She had my password. I had given it to her freely. We didn’t keep secrets. Her ass would be red for a week if she even tried, and I had nothing to hide.
Except, I did.
One gigantic, terrible thing that I knew would hurt her if she ever found out. Which was why I should have just deleted my conversations with Harold. If she found out what I’d done, she would hate me, maybe even try to leave me. And what was almost as bad, she wouldn’t trust me.
“I was accepted to Georgetown years ago.”
I wanted to lie—so fucking badly, I wanted to lie. But I swore I’d never do that to her.
It felt like I had glass in my throat, but I spoke the truth. “Yes. You were.”
“And you called in a favor to keep me out.”
Hearing the raw pain in her voice made my breathing become sharper. I would make this up to her, I mentally reassured myself. We would argue, and I’d grovel, and we would be fine. “Yes.”
Her hands balled into fists so tight the knuckles went white, and she flinched. “Bastard!” she screamed.
I stood there, taking my punishment. Seeing the pain that I’d caused her was nothing short of torture. She should have hit me, slapped me—something, damn it. I deserved it all. But violence was not my Elli’s way. She couldn’t squash a bug, or even let me do it for her. Even as a kid, she’d made me release them outside.
Having her look up at me like she didn’t know me, like I was a stranger—a monster—nearly brought me to my knees.
“Baby,” I rasped, taking a step toward her, already reaching for her, because the distance between us was unbearable.
She took several steps back, almost cowering from me, like she thought I would physically hurt her. I froze, quickly having to swallow the howl of agony her reaction detonated inside me.
“Why would you do that to me?” she whispered.
“To protect you,” I told her honestly.
“You destroyed my dreams to protect me?” she demanded in disbelief as tears poured down her beautiful, pain-ravaged face. “You shattered my confidence, my sense of self-worth, my every hope of what my future would be to fucking protect me?”
“Yes.”
“From what?” she shouted.
“Me!” I combed my fingers through my hair to keep from touching her because I didn’t know what I would do if she flinched away from me again. “I had to protect you from me, baby.”
“I can’t believe you.” Laughing dryly, she shook her head. “You ripped everything away from me, and now you’re going to make up some pathetic excuse for your shitty behavior?”
“It’s not an excuse, Elli.” It made me sick to remember how fucked in the head I’d been back then. What a perv I’d been. If she’d been that close, I would have become the kind of man I didn’t hesitate to lock up for the max sentence. “Baby, you had just turned eighteen. The leash I had on my control was slipping more and more every day, and when you became legal, it only got worse. If you had stayed, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.”
“You were selfish,” she whispered.
“No, I was selfless,” I corrected, willing her to understand. “I was thinking of your future.”
“You destroyed my future!”
Frustrated because she didn’t want to see the truth, I snapped, “I gave you a goddamned Ivy League education.”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “Gave?” she repeated in a voice that made my heart lift into my throat. “You gave it to me?”
“I hated seeing you so down about the rejection letter, so I arranged for all the costs to be covered at Stanford. It wasn’t your first choice, but I made it up to you, Elli.”
“It was blood money.”
“Of course it wasn’t. You’re not listening, baby.”
And she still wasn’t. “You wanted me gone so badly, you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get me out.”
“I wanted to protect you so badly, I put the country between us so I couldn’t touch you.”
“No,” she denied, shaking her head so hard her hair flew around her face. “The only thing I have ever wanted more than Georgetown was you. If you had let me have both back then—”
“If I had touched you then, do you honestly think I would have been able to let you go off to school every day?” I yelled. “Where all those horny motherfuckers would covet and crave what was mine? I would have bound you to me and refused to let you out of my sight.”
“What’s changed since then, Judge?” She put her hands on her hips and glared up at me, hating me. “What is so fucking different about now?”
“You love me,” I answered truthfully.
She flinched. “Wh-what?”
“That night, downstairs in my office,” I reminded her. “You told me you love me. And I couldn’t—”
“You felt so guilty that you’d just fucked poor, stupid, gullible Elli, who loved and worshiped you, that you couldn’t keep withholding her dreams from her?”
“What?” I roared, shocked at the way she portrayed herself—at how she thought I felt about her. “No, baby. No. Stop. That’s not how it is.”
“You stop!” she screamed. “Stop lying to me and yourself. All of this, the entire time, it wasn’t because you wanted me or us. It was because I was stupid enough to tell you I was in love with you.”
“No. Listen to me, damn it. Elli, I…”
The door opening behind her had me trailing off. Mabel stood in the doorway, her face unreadable as she took us in.
“Mabel,” I muttered, warning Ellianna her mom was there.
Eyes stricken, she whirled around to face the older woman. “Mom—”
“I came to check on you, but you weren’t in your room. When I heard shouting, I was concerned,” Mabel explained, her expression still unreadable.
“I-I’m feeling much better now.” Even with her back to me, I could hear the forced smile in Ellianna’s voice. “How… Um, how is Miss Lindy?”
Grief flickered across Mabel’s face. “I’m about to head back over. Patricia told me you weren’t feeling well, and I wanted to see for myself if you were okay.”
“It’s fine. We’re fine.”
Mabel’s gaze shifted back to me, and I nodded. “I’ve got this under control.”
She stared at me for a long moment before stepping back. “We will talk in the morning.”
“Mom—”
“Tomorrow, Ellianna,” she said firmly. “You two figure out whatever this is that’s going on between you.”
Chapter 33
Ellianna
Seeing the disappointment on my mom’s face, the disillusionment in her eyes, hearing the defeat in her voice, broke what little was left of my heart.
All my life, I’d worked hard to never let my mom down, and in one crazy moment—one enormously stupid decision—that was exactly what I’d done.
As the door shut behind her, the weight of my failure pressed down on me. Two decades of trying to be the perfect daughter, to make her proud, wasted. And for what?