Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Darcy
I took a sip of tea, not too upset by the events that’d occurred since Sebastian woke me during his dream, saying Melissa’s name over and over with agony in his voice. It was heartbreaking, and as much as I didn’t want to wake him up, it’d reached a point where I couldn’t bear to hear his anguish anymore.
His inability to use a tea kettle was a much more annoying wake-up call than his dream, but ultimately, I felt more pity for him than upset. I never would’ve imagined the rigid man had a weak or soft spot, but the wee morning hours showed me a different side.
“So, I think it’s obvious you’re still getting through the hard parts of grieving your wife’s loss, but I think it’s good and very healthy that you’re willing to talk about her, especially with me,” I finally spoke after watching him studiously pull his tea bag in and out of his mug.
“It’s not just you. I don’t like speaking of her passing to anyone. It’s as if I mentally just shut down.”
“A very understandable defense mechanism,” I answered, completely relaxed and prepared at any moment for him to shut down again.
“Well, if I’d allowed you to meet my parents, you’d understand why I’m not in touch with my emotions. I’m just not the kind of guy who talks about things like that.”
“Well, you don’t have to,” I reassured him. “You get no pressure from me. We can discuss anything else, like dinner tonight with Spence and Nat or the delicious fish tacos.”
“The fish tacos were certainly impressive,” he smiled at me.
“But it’s healthy to talk it out, you know that, right? Just to get the poison from all the pain and any negative emotions you’re feeling about her loss out of your system. I say this only because if you do ever want to start dating again, you need to have a more agreeable personality, or you’re just plain fucked.”
He chuckled, “The women I’d be dating don’t give a shit about my personality. They care about my wallet, not me.”
“That’s horribly sad,” I admitted. “Almost as sad as you considering dating someone like that, knowing that’s how they are.”
“Dating?” he looked over at me with a funny smile. “I married the woman who wrote the handbook on how to date for money and status.”
My eyes widened, “How long were you two in a loveless marriage, then? Because trust me, there is no love when money takes precedence.”
“You mean to tell me you wouldn’t love me for my money? You’d love me for me ?” He raised his eyebrows as if he couldn’t believe anyone would do such a thing.
I laughed, taking another sip of tea and shaking my head, “To keep facts straight, I wouldn’t date you for your money or you for you .”
“Well, that sucks.”
“What, being rejected?” I grinned at his sad little boy expression. “If it helps, you’re just not my type. Like we agreed a while ago, we’re from two separate worlds, and if those worlds ever collided, I’d imagine it would make a nuclear bomb look like a firecracker.”
He chuckled, “Very true.”
“I just can’t understand how you could be happy in a relationship with someone who doesn’t love you. Who gives a shit about money? It comes and goes.”
“Well, it’s fairly permanent in my family,” he shrugged and laughed. He had a point. His family fortune had survived world wars, civil wars, and revolutions near and far, and it showed no signs of decreasing within the next millennium.
“Well, being with someone just for money sounds awful to me,” I said, even though he probably couldn’t understand where I was coming from.
“In Melissa’s defense, I didn’t truly love her for her either in the beginning. Don’t get me wrong, she was an extremely attractive woman and very agreeable in the public eye, but she also came from an excellent family, and that was the thing that mattered.”
“What eventually drew you to her, if you don’t mind my asking? I don’t want you to shut down, so tell me now if you’re uncomfortable.”
“I’m fine,” he sat back in his chair and crossed his ankles, resting his tea in his lap. “What drew me to her?”
I watched as he studied his tea for answers as if I’d asked the most complicated question on the planet.
“It’s hard to say, I guess,” he said before a humorous grin crossed his face. “Have you ever heard about old couples who talk about being in love with their spouses of sixty years or so?”
“Oh, like those cute articles on social media?”
“I’m not on social media,” he answered, perplexed.
“Right. Well, there are these stories about the answers to lifelong love and how elderly couples hung onto it over the years. The men talk about how they loved it when their wife entered a room, dazzling everyone with her smile and lighting the place up, making everyone feel at home. Stuff like that.”
“Melissa never entered any room with a dazzling smile, lit it up, or made everyone there feel at home.”
