Bonds of Matrimony

by A C J McKechnie

  “No,” he said crisply, and she found herself even more confused.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you packing?” she hazarded and watched as he shot another quick glance her way.

  “Because I’m leaving,” he replied, and she found herself utterly bewildered.

  “I don’t understand,” she finally said and watched as he focused on her more fully. Snapping his gaze away, he zipped up the bag in his hands before slinging it over his shoulder.

  “I’m leaving,” he repeated.

  “To go where?” she asked.

  “Does it matter?” he asked as he locked his gaze onto hers, and she found her breath catching at the look there. He was serious. He was leaving. Leaving and not about to divulge to her his whereabouts. The truth that she’d been hoping she’d been reading too much into was crystal clear in his eyes as he stared at her. He was leaving. He was leaving her. He was leaving their marriage.

  “I don’t understand,” she said on an almost whisper as she tried to hold back her tears.

  “Yes you do,” he said with a rueful smile. “I can see it in your eyes,” he explained, and she found herself struggling to hear him over the beating of her heart in her own ears. “I’m leaving, Ellie,” he said more gently, and she just stood there completely at a loss for what to say.

  With a soft smile he turned to leave, and she shouted out, “Why?”

  “What?” he asked as he turned to look at her in confusion.

  “Why? Why are you leaving? I don’t understand. You’re not allowed to,” she pointed out as she remembered the terms of their ridiculous pre-nup. He couldn’t leave her. She couldn’t remember the consequences of such an action, but she knew that he wasn’t allowed to leave her. The same conditions that tied her to him, tied him to her.

  Studying her face, he remained silent, and she found herself holding her breath, almost hoping that whatever he said would give her some hope that she could change things, that she could convince him that he should stay. That she’d get more time with him, more time to have him fall in love with her. As much as she’d been angry at him last night, she’d thought over it all and had realized that she still loved the man. She still wanted her husband. And she still wanted to make their marriage successful. If he left, that would never happen. All her dreams would be gone.

  “Nobody deserves to be in a loveless marriage, honey,” he said softly. With a quicksilver smile he turned around, and she found tears starting to fill her eyes at such earnest and heartfelt words. He didn’t love her. After everything that had happened he didn’t love her, and he wasn’t going to stick around to try. He’d obviously concluded that it was hopeless for them. He’d never love her.

  As she stood there watching him leave she tried to control herself. Tried to keep herself together. Tried to not dwell on the fact that his footsteps were carrying him further and further away from her. As she heard the distinctive sound of his feet on the tiles of the foyer she found her brain kicking into gear.

  She had two years. Two years. He couldn’t divorce her until two years after they’d consummated their marriage. Two years from yesterday. He might think that he’d never love her, but they’d only had just over a month together. If she tried, tried really hard, they could have a chance. But she wouldn’t get that chance if she let him walk away from her.

  As urgency filled her veins and her brain scrambled about for what to say to convince him to stay with her and give their marriage a chance, Ellie dashed out of his room, running straight to the front door. Flinging it open, she found her breath catching once again as she spied his taillights heading out onto the street in front of their home.

  It was too late. She’d lost him.

  As the tears started to stream down her face, Ellie found herself collapsing onto the front step as the realization set in that her husband had left her. Left her and their marriage on Christmas Eve. Left her utterly alone and heartbroken.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Flinching from the sudden light streaming into her bedroom, Ellie turned away with a groan and burrowed back underneath her blankets.

  “This is ridiculous!” a sharp voice said, and Ellie peeked over the edge of her covers to see who had spoken to her. With a furrowed brow she took in the woman’s form before hiding again.

  “Go away, Tessa,” she mumbled and tried to stifle her tears yet again.

  “No, I will not. This is ridiculous. You’ve been hiding in here for four days now, it’s time to get up.”

  “He left me,” she sniffled and heard a heavy sigh on the other side of the sheets.

  “I know, Ellie. But crying in the dark isn’t going to help. You need to get up. Get up and get back to being the strong woman that I know you are.”

