Layla was there, feeding me more soup and crackers, not asking any questions either but mothering me quite efficiently.
I had no interest in saying anything anyway.
I had no interest in anything. Period.
In those few days when I mostly stayed in bed, barely lifting my head over the covers, life continued around me. Layla told me about Bessy's release from the hospital, the emotional first meeting between her father and Riley, the gig Danny scored with the Championettes in modifying Oakley Stead to fit the bill as home for the Rainbow Roof project, the new job she’s looking to do in her father’s family company now that Don had been fired, and finally the the new house she'd set her eyes on in Back Bay—a sore reminder of the house Brandon had gifted me for my birthday which would now likely stay empty for years to come.
Even though I’d offered no explanation, everyone in the house seemed to have figured out that any reference to Brandon, or even the mention of his name, wasn’t something I wanted to hear.
It must’ve been that one time I dragged myself out of bed to join them for breakfast and in the middle of eating a bacon quiche which Layla had so cheerfully prepared, tears started rolling down my cheeks so fast I could barely keep up with chasing them back with my hands. The three of them wordlessly stared at me, finishing their own breakfast, as I continued to fork through mine like there was nothing at all unusual about eating an exquisitely made quiche while your eyes leaked like faucets.
Layla narrowed her eyes on the tabloid Danny was reading before she snatched it and folded it close. Splattered on the front of it was a medium shot of Brandon standing against a podium, smiling faintly, headlined with the official announcement of his role as Maxfield Industries new leader.
The week after his birthday, Martin gathered the entire company in a scheduled general assembly announcing his formal resignation and the leadership changes that followed it, with Brandon and Francis both coming out on the forefront with their new roles.
I was supposed to be a guest to that assembly, standing by the sidelines and applauding proudly, and if anyone had noticed my absence, I wouldn’t know because since my cellphone died promptly after I arrived at my house, I hadn’t plugged it in once to charge it.
I dragged my ass back to bed and buried myself under the covers until an insistent nudge disturbed my nearly catatonic state.
Layla’s disapproving expression greeted me the moment I shoved the covers down and I just raised a brow at her, waiting to hear what she clearly wanted to say.
“Life occasionally sucks but if there’s one person I think would take it in stride, stubborn grin and spunk and all, it’d be you,” she said without preamble. “Get your ass out of hiding, Charlotte, because while you may occasionally run for cover, you don’t back out of a fight.”
“I don’t know what I’m fighting for,” I admitted feebly.
“Don’t you?” she asked, mocking me with a smile, before leaving me alone.
I stared at the ceiling and cursed Layla over and over again.
When a person was tired, from all the running and all the fighting that she had to do most of her life, couldn't people just leave her be?
No matter what I do, I lose anyway. I always lose. I don't know why I ever bother.
For all my half-full, half-empty philosophies, I couldn't even summon the desire to look at my glass and see where I was at.
It was hard to care when nothing would ever freaking matter anyway.
I slept throughout the night, if you could call staring at the wall while your mind shut down sleeping, but the next day I showered and got dressed, volunteering to get groceries.
I walked the five blocks to my old, favorite local store but it wasn't long before I noticed Gilles not-so-discreetly following behind me. Seriously, the dude was in casual jeans and a windbreaker but he had 'bodyguard' written all over him.
I sighed and stopped in my tracks, turning to him and waiting until he stopped in front of me.
"Hey, Gilly." I smiled at him—at least I did in my mind—not sure how that looked from his perspective. "How long have you been watching the house?"
"Since the morning you left," was his simple answer as we resumed our walk. "Today's the first time you stepped out."
I shrugged. "I was getting tired of the vampire tan I acquired. Thought I'd get some sun and groceries."
"Felicity would appreciate it if you returned one of her calls," he said. "She's frantic but I assured her I'd keep an eye on you so she can keep going to school."
I grimaced. "I'll call her."
"She's not the only one worried about you," Gilles added. "We all are."
I smirked, not quite saying out loud that I knew the only exclusion out of that generous 'we'.
"You can tell them you've seen me and that I seem to still possess all the necessary limbs and brain power to function," I said lightly. "They shouldn't worry about me. I'm fine."
Gilles inclined his head respectfully. "You'll have to pardon me if I disagree."
I raised a brow and tsked at him. "Gilles, it'll never do for you to disagree with your boss. I could still fire you, you know?”
“Alright. Consider me resigned then,” he said solemnly. “Now, let me say that from the looks of things, you are not fine. Neither is Brandon.”
The humour drained out of me at his name.
“I’m not allowing you to resign so you can’t keep telling me things I don’t want to hear,” I grumbled.
When he didn’t say anything, I sighed out loud. “I saw his picture Gilles, at the company assembly. He looked as every new CEO should—impossibly important and sufficiently smug. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy whose wife just left him.”
The words had never left my mouth until today and it had the feel of acid for a mouthwash.
I left him. I left Brandon. Why? Because he let me.
“Did Brandon ever strike you as the kind of man who would suffer his pain in public, especially when several hundred employees who admire him and depend on him are watching?” Gilles asked with such quiet precision that I glared at him.
