Instead, she was ablaze with silent outrage.
The door slammed behind me, already in motion before I’d gotten a full look at her. I screeched to a halt, disoriented from the raw and unexpected fury simmering in the room, licking at me like piping steam.
“Do you have something you’d like to tell me, Margaret?” Her voice was still. Calm. Coiled to strike.
“I’d ask you the same question.”
Her eyes narrowed, the tension between us tightening painfully. “I gave you the chance to be honest. I told you to tell me the truth about your little secret or stop seeing him. But you didn’t, did you?”
I watched in horror as she opened the folder on her desk, removed a large photograph, and held it up in display.
A sliver of Marcus, visible through the crack of his closing door. Me, trotting down the stairs of his stoop with a blissful smile on my face and my coat slung over my forearm. It had been too warm for the coat, I recalled, and my scarf remained in my bag, right where I’d left it.
It was a stupid disguise anyway, I noted bitterly.
“Of all the betrayals,” she seethed, her voice quivering with malignant rancor. “A Bennet. Marcus Fucking Bennet.”
The fire in my belly for the fight I’d planned—for my accusations and refusals and rejections of her—was doused and left smoldering. In a split second, I tamped that knowledge down. If she wasn’t going to come clean, my accusation might do more harm than good. Telling her might throw Shelby under the bus and could possibly incriminate us all. I didn’t know what would happen, and until I did, there was only one matter to address.
The picture in her hand.
“You had me followed,” I said. “Of course you did. We thought you would.”
“We?” She nearly choked on the word, her eyes wild and ringed with white. “I knew that day in the courtroom, but I’d convinced myself you couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to fuck Marcus Bennet.”
“Mother!”
“You’ve told him everything, haven’t you? You’ve sold out your family, your mother, your birthright for a Bennet? Of all the revolting rebellions you could have pulled, this is indisputably the worst.” She stood, fueled by fury, walking so slowly, so raptorially around her desk and toward me, I instinctively moved backward to keep the space between us. “You have no idea what you’ve done, Margaret. You have no idea what I’ll do to them. You showed your hand, so certain I was bluffing. But you’ve made your choice. And so I have made mine.”
My mother came to a stop before me, judge, jury, and executioner.
“Get out. Get out of this building. Get out of my house. No daughter of mine would ever stoop so low as to fuck a Bennet just to get back at her mother. No daughter of mine would be so bovine and dense as to cross me in the most grievous of ways.” Her lip curled back, exposing her teeth in a sneer of pure and unfiltered hatred. “I’d rather have no daughter than to be yoked to you.”
I despised the pinch of tears at the corners of my eyes. The tear in my chest. The hot pain of rejection from the woman who was meant to love and protect me. Because even now, even after everything, I realized I still wanted her love and approval.
And I hated that most of all.
“I came here,” I started, every molecule in my body trembling, “to tell you I was leaving. Because your mistrust is poison. Your greed is revolting. The bitterness that makes up the whole of who you are disgusts me. All of this pain, all of this suffering, and all because you weren’t good enough for Paul Bennet.”
Time stop-started with a gasp, a shift, the swing of her hand, the sound of flesh against flesh.
The slap cracked in the air, snapping my head toward the wall, leaving my ears ringing and my cheek blazing with pain. But I refused to react, refused to cry or flinch or press a hand to my stinging face. Instead, I turned my gaze on her again, thankful she’d made all this so easy for me to walk away from.
“You shut your fucking mouth, you ungrateful bitch.” She gave me her back, saying stiffly, “Have your things out of my house by the time I return. And don’t think to step foot in this building again.”
With that, she sat, her attention wholly on whatever papers lay on her desk and whatever she wrote on them. Perhaps it was the contract for her soul. Though I suspected she gave that away long ago.
I took a final look at my mother and left her office for the last time.
The office bustled on from somewhere far away, everything distant, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I spoke to no one as I walked into my office and gathered my things. When I stepped into the packed elevator, I held my bag in front of me, taking up the smallest space I could. The revolving door dumped me onto the busy sidewalk, but no one saw me.
Into a waiting cab I slid, and off we went toward my mother’s house. There were two men in the world I wanted to see, and one waited behind that grand old door of the only home I’d known.
James opened the door, directing me with worried eyes to the kitchen where my father sat, typing away on his computer. Dad’s smile on hearing me enter instantly faded, and the second he wrapped his arms around me, I came unraveled. My numbness had been a levee, and when it broke, pain spilled out, filling every crack and space. He held me until my tears ebbed, then stopped, leaving me with nothing but a hitching breath and runny nose.
He sat me down and snagged a tissue box, tilting it in my direction. Gratefully, I took one. And while I mopped up my face, he took the stool at my side, hooking a heel on the foot rung, his face grave.
“Tell me what happened,” he urged gently.
“She found out.”
The breath he took was sharp and noisy. “I suppose we knew she would.”
With my nod, a strange feeling settled over me. Not of sadness, not of fear. “Mother had me followed—I was with him last night, and now she knows, and she called me in and … and … it’s over. It’s all over.”
Relief, I realized. The feeling was relief, tinged with shock and laced with disappointment. But that curious sensation was the weight of her control as it lifted, inch by precious inch. “I’ve been instructed to leave.”
And then he listened at my side while I regaled her invasion of my privacy, the fight itself, my intent to quit and her beating me to the punch.
I did not, however, tell him about what she had done to Bower.
I couldn’t tell anyone.
The knowledge of my mother’s crime was a curse. Now that I knew, it was my responsibility to act, to decide. Because of that knowledge, I was faced with a choice that shouldn’t have been mine to make. I didn’t know what the consequences would be for her if I went to the authorities, but they would be dire. And to be the one to pull the trigger, fire the bullet that would put my mother in the ground … it was too much to decide in an hour or a day.
I hated my mother for putting me here. I only wished I hated her enough to pull that trigger without remorse.
For now, I couldn’t tell anyone. The more people who knew, the more complicated things would get, and they were already labyrinthian. Not to mention my aversion to putting the responsibility I despised on someone I loved.
Once it was settled, they’d be the first people I called.
Until then, the burden was mine.
When I finished speaking, he spent a long moment watching me. I didn’t know if he’d be disappointed, if he’d scold or reprimand me. If he’d be upset or angry.