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Broken by Love (The Basin Lake Series Book 2)

Page 28

by Stephanie Vercier


  “What is this?” I say, having heard enough, moving quickly toward them and stepping around the corner, filled with a rage that I’ll do my damndest to control considering Madison and Shannon are women and not burly guys I’d love to take a shot at.

  “John,” Shannon says, stepping back, the expression on her face one of mortification.

  Madison’s eyes widen. “Umm… how long have you been here?” she asks, trying to work an innocent smile on me.

  “Long enough,” I get out through clenched teeth. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Madison lets out a breath. “Nothing! I was just talking to Shannon about you. I’m worried.”

  “That I’m doing coke?” I look over at Shannon. “God, I’m stupid. But at least I didn’t sleep with you.”

  “That’s not fair.” Shannon pushes past Madison and grabs my arm. “I really like you. I do!”

  “Sure. So, Madison didn’t put you up to befriending me?”

  She looks down and purses her lips.

  “What did you expect me to do, John?” Madison says, stepping forward. “You end our relationship after seven fucking years, and I’m just supposed to fade into the woodwork and not try to get you back?”

  “You and my mother,” I begin, my fists clenched. “You and her dug up that stuff on Emma. You fucked my life… it’s ruined without her.”

  Madison’s face turns from pleading to angry. “I fucked your life? I put seven years into you, making sure you didn’t hook up with another girl like Alicia, introducing you to people and creating contacts for you that will last a lifetime! You think I did that so you could dump me and make a fool out of me?”

  “I’m so out of here,” Shannon says, pushing past both of us.

  And I couldn’t care less. Shannon was a friend, but now she’s just another someone who tried to mess with my life.

  “You want a Ken doll, Madison. You want someone you can control and do whatever it is you have planned for them. I always supported you and what you wanted, but when it came to my dreams, you just kept tugging me back to what you wanted for me.”

  “So, now you’re going to be some defense attorney or work for a legal aid clinic all your life? God, what a waste, John. You could really be something… you could still be something. There’s still a chance for us.”

  I have to take several deep breaths to keep from punching my fists into the concrete wall just beyond us. “You won’t ever get it Madison. What you want is a business arrangement, not a marriage.”

  “That’s not true,” she says, stepping up to me and gliding her hand across my cheek. “I love you. I still do.”

  “And you’d love me if I worked at a legal aid clinic all my life? Would you love me if I was a defense attorney or a mechanic or a fisherman?”

  She pulls her hand away and steps back. “That’s not fair, John. You know you’re capable of more than that.”

  I release the tension in my fists. “It’s plenty fair,” I say. “Emma doesn’t care what I do. She loved me for who I wanted to be, not who she expected me to be.”

  Madison deflates, as if she’s finally accepted defeat. “I really did try, but I won’t compete with a girl like her. There are plenty of men who will appreciate this.” She points to herself and looks at me like I just passed up a multi-million-dollar prize.

  “I’m sure they will,” I say. “It’s just not going to be me.”

  For a moment, she just stares at me, then shakes her head, brushes past me and walks off while I stand and watch her disappear. It finally feels like something has clicked with her, that she is willing to accept that I’m not the man she tried to make me into over the seven years we were together. And even though I know she’s had a role in pushing Emma and I apart, deep down I just want Madison Gaines-Monroe to go her own way and be happy, out of my life, but happy.

  I do my shift at the clinic without saying a word to Shannon. I’m beyond pissed, at her, at Madison, at my parents and myself. But I push all of those things away and focus on my job, focus on the clients who can’t pay their rent because the breadwinner in the family got into an accident or the boy who got kicked out of his house for being gay and wants to know if he can make his family take him back because living on the streets is tough. Their problems are so much more immediate than my own, and it helps to troubleshoot for them, to offer them resources and give them answers they didn’t have when they walked in.

  “I’m so sorry,” Shannon says, coming up to me at the end of our shift. “I need you to know that.”

  “I don’t even know what to say,” I reply, gathering up my things, confused about what my next step in life is going to be.

  “Say that you don’t hate me?”

  I sigh. I don’t like to hate anyone.

  “I met Madison in late spring,” she says, taking my silence as an opening I guess. “I actually met you too, at that party up in Woodinville… at the vineyard?”

  I shrug, unsure I’d even remember the party. There had been so many of them when I’d been with Madison that they all bled together into heaps of hours full of superficial conversations, events filled with expectations, time suckers that would have gone on forever had I stayed with Madison.

