Chapter 3 #2
I had planned to sneak into one of the lectures to do research for one of my latest writing projects, but I hadn't told Tony that.
He wasn't just a professor of international law.
He was also one of the six men who belonged to the circle of the most respected, elite, and conservative former lawyers at the university.
A circle that determined what was taught and which three percent of the students would become the future elite of the country.
In short, people I didn't want anything to do with.
The reason Tony was involved?
For Daddy.
“I don't know exactly what he wants from us, but you should try to join us for family dinners a little more often.”
He looked at me firmly before taking another bite of his apple and continuing on through the foyer and finally through one of the double doors into one of the salons.
“To force something that isn't there?”
“You know I'm glad you're here.”
I avoided his gaze and he threw the apple up again, but this time I caught it and bit into it.
“Just because you finally have someone on your side when Brittany brings out the big guns and gets Mommy and Daddy on her side,” I replied with my mouth half full.
A war he had dragged me into without asking.
He didn't have a chance to answer because we were already entering the family dining room. The Richter family's battlefield, where wars were fought even when I wasn't there.
Borgov I
Carlos Rafael Rivera
My father's brunette trophy wife Lorette, the daughter of a French immigrant, who had thrown herself at my father when she had just turned seventeen, and had entered into an unhappy marriage with him, didn't even look up from her gossip magazine.
Her makeup was subtle, her lips full, elegant gold earrings dangled from her ears, and you wouldn't have guessed she was fifty-six.
As so often, she was wearing one of her dark green luxury dresses, which gave me hope that she would later have our bodyguard drive her downtown to meet one of her gossiping friends to plan their daughters' weddings.
Fortunately, I was not one of those daughters, unlike the twenty-six-year-old beast with the fake waves, who was the spitting image of her beautiful mother and glared at me as if my arrival had ruined her breakfast.
She was wearing a matte black luxury dress with a golden belt, her eyes as gray as mine and not light blue like her mother's.
“Tony, have you seen my black Dior coat?”
She didn't look at Tony, but at me, as if she knew I had borrowed it. The fact that this coat had cost six thousand dollars didn't make it any better.
My last shred of common sense wanted to go back to that mansion on the hillside and get it back, but especially because it was Brittany's coat, I wouldn't trouble myself.
She probably didn't even know that I could easily get by for a year on that money if I played my cards right and didn't throw away as much money in a week as my mother had earned in a year, like Brittany did.
“Why should I...,” Tony began, but his mother lowered the newspaper, continued to ignore me, and looked at her son reproachfully, while Brittany reached for her teacup and took a ladylike sip.
“Anthony. I beg you. Stop teasing your sister. You're almost forty.”
I sat down opposite Brittany and grinned gleefully at Tony. He pressed his lips together, sat down opposite his mother, next to his father, and I was grateful that he was sitting between me and the man whose head was hidden behind the latest edition of the Washington Post.
“It's a shame you still haven't blessed us with grandchildren.”
Tony stared at his mother, who at least once a week presented him with a list of women he should please consider marrying in order to support his father's business relationships and finally give her the family offspring she so desperately craved.
Tony's ignorance on the subject was probably the reason why she had decided a year ago to find a husband for her daughter.
Tony had told me that his mother had fixed her sights on his best friend, another lawyer from the sacred circle of six, to marry her daughter. I already felt sorry for the poor guy.
Sometimes I wished Brittany was dim-witted and uneducated, but Father had insisted on her studying political science, and she already had a PhD, which she occasionally bragged about.
She probably thought I was the dim-witted and uneducated one, because she made it clear to me every day that I was dirt beneath her feet. A stupid good-for-nothing who hadn't even managed to graduate from high school.
Her eyes flashed menacingly in my direction, but I preferred to look at her rather than at the man who was now lowering his newspaper.
“Could everyone please concentrate on tonight?”
The sixty-four-year-old man, dressed in a dark purple shirt and black tie, with narrow gray eyes, a wrinkled forehead, a straight nose, and a shaved chin, took off his reading glasses.