“No,” I bit out.
Brandon wouldn’t let anyone down—not when he could do something about it, not when he could fix it.
Except that when he tried to fix me, he broke us instead.
I took a deep breath, stopping on my tracks again, blinking at the surge of tears pooling around my eyes and trying to fan my face with my hand.
Gilles took out a neatly folded handkerchief and gave it to me.
I rubbed the handkerchief over my eyes until I practically hiccupped away the last of my tears.
When I finally peeked over the now soggy piece of linen, Gilles was looking at me with helpless concern.
“I wasn’t crying,” I told him with a stubborn sniff. “I was merely exhibiting a natural bodily process of flushing out toxins from my system.”
“By toxins you mean your misery and by exhibiting it you mean crying,” Gilles said with a raised brow, clearly unconvinced.
“No.”
He shook his head and sighed. “I hate to say this but for someone who doesn’t take any of it, you just gave me a whole lot of bullshit.”
I blinked, struck dumb by Gilles’s comment. “I beg your pardon?”
He started walking forward though, beckoning me over, completely ignoring my appalled reaction. “I’ll accompany you to the grocery store, Mrs. Maxfield.”
I glared at him and decided that even though I wasn’t going to admit it in this lifetime, I knew exactly what he’d meant.
***
I decided to get busy.
When you were too busy doing something, you didn’t have time to think about anything else. When you were tired to the bone, you didn’t spend the night awake, thinking of all the things that went wrong.
So in the next few days, I cleaned, cooked and did chores like I used to. I also helped Layla pack up what little she, Riley and Danny had brought with them while sta
ying in my house. They moved into the new townhouse she got that weekend. Don disappeared out of the public eye when Layla filed for divorced on the grounds of domestic violence which caused an uproar of reactions. The media was all over it, and thank God she’d moved into her new place when that happened because while I was proud of her courageous move and wanted to support her all the way, I didn’t want to deal with reporters when they get wind of the fact that I was staying at my old house.
With the move done, I was left alone in my eerily quiet childhood home where ghosts of the bitter past competed with those that haunted my present life. Determined to drown them out, I threw myself into the preparations for next weekend’s Masquerade Magnifique, practically spending most of my day out in the old house out in the country doing everything from building sets to making snacks for all the workers. The Championettes seemed to sense that something else was going on with me but they didn’t say anything except for Catherine who told me in a disdained voice that even though I was part of the board, I wasn’t actually required to get my hands dirty.
Danny, either by some sheer slick sales talk or old-fashioned nepotism, scored the gig to volunteer some of his expertise in staging Rainbow Roof for the masquerade ball. In the days I’d spent in the same house with him, I noticed not one lick of alcohol and I’d known where to look. He’d packed on a few pounds and didn’t look like he was on the verge of wasting away.
Purpose, apparently, had some real sobering effect.
He drew up plans, worked charmingly with the event-planning team, and called up old contacts like the last few years of his life hadn’t happened. I thought about asking him for tips because I’d like to forget the last awful decade of my life—some parts of it anyway.
“Are you sure about the horse carriage?” I asked him again for probably the tenth time as we stood and watched a couple of our contractors build a set of four small gazebos that were going to be spread out by the entrance. They were part of this magical woods-like theme that guests were going to stroll through on their way to the party. They would be surrounded with firefly lights, a couple dozen large potted trees we were renting, a few unique water features and some smoke effect.
“It’s the old-fashioned way to arrive at a ball,” he answered, flipping through his clip board to check on the sketch he’d done of the entrance. “It’ll seem like a fairy tale night, I promise you.”
I glanced up at the house which now somehow gleamed under the mid-day sun after a thorough cleaning and primping. “I thought the house was beautiful as it was but I have to say that the small changes we made to it made quite a difference.”
“Just because we wanted to make it better, it doesn’t mean it was broken or bad before,” Danny said distractedly as he scribbled something down.
“It’s still missing something though, isn’t it?” I said quietly.
Danny looked up and narrowed his eyes at me as if peering at me through a magnifying glass. “I don’t really know what happened to you, Charlotte, but you’ve been acting like a broken doll. Nothing like the woman who showed up at my door, demanding me to let her see Riley.”
I laughed wryly. “A broken doll. How fitting. Are you going to suggest a fix too?”
“This sounds like a trick question.”
I smiled. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“What are you so peeved about?” he asked.
“Fixing things.”
Danny snorted. “But you like fixing things. When I first met you that night you and Brandon showed up at my door, it was easy to see the list you’d started in your head of things you wanted to fix about me and Riley. I don’t always like interfering people but I realized that if I, myself, hadn’t fixed what was wrong all these years, then I probably really can’t. I figured, what could it hurt if I let someone do it?”
“There’s a line you shouldn’t cross,” I argued.
“If you think something needs to be done, something that you know will make someone better or happier, even though they don’t quite know it yet, would you really stop at that line?”
I opened my mouth to instantly answer but I found myself flapping it open and close like a fish because really, I knew the answer to that and I didn’t even have to think about it.
The realization made me painfully aware of my own hypocrisy.
