Chapter 3
Cornelia
Iwalk up the stairs towards my room after my first day of classes.
Reaching the first floor, my eyes unconsciously flick to the door beside the living room.
I freeze. It’s open. For the first time in four months, I can see inside—part of the bed, a strip of dark green velvet wallpaper, the floor usually clouded by clothes now bare.
Someone is in there. I know it’s not her.
Probably just a maid cleaning. Still, the sight hits me like a punch in the gut, knocking the air out of my lungs.
Unlike at Annabel’s, where the public setting forced me to keep it together, here I have no defences.
Suddenly, I feel like I’m reliving the worst day of my life all over again.
The day began like most in London. It had been raining all day—some people might see it as a bad omen, but I didn't. I love rain.
TJ and I hadn't talked, but that was neither surprising nor concerning. I had spent almost the entire day before in a board meeting for my family’s company, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
If you’ve ever taken a pill or been to the hospital, there’s a good chance we had something to do with it.
The company was founded by my grandfather, passed down to my father, and about fourteen years ago, when my father had a midlife crisis and abandoned everything to gallivant around the world with his highly age-inappropriate girlfriends, he handed the company over to my brother, Anthony.
My brother is thirty-seven. The significant age gap between us is because our parents married after conceiving him during high school, or right after.
I’m not entirely sure, as my mother tends to lie about her age.
There wasn’t much fuss about it; after all, they were two kids from wealthy families whose parents likely hoped they would eventually marry, and Anthony just sped up the process.
They were happy for a while, but just before I was born, they started having problems. Their brilliant solution? Since a child had brought them together, a second one would fix everything. So, they had me. Of course, it didn’t work. Six years later, they got divorced.
Anthony makes me go to every single meeting.
He says he’s the present of the company, but I’m the future, and it’s important people see me there.
I tell him that will only happen if he doesn’t have kids, but he’s always insisted he doesn’t want them.
For a while, I thought it was a phase. Now, I’m not sure.
Sometimes, I feel like it’s my fault that he hasn’t gotten married or had children because he was forced to raise me, since both of our parents were too messed up to do so.
Anyway, he has one rule everyone must follow in every board meeting: no phones allowed, to avoid corporate espionage and keep everyone focused.
Everyone has to leave theirs at the door with his secretary, even me.
Which I find incredibly rude—in what world does my brother think I’ll leak private information about our family business?
That’s like shooting myself in the foot.
And let me tell you, I have amazing self-preservation instincts, so obviously, I wouldn’t do that.
We’ve fought about it a bunch of times, and his answers range from, “Will it actually kill you not to be around your phone for a couple of hours?” to “If I let you keep your phone while the others have to hand theirs in, it will be a clear sign of nepotism.” As if me having a job as Head of Corporate Affairs—which I’m not qualified for—wasn’t already a clear sign of nepotism.
But I’ve learned to pick my battles, so I leave my phone at the door.
The meeting was so boring. It was all about some medicines that are about to be approved by the EMEA and the FDA—stuff we already discussed in the last board meeting—and tomorrow’s gala celebrating the company’s 58th anniversary.
By the time the meeting ended, my phone was flooded with messages from TJ.
TJ
I had a fight with my dad. He’s being an arsehole.
His dad is always an arsehole, by the way.
I’m on my way to your house. Maybe you can help de-stress.
Got to your place, but I forgot you are in a board meeting.
I think I’ll go grab a few drinks with the boys.
See you tomorrow at the gala. Love you.
I sent him a few messages back, but he didn’t respond.
Not a red flag, knowing him and how he gets after fighting with his father.
He was probably with one of the boys, knocked out drunk, and wouldn’t text for the rest of the day—or probably even most of the next—because he still hadn’t developed the ability to text unconsciously.
He would likely wake up the next day, an hour before the gala, scramble to get ready, and we’d meet there as usual, the way we always did whenever he fought with his dad and I wasn’t available.
It didn’t happen often, but his dad had been getting more difficult with him lately, questioning what he was doing with his life, and I had been so consumed with school.
It didn’t help that my mum was back from rehab and had turned my house into a constant parade of random men, drugs, and alcohol.
I don’t even know why my brother bothers to send her to rehab anymore.
She’s been in and out of rehab my whole life, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
The only times she stops getting drunk and high are when she’s getting cosmetic surgery done.
I hate drugs—always have, always will. I tried some of them once with the boys at boarding school and hated it. They still do it sometimes, “recreationally,” as they call it. Nitwits.
I tried calling TJ a few times later that night, but each call went straight to voicemail. So, I reluctantly made my peace with having to wait until the next day to talk to him and went straight to bed.
I slept terribly, like most nights when I’m not beside him. At least waking up wasn’t difficult. I ate a quick breakfast, watched some TV, and my favourite hairstylist and makeup artist came to help me get ready.
Then I got dressed in a black Cristina Savulescu dress with crystal details, paired with some really cute Manolo Blahnik heels—sadly hidden beneath the dress.
I added a tennis diamond bracelet from my personal jeweller, Solar Long Gypset earrings from Jessica McCormack, and my two usual rings back then.
Around 5:30 p.m., once I finished getting ready, I went to look for my brother. Just as I had expected, I found him in his home office, dressed in a black tuxedo, ready for the evening ahead.
I knocked on the door, though it was more of a formality since the door was wide open. When he finally noticed me, I asked, “Are you ready to go?”
The gala didn’t start until 7:00 p.m., but Anthony is kind of a control freak who likes to inspect everything beforehand and loves punctuality.
He glanced up briefly, then returned to his computer. His yellow-green eyes, which can sometimes look deeply intimidating, were calm and focused.
“Yes, I’m just finishing a few things here,” he replied without looking away. “Can you do me a favour in the meantime?”