  “Anyway,” she says, “it was brief, and I’d been blonde at the time, so I didn’t expect you to remember when you met me again as a brunette. I could tell that she liked to network the two of you as a team, but it was obvious to me your heart wasn’t in it.”

  “That sounds about right,” I say, my body beginning to relax.

  “Anyway, I was in touch with her occasionally—we went out for coffee once or twice. She was mostly interested in my family back in Omaha, in the potential business connection her family or your family could make with them. And when she found out I was volunteering at the legal aid clinic with you, that you and I had a class together, she asked me to pay close attention.”

  “To watch me,” I say.

  “Yes. It was obvious she wanted you back, so completely and totally obvious. But I started to feel things for you too… even more after you broke up with Emma.”

  An emptiness blows through me at the mention of the breakup, just like it always does. “That was a mistake. You know what my mother did to make that happen?”

  Shannon bites at her lip. “I figured most of it out. I’m not stupid. Something about a sex tape Emma did?”

  “She didn’t do anything,” I correct her. “It was the guy… the guy who took advantage of her.”

  “Yes, the teacher,” Shannon says. “The one our professor talked about in class?”

  I nod, my jaw clenched.

  “I had an inkling. Anyway, I didn’t have any skin in the game, you know? I didn’t care what Emma had done. Hell, I’ve done worse I’m sure. And I was done being Madison’s eyes and ears. I was just more interested in you.”

  I sigh. I’d been so weak.

  “And if I’d known you ever had a drug problem, I wouldn’t have offered you that coke.”

  “I don’t have a problem… I’m clean now. It’s just situational.”

  “Situational?”

  “Could you stop snorting coke tomorrow if you wanted to?” I ask her.

  She nods, somewhat hesitantly. “I think so. I don’t actually use it all that much.”

  “It’s situational then,” I say. “I’m not saying it’s okay, but I doubt you’d sell your firstborn kid for a line, would you?”

  I didn’t mean it to be funny, but at that she laughs.

  “Me doing that coke with you was in response to not being with Emma. But I need to be better than that. I need to be a man and not depend on a substance to take away my pain.”

  “You are better than that.” She reaches for me, but I stand up and move away from her.

  “If that’s true, then I need her to see it. She’s the only one that matters.”

  “You mean Emma of course.”

  “Yes… Emma,” I say plainly and succinctly.

  “You
should go to her, then” she says, a hesitant smile spreading across her face. “Real love doesn’t happen very often.”

  “No. No it doesn’t,” I say before offering a quick nod, then walking past her, unable to think anything else except that I’d had that love… and then lost it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  EMMA

  My mother, my father, Jennifer and her mother are all here. The precinct is uncomfortably familiar at first. It reminds me of that morning more than three years ago when I still loved Mr. Thatcher and was terrified that anything I’d say to the detectives would hurt him.

  “Hello everyone,” Detective Marshall says, looking no different than she did the first time I’d met her, her hair pulled back tightly, her outfit a gray suit, and a manila folder in her hand. “Emma, if you’re ready?” she says, nodding toward me.

  “You’ll be fine sweetie,” Mom says, taking my hand and giving it a grip.

  “We’ll all be out here,” Dad says with a strong, silent nod.

  “You’re very brave,” Jennifer’s mom says while Jennifer simply smiles at me, a warm smile that tells me I’ll be okay.

  The room Detective Marshall takes me to is different than the one I’d remembered being questioned in. This one has carpet and is painted in a warm tan color. There are pictures on the wall of Seattle, and the furniture looks comfortable. It’s a far cry from the gray, sparsely furnished room I’d been brought to three years ago.

  “It’s good to see you, Emma,” Detective Marshall says, sitting across from me. “You look healthy… happy. Not all girls who go through what you did come out so well on the other side.”

  “Thank you. I’m doing the best I can.”

  There is a laptop open in front of us, and she slides a flash drive into the side of it.

  “You have every right to see this of course, but I want to be sure you’re ready.”

  “I am.”

  It had been my idea to see the recordings Mr. Thatcher had made of us. When we’d first requested this of Detective Marshall, she’d asked me to reconsider, said it could be “emotionally damaging” for me to watch it. But Jennifer’s mother, myself and even my parents hadn’t relented. I needed to see them for closure. I needed to know what was on them before I faced Mr. Thatcher who I’m told is currently sitting in an adjoining room, here of his own volition and waiting to see me.