The girl who recites the rule book of life even in her sleep can't take her own advice. The irony of it.
Preferring not to ask myself questions I might already know the answers to, I wandered away and kept myself busy until it was dusk by the time I popped my head out of the house.
Instead of finding Gilles, who often dropped me off in the morning and came back to pick me up at the end of the day, I saw Jake leaning against the hood of his car instead, his arms crossed, his expression angsty.
My heart grew heavy.
As much as I liked seeing Jake, the sight of him reminded me of my crumbling marriage. He was, after all, the alleged lover my husband was very certain I betrayed him over.
My life had become one bad soap-opera.
“Did you scare Gilles away?” I asked as I walked up to him.
“I told him I’d give you a ride home,” Jake answered, not moving from where he stood. “After you and I talked.”
I cringed. “This doesn’t sound like a conversation I want to have.”
“I don’t imagine there are a lot of conversations you want to have these days, Char. You’ve been hiding all this time, after all.”
Jake’s green eyes were sharp and serious as he narrowed them at me. “You and Brandon disappeared right after that weekend, most of us thought you’d gone on an impromptu trip to your beach house—which would’ve explained why neither of you were answering any of our calls or messages. I knew you had a fight at the party, with your mother’s appearance and all, and I thought maybe you made up and went away somewhere, because honestly, who would ever think that there’s ever anything that can stand between you two? But then Brandon shows up on Wednesday morning for Martin’s announcement and you were nowhere to be found. He was practically growling at the mention of your name.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t rip your throat out right there.”
Jake raised a brow and tilted his head at an angle, catching a shaft of light that illuminated the angry bruise on his jaw. “He very nearly did when I came to see him after work yesterday. I was going to talk to him about Tessa, because I wanted it out in the open so she knows just how dead serious I am about us, but not only did he yell at my face and shove me out of his way, he made me chase him down the parkade where he finally turned on me and attacked me like a fucking madman.”
Jake was furious, alright. Not that I blamed him. He had no idea why his best friend wanted to tear him into pieces.
“Did you hit him back?” I asked faintly.
I saw his jaw clench as he took a moment to answer. “No, I didn’t.”
“Why not?” I was genuinely surprised. Even though Jake was an easy-going guy and incredibly loyal to Brandon, he wouldn’t take crap from anybody, especially from his best friend.
“Because I’ve never seen him so defeated like that.” Jake sighed, his shoulders slumping. “He was angry but he kept swinging like he was blind—like whatever he was fighting wasn’t right there in front of him but somewhere he couldn’t reach. He kept trying anyway until he wore himself out, which didn’t take long. He looked like shit, if you ask me.”
I released the shaky breath I didn’t realize I was holding, blinking rapidly against the tears that were stinging the back of my eyes.
It was useless, anyway. Jake was watching my every move and he wouldn’t miss a thing.
“I thought he found out about Tessa but he didn’t say anything about that. And since he wouldn’t offer me anything else but his fists, I left him and searched you out,” he continued, relentless even as I started gasping in some air to loosen the sudden tightness in my chest where my sobs gathered. “When it became clear that no on
e else had heard from you all week, I tracked down your assistant and demanded answers. She said all she knew was that you were staying at your old house and refusing to see anybody. When I couldn’t find you there, I crashed a food-tasting at Clifton House and interrogated some Championettes for your whereabouts and they led me here.”
I managed a laugh through the tears that were spilling down my cheeks. “You should get out of p-publishing and be a private investigator—although you l-lack subtlety.”
He didn’t even smile. He just scowled at me as I cried harder, before putting an arm around my shoulders and pulling me in for a comforting hug.
“What happened, Charlotte?” he asked, barely audible through the sobs that were bursting from me.
I told him the truth—all of it—and while the truth liberated something inside of me, it opened the floodgates that were already near-bursting.
It devastated me but I had to.
He was unwittingly thrown into the fire like a pawn in a sinister chess game. He should at least know why.
Jake listened through my broken explanation, fragmented into parts by episodes where I just kept crying for a while before I could continue with another word.
When it was over, he was grim-faced. I expected him to curse to hell and back but he just patted my cheeks dry and grasped my shoulders firmly as he looked me straight in the eye.
“We’ll tell Brandon the truth,” he said, like a coach explaining a complicated but critical strategy in an all-too-important game. “We’re going to tell him to get his head out of his ass and then we’re going to tell him the truth. And he’s going to listen if he doesn’t want me to pound it into his brain. And then we’re going to find that sick bastard who took all those photos and started this propaganda and we’re going to bring down the wrath of God on him.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter, Jake.”
“Of course, it matters!” Jake threw his hands up into the air, stupefied. “I’m not going to let some manipulative moron destroy my friendship with Brandon. I’m not going to let a scheming asshole ruin any chance I have with Tessa. Most of all, I’m not going to let some sadistic son of a bitch hurt you like this, Charlotte—not when all that you’ve done that led up to this mess was to try and help people who were in very bad situations. That would be the biggest injustice of all.”
The Mischievous Mrs. Maxfield Page 91