  “No,” Ellie mumbled before gasping as her covers were abruptly ripped away from her by a very angry looking woman. “Go away,” Ellie said again as she reached for her covers, only to find them thrown over towards her doorway where Pauline quickly gathered them up and headed back out of the room with them.

  “For goodness’ sake, Ellie, you’re pathetic,” Tessa said in disgust, and Ellie glared at the woman.

  “Well thank you for your kind words, now leave me alone.”

  “You haven’t showered, you don’t leave your room, you haven’t changed in four days, you don’t eat. You’re going to end up sick if you keep this up. And you smell.”

  “Again, thank you for such lovely words. Any chance that you’ll leave like I’ve told you to?” Ellie said with a frown at the other woman.

  “You can’t keep this up. I know you’re upset. Clearly you’re heartbroken, but it’s time to get over it. It’s time to do something,” Zachary’s sister continued, ignoring Ellie’s attempts to be left alone to wallow. “You can’t keep hiding out in your room. You have things to do. You have responsibilities now, Ellie,” the woman stressed, and Ellie found her brow furrowing.

  “What?” she asked in confusion. She didn’t have any responsibilities, the only responsibilities she’d had since marrying Zachary were those associated with being his wife, and seeing as he’d left her she now had absolutely nothing to do.

  “There’s a business counting on you. There are employees that are going to be looking towards you. Get up, get showered, and get yourself to work!”

  “I don’t understand,” Ellie said in bemusement. What the heck was Tessa talking about?

  With a sigh, the woman stared at her and scanned her face before obviously realizing that Ellie didn’t have a clue what she was referring to.

  “The pre-nup, Ellie,” Tessa said, and Ellie found her eyes widening.

  “How do you know about that?” she asked in surprise. Nobody was supposed to know about the document, it had been a condition in there.

  “I know. I’ve always known,” the woman added, and Ellie looked on in suspicion.

  “No,” she said with a shake of her head. “There’s no way you could have. Nobody knew about it.”

  “Well I did, but that’s not the point. He left you, Ellie. My useless fool of a brother decided to walk out on you, and in doing so he’s handed everything over to you.”

  “What?” she asked in confusion before shaking her head. Ever since that cursed charity ball her life had seemed like a dream. At first a glorious blissful dream, and then afterwards an utter nightmare. Now it seemed like one of those weird dreams that made no sense and left you waking up with a feeling of ‘what the heck?’.

  “The pre-nup, Ellie. That was what Zach forfeited if he left you. Everything he owned became yours,” she explained, and Ellie’s eyes widened.

  “What?!”

  “Precisely, so get going. Get showered and dressed. You’ve got a rather large and successful business to run, Mrs CEO.”

  “Surely it can’t happen like that. There’s a board. I can’t just go in and take over.”

  “For the moment you’ll have to, they have no choice but to let you run t
hings. You own the company, Ellie.”

  “But ... but I don’t have the first clue how to run a business,” she said before she shook her head. “That doesn’t matter, I’m not running his business. You’re wrong. Zachary would never hand his business over to me. He cares too much about it. He’d never do anything to jeopardize it,” she stated with a shake of her head.

  Looking back up at Tessa, she could see the woman’s serious face and swallowed hard. Had she really driven her husband away from the thing that he loved most? Had her actions that last night sent him packing, even knowing that he’d lose his business in doing so? No. No, Zachary wouldn’t give up his father’s legacy so easily.

  “Go get showered, Ellie,” Tessa said more gently. “Then we have a few things to talk through,” she added, and Ellie studied the woman in the room with her. Something more was going on. There was some underlying meaning to Tessa’s words.

  With no way of knowing what the woman meant, and no chance of being able to seclude herself in her comforting cocoon anymore, Ellie reluctantly got up out of her bed with a weary sigh and headed towards her bathroom.