His hair was already gray, and I tried every time to figure out what Mama had seen in this man twenty years ago. His striking features had a certain aesthetic appeal that even the age creeping up on him couldn't really touch. But there was a judgmental coldness in his eyes.
“Lorette. You are definitely not going to meet Michelle today.”
“But...”
“You'll see her tonight. Isn't that enough?”
Lorette pressed her lips together and reached for a cake fork, rolling her eyes as she turned her attention to the little mandarin tart on the white gold-rimmed plate in front of her.
All that kept her here was his money. She could hardly stand his presence. But she hated me more. I was living proof of her failed marriage.
“Brittany, sweetheart.” Brittany immediately put on a smile for Daddy. “Please go through the guest list and find out about the most important political guests so you'll be prepared if they introduce you to their sons.”
She smiled because she wanted to make Daddy proud, but Anthony and I knew how little she wanted to get married. The only man she hadn't expressed any objections toward so far was Anthony's friend, which made me curious who that guy was.
However, I had little desire to meet any more lawyers in this town. Belonging to the well-known Richter family, who, it should be noted, treated me like a tumor-like outgrowth and tried to hide me in my room whenever anyone came to visit, was more than enough.
My inner tension grew as his gaze lingered on my brother.
“Anthony. We're going to discuss the new semester plans with the others tonight. You already know the rest.”
The knot in my stomach tightened and I couldn't help but press my index fingernails into the sides of my thumbnails until pain flooded the tips of my thumbs.
And then his eagle gaze fell on me.
I was forced to look him in the eyes. Something that sent goose bumps down my neck every time.
“Onera.”
To him, I wasn't Gravia. The name my mother had called me. Not Quill, because he didn't know that name. He always used my middle name. The one he had chosen for me. Back then. In a father's moment of madness.
What had he seen in me when he had held me in his arms for the first time? When he had given me that name?
“I have only one expectation of you.” Coldness crept into his voice. All I wanted was to break eye contact with this man. “You will not leave your room tonight.”
“Oh, shit,” Brittany snorted with a laugh.
The only thing I could focus on was his icy gaze, demanding submission.
“Britt!” her mother blurted out, and you could tell she wanted to defend me, but behind closed doors, when my father or Tony couldn’t see us, my stepmother was the nastiest of them all. The one who threatened to erase me from existence if I ever made a wrong decision.
“Father, you can't...” Tony began, but his mother interrupted him.
“Whenever that girl is out in public, she attracts attention.” Now she looked at me for the first time. Bitterness filled her judgmental eyes.
“The people in this town don't even know she exists.” She laughed, and it sounded maniacal.
“Imagine what a disgrace it would be if, on this important evening for your father, it came out that he has an illegitimate child.” That was the moment my father couldn't take it anymore and looked away from me. “Our family would be ruined.”
One might have thought that he was the dominant one in this family, but it was Lorette who was desperately trying to maintain the pretty illusion and put everyone present in their place in private.
“What’s she to blame for your mistakes?” Tony blurted out.
Since I had known him, he had only raised his voice to his parents once, and that was on the day they had found me in his apartment on the second floor.
I would never forget my father's pale face. How the vein on his forehead had almost popped out of his skin. How Lorette had run through the house trembling and with tears in her eyes, and how Brittany had looked at me as if I were the intruder I actually was.
I had disrupted their picture-perfect life. Not for the first time, and not for the last.
“Anthony!” Lorette’s eyes flashed. Tony’s jaw clenched. “Isn’t it enough that we let you drag this ill-mannered country rat into our lives?”
Tony’s fist landed on the table, and Brittany and I flinched simultaneously.
“Please don't talk like that, Mother!”
“Anthony!” Father blurted out, and there it was again. The vein. “Enough!”
He looked at the halfway-empty whiskey glass next to his plate. Another of his sins that would sooner or later ruin this family. Lorette could pour as many bottles as she wanted into the kitchen sink, she wouldn't get rid of this cancer so easily.
“Onera.” He didn't look at me, but the hand clenching the knife was enough to send another shiver down my spine. “To your room. Now.”
Feeling too much is one extreme. The other lies in emotional numbness.
How had I been able to go from one to the other so suddenly?
– Leaking Batteries Diary