“Well, okay,” I laughed. “How long were you married?”
“Five, almost six years,” he said. “And before you remark, our love would’ve stood the test of time.”
“I guess she must’ve been a good cook, then, because what you’re telling me is that Melissa would walk into a room and shut the place down with her ice-cold, bitchy behavior.”
“She didn’t cook at all,” he said. “One time, we came home early from vacation, and the house staff weren’t due to arrive until the next day, so I asked if she wanted to cook dinner or dine out.”
“And, let me guess. She didn’t know how to cook and nearly burned the place down.”
“No, she did know how to cook. She just preferred not to,” he said. “Anyway, she was so angry that I even suggested she cook that we slept in separate rooms until I bought her a yacht to apologize.”
“What the living hell?” I asked, recalling what Nat said about the woman earlier tonight when she warned me not to do things like I was doing right now, forming bonds and shit that would only lead to heartbreak later. But here I was. “That’s the most pretentious shit I’ve ever heard.”
“ That was my wife,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “She knew how to get what she wanted from me.”
“I have a hard time seeing anyone get away with something like that with you. Sounds like a pretty fucked-up, loving marriage.”
“Before I say more,” he said, becoming serious, making me feel bad for insulting his dead wife. She seemed like the devil’s mistress, but he was the devil, so I guess it was the perfect marriage. “I must insist anything spoken about Melissa be off the record. I don’t wish for anything to be written about her.”
“Trust me, from the way you’re already starting about her, I wouldn’t be surprised if she returned from the grave to haunt me.”
He chuckled, “She’d haunt my ass too.”
“Were you afraid of her?”
“Hell no,” he said. “I was annoyed a lot, though, especially when she hired a private investigator to follow me around and ensure I wasn’t doing anything untoward .”
“What the fuck?” I couldn’t hide the look of disgust on my face. Surely no one would put up with that shit. “I don’t even know what to say about that.”
“She did that when she was withholding sex, so she must’ve been worried I’d get it elsewhere, which is something I’d never do.”
“Okay, that sounds like excusing horrible behavior,” I said, surprised there was any justification for her actions in his mind.
“Maybe it is,” he said. “I let a lot of things go once she got pregnant. I thought things would change in her behavior, becoming a new mother, but it became evident that our daughter was just another step to take for us to seem like we had a perfect marriage.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” I answered.
Everything I heard was so foreign and opposite to my opinion of how relationships should be. I was only intrigued because of the shock factor this story was producing.
Good God, Nat wasn’t lying at all.
“I assume she hired the private investigator to follow me around because if she ever wanted out of the marriage, all she had to do was catch me cheating on her to be awarded a large sum of money. And if it were my fault, no one would frown upon her for divorcing me.”
I didn’t want to say what I was genuinely thinking, which was how the hell are you sad that a woman like that is gone? How are you grieving and not rejoicing? But I knew it was best to keep my mouth clamped shut…that didn’t mean I couldn’t think it, though. To say I was appalled to hear any of this would be an understatement.
“Was there anything that you, um, loved about her? I only ask because I can tell you’re having a difficult time in the grieving process, as any husband rightfully would, but I am starting to wonder why you’re having such a difficult time after hearing the things you’ve said.”
“Aren’t you the psychologist?” he teased.
“I’m not trying to be,” I answered. “I just see that the lights seemed to have come on in your life again, and the angry devil who stormed the winery halls with his rude opinions has left the building. Usually, people who behave that way hate themselves or their relationship or are grieving. In your case, it might be all the above?”
He offered me that bashful smile from the other night, and I felt my stomach do a tiny flip in response.
“Yes, I did love her. She was my wife.”
“I know she was your wife, but what did you love about her aside from her being your wife?”
“I loved her brilliant mind,” he said, looking at the moon. “I loved how she was charitable and lent her time to many different programs for the underprivileged. She put a lot of effort into planning events and fundraisers for retirement homes, counseling for veterans, orphaned children, and schools desperate for funding for books and such. After she passed, they even named a school after her.”
“That’s very amazing,” I answered truthfully. “That’s what you loved about her, though? And I mean love like if you lost everything—material possessions, statuses, money, and all of that—and you had nothing but the dirt beneath your feet and jobs that barely covered the rent, what would keep you together during those hard times?”
