “Sometimes, your groceries. I pay for your life so you don’t have to stress about it.”
I pulled my laptop toward me and woke the screen.
“As of this morning, the auto-pay on every single one of those accounts is officially canceled,” I said, looking her dead in the eye. “The deed to the house is yours, Mom, but the bills are too. If you want to pay for Harper and Daniel’s life, you are going to have to do it with your own money.”
My mother stared at me. The color completely drained from her face as the math caught up with her.
“You… you can’t do that,” she stammered, the anger evaporating into genuine panic. “I live on a fixed income. I can’t afford the property taxes on that house. I can’t afford the car.”
“Then you will have to downsize,” I suggested smoothly. “Or get a part-time job.”
“Marianne, please,” she begged, her hands shaking as she reached for her purse. “You can’t just cut me off. I’m your mother.”
“And I am your daughter,” I said quietly. “But you came into my office today and asked me to fund the people who ripped my life apart. You took their side, and you called me vindictive for standing up for myself. The bank is closed, Mom.”
My mother looked at me as if I were a stranger. She had relied on my guilt and my sense of duty for decades. She had absolutely no tools to handle the woman sitting across from her now.
“You are going to end up completely alone,” she whispered, every word thick with venom.
“I’d rather be alone than used,” I replied.
She turned on her heel and practically ran to the office door, yanking it open and storming out into the hallway.
She nearly collided with a man walking toward my office.
Elias sidestepped her smoothly, turning his shoulders to avoid the impact. He watched my mother march past him until she disappeared around the corner toward the elevators.
Then he stepped into my office.
He was dressed in dark trousers and a charcoal-gray suit jacket. He didn’t immediately ask what had happened. He looked at my face, reading the lingering tension in my jaw and the rigid set of my shoulders. He closed the door, sealing the room in quiet privacy.
“I’m sorry for dropping by unannounced like this,” Elias said. “I was going to wait until you were free, but Chloe told me to come in. I take it that was the mother?”
“That was her.” I sank back into my chair, suddenly feeling the physical exhaustion of the confrontation. “I want to say she isn’t usually like that, but in reality… I think she always was.”
Elias walked over and took the exact chair my mother had just vacated. He set his portfolio on his lap and waited, giving me time to gather my thoughts.
“She wanted me to put Harper and Daniel on an allowance,” I explained, running a hand over my face. “She told me I was vindictive for cutting them off, and asked me to pay their rent because the baby is innocent.”
Elias let out a short, dark laugh. “I feel like I should be surprised. But I’m not. What did you say?”
“I said no.” I lowered my hand and looked at him. “And then I cut off her credit cards, canceled her car lease, and stopped paying her property taxes.”
Elias didn’t seem surprised. He only nodded. By now, he was very familiar with how I dealt with people like my mother. “That couldn’t have been easy.”
“If she’s going to side with the people who actively tried to ruin me, she can figure out her own bills,” I said. “But yes, it felt awful.”
“Cutting off dead weight always does,” Elias said gently. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “What matters is that you held your ground.”
I looked at him. He was the only person in my life who saw my strength as an asset rather than something to exploit. Daniel had used my competence to avoid his own responsibilities. My mother had used it to fund her comfort. Elias just respected it.
“Honestly, it was easier than it should have been,” I said softly. “Maybe I knew, the whole time, that it’d get to this.”
I shook my head, chasing away the echo of my mother’s venomous words. “But you didn’t drop by for that, did you?”
“Not exactly,” Elias said, standing up from the chair. He walked around the edge of my desk, stopping just a few feet away. “I came because we made each other a promise. And because you deserve a proper lunch. Today, or any other day.”
I looked up at him. The professional distance we had maintained since Saturday night was suddenly shrinking. He wasn’t rushing me, but the intent in his eyes was entirely clear. The ring was gone. The family was cut off. The lines were finally erased.
“A proper lunch,” I repeated, a genuine smile finally breaking across my face.
“Steak,” Elias confirmed, extending his hand toward me. “And a very expensive glass of wine to celebrate the fact that you survived this week.”
I placed my hand in his and found his grip warm and solid. When he pulled me to my feet, I smiled. “Lead the way,” I said.
We walked out of the office together, leaving the wreckage of my old life behind.