  Entering, she found herself looking in the mirror and grimacing. Tessa was right, she was pathetic. Her face was a mess of dark circles under her eyes and red puffy eyes. Her skin was sallow and her hair was a greasy lumpy mess of tangled curls.

  Grimacing at the sight that she made, she shrugged out of her nightgown and stepped into her large shower. Standing under the water, she found herself enjoying the sensation while running everything through her mind that Tessa had just divulged to her. She couldn’t run a company. No way. She didn’t want to and she didn’t deserve to. What woman deserved to run a multimillion dollar empire for driving her husband away?

  No, Tessa must have been mistaken. But how did the woman even know about the pre-nup? Ellie doubted that it had been through Zachary, but how else would she have known? Something was going on here. Something odd and suspicious.

  Turning off the water, Ellie found herself looking into her mirror and smiled slightly at the sight. She might not be any better inside, but she darn well looked a lot better on the outside at least. Wrapped in her large and comfortable towel, she exited into her room and headed towards her clothing. She could see Tessa out of the corner of her eye and noted the small smile of approval on the other woman’s face where she was settled on the small couch at the side.

  Shooting a glance to her completely bare bed, Ellie was surprised when Tessa answered her unspoken question.

  “Pauline thought that a change of bedding was in order. She’s also going to bring up a tray of food for you,” she added, and Ellie just nodded in acknowledgement before bustling about and grabbing some clothing to wear.

  Exiting her closet area, now fully dressed, she grabbed up her comb and leave-in conditioner, and headed towards the other woman, ready to start figuring things out more fully.

  “Alright, I’m washed and dressed. Now what exactly is going on? How do you know about a document that only five people in this world are supposed to know exists?” she asked in suspicion and watched as Tessa’s eyes flashed briefly with guilt.

  “Because I wrote it,” she stated succinctly, and Ellie stopped with her comb midway down her hair to look at the woman in doubt.

  “No you didn’t. Zachary’s lawyers did,” she said carefully and watched as Tessa wrinkled her nose at the statement.

  “No. They didn’t. Well, they added a few clauses, but the majority of it was written by me and a lawyer friend of mine that Josh put me in contact with.”

  “Josh?” Ellie asked as she found herself confused by this strange turn of events.

  “Yeah. Josh. He’s known Zach forever, and he’s one of the few men that Zach trusts implicitly. I knew that he’d be trustworthy to go to for advice, so I told him that I needed a good family law lawyer, and he put me in touch with one. We devised the pre-nup.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ellie said in utter confusion. “Why did Zachary have you write the pre-nup?”

  “He didn’t. We gave him the pre-nup. Like I said, he added in a few extra clauses, but the majority of it was our idea.”

  “Our? Yours and Josh’s?” she asked in puzzlement, trying to grasp what exactly was going on here.

  “Ours. Me and your dad’s,” Tessa replied softly, and Ellie’s eyes widened at the statement.

  “What?”

  “It was our idea. Mine and your dad’s, Ellie. It was all our idea,” she said, and Ellie scrambled about in her brain to try to understand everything. Instead of coming up with an explanation she just stared at the other woman in blank confusion, hoping that at some point things would make sense to her.

  Recognizing her bafflement, Tessa continued, “I met your dad at the clinic that I work at. He came in, he hadn’t been feeling well. I saw him sitting in a chair, looking despondent. Despondent, depressed, and utterly heartbroken. You see the look a lot when you work in the health industry, but this was different. A lot of people are upset, are sad, are down because they’ve received bad news and they can’t cope with the idea that their health is damaged, that they haven’t got long to live, that something’s wrong. With your dad it was different,” Tessa explained, and Ellie sat there in utter shock at this turn of events.

  “Your dad wasn’t sad for himself,” Tessa continued with a soft smile. “I went up to him, concerned about him, and as I sat down he said, ‘She’ll be all alone’. I had no idea who ‘she’ was but I knew that his tears and his despair were because he loved someone else and didn’t want to leave them behind. As we spoke he told me all about you, Ellie. Told me about your mom and the life which you led. He told me all about how hard you worked, how much you cared about him, how much you looked after him, took care of him. He spoke about the fact that he couldn’t bear to know that you’d be left on your own. That you’d have nobody to look after you.

