Chapter 74
Cornelia
Iget out of my bed carefully, not to wake TJ.
What he told me last night haunts me, and I feel like the full height of it hasn’t even hit me yet.
I… I should have been there for him. I should have tried harder to get him to open up.
Instead, I abandoned him. There’s nothing I can do to change that now.
I just know I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to him for not being there.
I walk down the stairs, reaching the first floor. She’s there—like I knew she would be—stepping out of the lift. I get notifications when the front door opens. Usually, I have them off, but last night I turned them on. No one else is walking into the house at five in the morning.
“I need to talk to you,” I tell her—more like demand.
She barely glances at me. “Whatever this is,” my mother does a hand gesture, signalling me as if I’m an inconvenience rather than her fucking daughter, “can we do it another time?” She attempts to walk past me to get into her bedroom.
I block her path. “No, we’re going to do this right now.”
She almost died, you know. When I was five, she had an operation for bladder stones, and there were complications.
She was in the hospital for almost three weeks.
My family flew in specialists from all over the world.
Everyone thought she would die. But she didn’t.
I think about that a lot. About how sometimes I wish she had died.
If she had, I would have been sad, I would have grieved her, and at milestones in my life, I would have wished she were there.
I would have grown up imagining what an amazing mother she could have been.
I would have loved her. I would have loved a fantasy.
But that would have been better than the disappointment she is now.
I normally get off that train of thought quickly, because how horrible is it to wish your own mother dead? What kind of person does that make me? But right now, I don’t. Right now, I wish nothing more than for that to have happened. So she would never have met TJ.
I hate her more than I have ever hated anyone in my life.
“You raped my boyfriend.” Saying the words makes me instantly want to throw up. Words I never thought I would say. Words I wish I didn’t have to say.
“What are you talking about?” she says, confused, rubbing her temple.
“TJ—the night you two had sex. Whatever you gave him was strong enough to knock him out, but not you.” She has a strong tolerance.
It would take the same amount of drugs or alcohol to knock out a medium-sized horse to knock her out, and I know what she looks like when she’s passed out to the point of being completely out of it, and that night, she wasn’t.
“You were conscious, and he wasn’t. That’s one of the definitions of date rape.
And you were aware of that, weren’t you? ”
TJ may not have said the word rape, but as he explained what happened, I knew exactly what it was.
She rolls her eyes. “You’re serious? All of this is about that?” she says, not looking even slightly disturbed by the topic.
“Answer me!” I yell, angry tears streaming down my face.
It’s not that I don’t believe TJ—I do, wholeheartedly—who wouldn’t after what I witnessed yesterday. But I need to hear it from her. I need to know if she has a shred of remorse for what happened.
“I don’t remember exactly if he was completely conscious, but who cares?
” She brushes it off with a casual wave, like we’re talking about something inconsequential, like forgetting to lock the front door, not raping someone.
“Can you really tell me all the sex you’ve had, you’ve been completely conscious? ”
I take a few steps back, putting distance between us—mostly for her protection. “You can’t be serious,” I exclaim, my voice shaking. I feel like I’m in a madhouse. “Do you even hear yourself talking? You’re delirious!”
“It doesn’t matter how conscious he was. He wanted to have sex. It was obvious.”
Now I lose it completely. I rip off the ring—the ring she gave me, the one I always wear—and throw it at her. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want anything from her. It hits her in the arm, but she barely flinches. It’s light, so it probably didn’t even register.
“Fuck you! You should be in jail, and I hope, at the very least, you go to hell.”
If I could rip out half the DNA I share with her, I’d do it right now and throw that at her too.
But since I can’t, I grab the next best thing—my shoe.
I’m in the same clothes from last night.
After sitting on the chaise lounge crying with TJ for a while, we eventually moved to my bed and fell asleep there.
I hurl the shoe at her with everything I got.
She dodges—surprisingly—and it slams against the wall, right by the door of Anthony’s office.
At the exact same moment, he steps out. The shoe nearly hits him.
Leave it to my brother to be awake at this hour, fully dressed, perfectly put together, and ready for a day at the office.
He looks at the shoe on the floor, the one that narrowly missed hitting him right in the chest. Then he lifts his gaze to me and finally to our mother. “What is going on here?”
I don’t answer him. My attention is yanked away by the sound of someone coming down the stairs. I turn and see TJ standing at the top of the last stair.
He looks shocked and confused. I can’t even begin to comprehend how TJ feels right now, seeing my mother again after everything. Fuck. Part of the reason I wanted to talk to her now was to throw her out of the house before he woke up. He shouldn’t have to see her—not now, not ever again.
“She’s just being dramatic,” my mother answers Anthony. “So fucking dramatic.” She turns to me and adds, “You get that from your mother.”
Because, of course, what this fucking mess was missing was her starting to refer to herself in the third person.
I let out a small, bitter laugh. “My mother? You mean you?”
I think she has lost the plot.
My mother looks at Anthony, then back at me. “I mean your real mother. The girl Anthony had unprotected sex with and conceived you.”
I freeze.
She uses that moment to slip past me, moving down the hall towards her bedroom. “Now, if you want to fight with someone about sex, do it with him,” she calls out, pointing at Anthony before entering her bedroom and closing the door. Just like that, she drops this bomb so she can go to sleep.
She… must be lying.
She—she just wanted to distract me so she could get to her room. She couldn’t have said something so monumental like it were something so mundane.
“She’s lying, right?” I whisper, turning to look at Anthony.
My brother—who always looks so poised, so put together, who, if you don’t know him, you’d think nothing can affect him—doesn’t look that way now. He looks… distraught. Like I’ve never seen in my life. And I don’t need him to say it to know it’s true.
Still, I repeat, “She’s lying, right?... Right?” I need her to be lying. I need him to tell me she’s lying. Because if she’s telling the truth, then it means that everything I have ever been told is a lie.
He doesn’t look me in the eye. He exhales a breath that sounds like he’s been holding it for over twenty-one years, then he says the words I wish he wouldn’t because they change everything between us. “It’s true.”
I shake my head as tears fall down my cheeks.
“No, no, no, no,” I whisper, like by saying it might make it true.
“You were the one person who never disappointed me. The only one who was always there for me.” I sniff, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.
“The only person who I thought never lied to me. But it turns out you’re the one who has been doing it the longest.”
He had always been my hero. The person I’d always been afraid to disappoint. The one who could do no wrong in my eyes. He let me build him a pedestal, and not only that, he helped me, and all of it was built on lies.
“Cornelia,” he begins, stepping towards me.
I instinctively back away, trying to put distance between us, and I bump into TJ.
I hadn’t noticed he moved behind me. He places his hands gently on my waist, steadying me, letting me know he’s there, comforting me.
I should be the one doing that for him, not the other way around.
Anthony keeps walking slowly towards me.
“No! Don’t come near me!” I yell, my voice sharp and raw, trembling with rage. I’ve never yelled at him like this before—never with real anger, real hurt. The times I did were just temper tantrums, stupid childish outbursts I never truly meant. This is different. This, I mean. It startles him.
“You’re as dead to me as she is,” I spit, pointing at my mother’s room.
And then, I do what’s practically my signature move by now—I run away. But this time, I take TJ with me.
To be continued…