3. Sloane #3
"He's a glorified student." My father's volume never lifted a decibel.
It never had to. "A boy who can't provide for you.
I raised you in elite wealth. I handed you every advantage this world offers.
And you're willing to burn all of it to play house with a man scraping by on a resident's salary.
" He leveled a look of pure disgust at me.
"How could you embarrass this family on purpose? "
"I'm not embarrassing anyone." My voice cracked on the last syllable. I hated the weakness of that sound, but I plowed past it. "I love him. He loves me. That's all that matters."
"It is not."
"It is to me."
His palm slammed down on the mahogany. The China jumped, the silver rattled, and I flinched so hard my spine hit the back of my chair.
My whole body locked up, paralyzed by the trained response I'd built to that same sound in that same room.
My mother didn't even twitch. Her eyes never lifted from her dinner.
"You will make a choice," my father said, his voice dropping back to a terrifying whisper, the anger buried again like it had never surfaced. "You end the relationship. Or I end his career."
The air evaporated from my lungs.
I stared into his lifeless eyes, and I knew, with a certainty a lifetime of surviving him had forged, that he wasn't bluffing.
My father had never made a threat he hadn't already drawn up the blueprints to carry out.
His corporate reach was invisible and limitless, and his cruelty outlasted everyone.
Xavier's clinic was barely off the ground.
One phone call from my father to a hospital board member, and Xavier's whole future was gone.
"You wouldn't do that," I whispered.
He just stared at me and gave me nothing.
I whipped my head toward my mother. She sat four feet from me, and I could hear the shallow rhythm of her breathing. I reached across the table and seized her hand. Her skin was warm and familiar, and I needed her to look at me and fight for her daughter.
"Mom," I begged, my voice cracking. "Please."
She lowered her gaze to our tangled fingers. I watched her powdered face. Her chin ducked, a flash of sorrow softening her eyes for one heartbeat. Then the steel mask slammed back into place. She slid her hand out of my grip, picked up her fork, and went back to eating without a word.
I'd always understood, on an intellectual level, that my mother was too weak to ever protect me from him.
I'd accepted that years ago. But knowing a fact and surviving it are two different animals.
As I sat at that table, something cracked open in my chest, and a radioactive ache spread through me.
I couldn't pull my eyes off the hand that chose the fork over me.
I'd always known I was alone in that mansion. I just hadn't realized, until that second, how deep the isolation ran.
I drove the three hours back to campus with the velvet box a dead weight in my jacket pocket, my eyes stinging so badly I could barely keep the car between the lines.
Violet threw the dorm door open, and whatever greeting she'd lined up died on her tongue the second she read my face. She just opened her arms, and I collapsed into her chest and finally let myself break.
Hours later, after Violet had drifted to sleep, I sat cross-legged on my dark bed and stared at the sapphire ring. When I found the courage, I dug out a small shipping box, wrapped the velvet case, and drafted the note on a sheet of lined paper in the coldest handwriting I could fake.
I don't want to do this anymore. I won't tie myself to a resident who can't afford the life I need.
Every syllable was a fabricated lie. I built the most shallow version of myself I could imagine, because I needed him to read it and hate me. The only way to stop a man like Xavier from fighting for me was to make myself unlovable. And I needed him to stop fighting before my father ruined him.
I sealed the box and dropped it in the mail before my broken heart could stop me.
I'd convinced myself I hadn't thought about any of this in a long time.
It was my favorite lie, and over the years the performance had gotten good.
I'd built a thriving tattoo studio from scratch.
I'd forged a fiercely independent life. Most days I could go long stretches without the ghost of him haunting me.
But the grief was never really gone. It had just found quieter places to wait.
And now I was going to be standing in the same room with him again.
What would he even look like now? I'd been carrying a static version of him since the day I ran, a portrait assembled from old memories. But time smooths the sharp edges of a face, and the boy in my head wasn't an honest reflection of the man anymore.
Would he hate me?
Obviously he would.
I'd loaded the most superficial version of myself into that box and fired it straight at his heart.
He would've opened that box, read my cruel words, and swallowed the lie whole, because I'd engineered the note to be believed.
I never reached out to correct it. I never called him in the middle of the night to confess: None of that was real.
I was just trying to keep your dreams alive.
I just let the lie become his reality.
He would hate me. And God knew he had every right to.