  “He was so worried, Ellie. So worried about your future. It was tearing him up. The doctors had told him that he didn’t have long. The cancer had progressed too far, was too wide-spread to do anything with except manage the pain. He didn’t care about that, he could cope with the physical pain, he could cope with knowing that he was going to die, but he couldn’t cope with the thought of leaving you behind and alone.

  “When he showed me your picture I was stunned at the sight before my eyes. You were gorgeous, absolutely beautiful. I told him that you wouldn’t be alone for long, and he laughed at that. It wasn’t comforting to him, he thought that somebody would prey on your grief, and you’d end up being used and abused by somebody. He said that if he could only know that you were well settled and cared for it would make it all easier.

  “We got to discussing you. He told me about your life, about your achievements, and I suddenly realized something. You were the perfect woman. The perfect woman for Zach. My brother, he’d been so wary of women, so distrustful of them. He had no time for them. As much as he loves our mom and cares for her, her and his dad’s actions damaged Zach. Damaged his perception of marriage and relationships. He wasn’t open to finding somebody, and I knew that he wanted one. He wanted a wife and family, but he would never find one himself, he’d never open himself up enough to get one. Or even leave his work alone for long enough to search one out or court one.

  “Suddenly the answer was obvious. I told your dad that I had the perfect man for you. He was skeptical. Boy, was he skeptical,” Tessa continued with a heavy sigh, and Ellie just continued to stare at the woman in utter bewilderment. “It took a lot of convincing. A lot. He’d heard of Zach, of course. Heard all about him and the rumors that abounded. It took weeks for him to finally trust me enough to really consider my proposal.

  “I had so much information gathered from those close to Zach. I had written affidavits, testimonials, statements about what a great guy he really was. I laid everything on the line for your dad. He knew all of Zach’s flaws, as well as all of his strengths. When he finally agreed that perhaps Zac
h was the right man for you, he suggested setting up a meeting between the two of you.

  “Well, I just laughed at that. It would never happen. Not in the timescale that your dad had to work in. I knew that Zach would come to love you, and your dad seemed convinced that you’d eventually fall for him if he was everything that I’d described, but it would take too much time. We needed a solution. A quick solution.

  “So I had an idea. Your dad wasn’t convinced, but I promised him that it was the way to go. So I sent him to my brother with photos of me. Photos that showed and proved the connection between Zach and me. And other photos, photos of me apparently in compromising positions with a friend of mine.”

  “The blackmail!” Ellie said with wide eyes. “It was your idea?! But you couldn’t have known that Zachary would demand a wife in payment,” she said in confusion and stared at Tessa. “Could you?”

  “No, Ellie, don’t you get it yet?” she asked in frustration. “The marriage was never Zach’s idea. It was ours. Your dad blackmailed him into marrying you,” Tessa said, and Ellie’s mouth fell open.

  “What?!”

  “Your dad’s payment to stay quiet, to not go to the press, was Zach’s marrying his daughter. He gave Zach the conditions of the pre-nup to ensure that the two of you spent enough time together to get to know each other and fall in love. He demanded an exchange, my freedom for Zach’s hand,” Tessa added, and Ellie’s eyes widened even further before anger took over.

  “How could you?!” she screamed at the other woman as she leaped up off the couch. “How could you do such a thing to him!?”

  “To who?” Tessa asked in confusion.

  “To Zachary! How could you do such a thing to me?! He thought that I was in on it! He thought that I was a part of it! I thought it was his idea! How could the pair of you do this to us!? You were playing with our lives!”

  “It was for your own good,” Tessa supplied, and Ellie stared at her in horror.

  “You think this was for our good?! Look around you, Tessa!” she railed with outstretched arms. “How good do you think things are here?! Zachary’s miserable! I’m miserable!”