“Holy fuck,” he laughed at me. “I don’t even think I love myself that much to stick around if my entire world imploded in that manner.”
“Well, many people go through it, but they survive it because they have each other, and they rebuild.”
He sucked in a breath and concentrated. “I loved her eyes,” he finally said, then looked at me. “They were green, not piercing like your blue eyes, but sometimes they’d dazzle in a way that?—”
“That’s a physical trait. What did you love about this woman to want to marry her, buy her a yacht when she had a meltdown, and insist on starting a family to elevate your social status? There had to be something.”
“I loved that she never interrupted me while I was talking,” he said, giving me a shitty grin. “So, there’s something.”
“That’s definitely something,” I answered.
“I know it doesn’t seem like a loving relationship to you, but it was in its own way. I miss her every day, and I feel very guilty at times that I didn’t take the final call she made to me moments before she passed away. I was too busy in a meeting, and nothing was more important than my work, not even my wife’s dying wish to talk to me.”
I saw the pain and darkness wash over him like an invisible, thousand-pound blanket of guilt was laid across his back, and I knew this was haunting him. It was probably the main reason he was stuck in grief, not allowing himself a moment of happiness.
“You blame yourself?”
“No. Well, maybe. I’m not sure,” he said softly. I was glad he hadn’t shut down again; the subject matter was getting heavy, and his not bolting was a good sign. “Even though I don’t recall the dream I was having when you woke me up, the sensations and the mood of sudden loneliness I’ve experienced since waking up are typical of my recurring nightmare. That dream is just a loop of the day Melissa was killed, and I’m watching myself make all the wrong decisions as I did on that day, and I can do nothing to change any of it.”
“This is going to sound like easy advice, even though you’re probably not going to take it that way, but you need to try to forgive yourself. You’ll be stuck in this guilt for the rest of your life if you don't. You must try to move forward.”
“I feel that I am.”
“Filling your mind with a crazy distraction, like being in a fake relationship with me, and then throwing ourselves to the wolves to lie to everyone about it is not moving on. It’s not healing or helping you to come to terms with things either.”
“You are correct. That is easier said than done. I don’t do well with letting myself off the hook. Melissa deserves better than for her selfish husband to find happiness again when he couldn’t be bothered to grant her a moment on her deathbed.”
“Forgive me if this sounds harsh, but from what you’ve casually mentioned about her, I wonder if she wanted you to find happiness even when she was alive,” I said. I didn’t want to bash the woman, but it seemed he was putting her on a pedestal just because he felt guilty, which is what people tended to do when they wanted to punish themselves. “You have a lot of emotional baggage to start going through, shedding layers of bullshit before you’ll find any form of happiness. But you owe it to yourself to find that.”
“I owe it to my daughter,” he said.
“Her too, but you can’t take care of someone else if you haven’t taken care of yourself. If you’re not happy, your daughter will not be happy.”
“I know that,” he said. His tone was edgy, so I felt it was best to stop psychoanalyzing the man I hardly knew.
It was easy to see he had no idea what real love was. All he knew was the life he was born into. I wasn’t a psychologist, to be sure, but I was more convinced than ever that this poor guy could really use one. Years of living a life of wealth and privilege had skewed his perception of reality. He lived in a world where money was the only thing that mattered, and it wasn’t because he was a horrible person by nature but because he’d had no examples to the contrary…until now.
He’d brought me on this trip to get away from his parents, and now, I would show him how the other half lived. Tomorrow, we were going to see if he could get a glimpse of happiness without endless luxuries and deep pockets filled with cash to throw around.
“I’m heading to bed,” I said. I was tired and wanted to sleep before dragging him all over town like an average tourist, shopping and eating street food…something an Aster would never do. “You should, too. I have plans for us tomorrow, and they consist of you leaving your wallet at home.”
“Oh?” He smiled up at me.
“You’ll see.”
With a sassy smile, I left him sipping his tea and appreciating the beauty of the moon as I started making my plans for tomorrow. I was excited to spend time in Mexico my way , not his fancy resort way.