“What?” I asked.
He glanced at the tray on the table in the small living room of his office, and I immediately knew exactly what the favour was about. “No, no, and no,” I said, shaking my head.
“Please, I have to finish sending a few emails before we can head to the gala,” he pleaded, his fingers flying over the keyboard.
“Fine,” I conceded reluctantly. “But you owe me.”
He nodded without looking up from his screen.
“And I only accept payment in the form of a Chanel or a Hermès bag,” I added with a smirk.
“Not jewellery?” he wondered, running a hand through his brown hair, the same shade as mine.
“Jewellery too, but only if it’s over three thousand pounds.”
He chuckled, and I picked up the tray, heading off to do the job the maids used to handle.
We stopped asking them to do it after two quit using the same phrase: “I don’t get paid enough for this.
” I can’t blame them. I have several trust funds with millions of pounds in each, and I still don’t think that is enough for me to be doing this.
The amount of hours and money I’ve spent in therapy after accidentally opening my mother’s bedroom door and finding everything from her having BDSM sex to her creating a sex painting is alarming—it’s probably what put my therapist’s entire family through university.
I reached my mother’s room door and glanced down at the tray, making sure everything was there.
Two ibuprofen tablets, a glass of water, an atomiser with more water, a piece of toast, and that disgusting green juice she swears is the best hangover cure ever.
I tried it once, took one sip, and ended up vomiting everything I’d eaten that day.
Most people would knock on the door to wake up their parents, but if by this time of the day my mother hasn’t woken up yet, you usually have to use an atomiser and spray water in her face to wake her. I’ll admit, I do enjoy that part.
I opened the door and found my mother lying in bed in just her underwear, the green-and-white duvet kicked to the floor, her fake blonde hair covering half of her face, and I immediately noticed she had company.
Disgusting. Parents should stop having sex after they’ve finished having kids. That should be a law.
On the other side of the bed from where my mother was, a naked young man was sleeping. I tried hard not to look at him because who wants to see who is doing their mother? But as much as I hate to admit it, I’m a bit nosy, and temptation got the better of me. I looked.
And then my jaw dropped as I recognised the back of the naked body lying beside my mother.
At first, I thought I was hallucinating, that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to skip lunch, but then I recognised a tattoo with my name on his upper back, one I had spent plenty of nights tracing my fingers through.
At that moment, I knew for certain—it was TJ’s back. My boyfriend’s back.
Actually, everything dropped—including the tray I had been holding.
I looked down at the floor. The china plate shattered into a million tiny pieces, along with both of the glasses.
The toast was soaked in green juice, and the water and pills had scattered across the floor.
It was like a visual representation of how I was feeling.
I was so shocked by what my eyes were seeing that my brain didn’t register the sound the tray made as it fell. But it was loud… I think. It woke TJ and my mother, and my brother came running from his office.
“Cornelia. What happened?” Anthony exclaimed before looking down at the floor, then into the bedroom, quickly piecing together the answers for himself.
Finally, my mother and TJ realised they weren’t alone in the room. TJ looked at me, then at my mum, then back to me. My mum just looked like she was annoyed we had woken her up, or maybe that I had dropped the tray.
“This… this… it… it isn’t what it looks like,” TJ blurted out, sounding out of it. He scrambled to grab his clothes from the floor, his movements frantic as he pulled on his boxers.
I just stood there in shock, feeling like, in a few seconds, all the plans, hopes, and dreams I had for my future—for our future—had been thrown by him straight into the trash.
It felt unfair that the universe didn’t give you any sort of heads-up when it was about to flip your entire life upside down.
It should have.
It would have been nice to know.
I snapped out of it the moment he began to approach me. With every step he took towards me, I took one step back.
I realised then I didn’t know much, and the few things I thought I knew for certain were mostly wrong. Like… like how I once believed he loved me above everything, but I did know one thing for sure: I couldn’t be there with him.
I didn’t want to hear his excuses. I didn’t want to hear his apologies. I didn’t want anything from him anymore.
So I ran.
I ran up the stairs to my room, TJ close behind, until my brother held him back. I reached my room, locked the door, and went straight to my bathroom, locking that door too for good measure.
Then I heard him banging on the door, begging me to let him in.
His voice cracked—desperate, broken—and it hurt me to hear.
He sounded like he was hurting, just like me.
I didn’t want to hear him. I didn’t. I just wanted to stay in the bathroom and forget about the outside world.
I turned on both sinks and the shower, letting the rush of water drown everything out, then lay in the bathtub and cried.
I don’t know how long I was there. I only remember crying in the bathtub until I fell asleep, waking up hoping it was all a bad dream, only to remember it wasn’t, then repeating the cycle.
At some point, TJ stopped banging on my door, and it was replaced by my brother knocking, asking me to come out. He told me both TJ and my mother were gone, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave.
In the bathroom, I could live in denial, but the moment I stepped out, it would all become real.
When my tears finally ran dry, I just stared at the wall, numb, almost catatonic.
Hours of crying without food or water had hollowed me out.
I barely noticed when my brother broke the bathroom lock and came in—not until he sat on the floor beside the tub.
He looked at me with a level of concern I’d only seen once before in my life.
They say you can’t die from heartbreak, but I’d argue you can.
It’s like when someone dies from cancer—the reason they die isn’t the cancer itself, but the complications it causes.
The same goes for heartbreak. Maybe it wouldn’t be listed on my death certificate, but in a way, it wouldn’t have happened without it.
If it weren’t for my brother, I probably would have stayed there until I died. And a part of me wanted to.
“What do you need?” Anthony asked in a warm voice, so low it almost sounded like a whisper.
I struggle to get the words out, my voice hoarse and breaking. “I…I need to go away.”