  She offers to stay, but I ask her to leave, and after taking a very deep breath, I push play. The images are shocking at first. Seeing myself as a sixteen-year-old girl again is strange, and it’s stranger yet to see Mr. Thatcher leading me through the hotel room and onto the bed. There is perhaps an over the top tenderness in him that I mistook for love—all the while he’d been recording me without my permission, violating my belief that what we’d done in that room would have remained wholly private, existing only in our memories.

  The video is fairly clear, the result of a nanny cam he’d apparently hidden on the desk in the room before he’d gone back down to the lobby to bring me up. I’d thought that odd at first, that he had me wait in plain sight, giving more people the chance to see him come back to get me. But nobody noticed or seemed to think it odd if they did. But when he’d come back for me and we’d gone to the room together, there were rose petals spread out on the bed, and it made perfect sense that he’d wanted some alone time to make things as romantic as possible. After that, I thought nothing of him repeating the same thing for our two following encounters.

  I’m surprised how calm I am in watching myself, in watching him and the two of us together. I’d loved him once, but not anymore. Not even these videos can bring back the connection we’d once had, a relationship built on lies, words of love from a man who should have known better, who I’m convinced must only think of himself.

  When the screen finally goes black, I have to take a few minutes to digest everything. Actually facing what has terrified me for the last three years lessens some of my anxiety about the videos, even if I still wished they didn’t exist at all. But they will no longer be monsters in my nightmares that grow bigger and more horrendous, fed by fear. They are just videos now, of a girl—me—who was experiencing love for the first time with a man who didn’t deserve that love, a man who I’m now ready to face.

  There is a knock at the door, and when I say, “Come in,” Detective Marshall enters back into the room.

  “Can they be destroyed?” I ask when she sits down.

  “They’re evidence,” she says. “It’s not customary.”

  “I’d feel better if they were,” I say, though I know I’ll be okay even if they aren’t.

  “I can look into that further,” she offers. “But did watching them bring you clarity… some peace of mind?”

  I nod. “Yes. They weren’t especially pleasant, but I’m not afraid of them anymore.”

  “And you still want to talk to him?”

  “I do.”

  “I’ll be here with you. The court order won’t allow you to be alone with him, and the no contact order will go right back into effect after this meeting.”

  “I’m aware,” I say.

  “Then, if you’re ready, I’ll just go and get him.” She pulls the flash drive out of the laptop and places it into the manila folder.

  And I wait.

  JOHN

  “Thanks for agreeing to this,” I say, my knee bobbing with nervousness and hitting the table above it several times.

  “We could have talked at the house,” Denny says, folding his hands on the table at the coffee shop we’ve spent countless hours over the years studying at.

  “I feel like an outsider there now. I sleep in my bed, but that’s about it. I miss Emma… so much.”

  “Are you going to tell me why you really broke up with her?”

  I take a few moments to organize it all in my head before I relay the apparent conspiracy my parents and Madison had to get Emma out of my life, one that only worked when Mom reminded me of what she’d done to Alicia and how she wouldn’t give a second thought to doing much worse to Emma.

  “A while back, Emma told me your Mom had a talk with her,” Denny confesses.

  “She never told me,” I say, hurt that Emma would have kept that from me, sad she’d thought she needed to.

  “She didn’t want to be the cause of more stress between you and your mom.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut and rub my fingers against my temples. “That figures,” I say, returning my attention to Denny. “Emma is always thinking of everyone else… that’s part of why I love her.”

  “I get it,” Denny replies, his expression empathetic. “And honestly, I did know about the teacher thing, third hand from Court. I didn’t give it much stock, kind of figured Madison was making shit up and spreading it around.”

  “Yeah… Madison. I think she’s finally done.” I go on to tell Denny about my discovery about Shannon and the confrontation with both she and Madison.

  “I’d say Madison really loved you… totally thought she did… but that’s more like obsession,” Denny says with a shake of his head.

  “More like I was her investment that went sour. I really think that’s all I was to her. Now she’s got to start all over again with someone who doesn’t mind being molded.”

  “It’s just crazy,” Denny says. “And what your mom did? That’s pretty much beyond the pale. I don’t even know where you go with that.”

  “For now, nowhere. I can’t talk to her… don’t want to. Dad has tried to force a conversation with me, but he just sat back and let Mom take the one person I love most in this world away from me.”

  Denny repositions in the chair opposite me and leans in closer. “That’s kind of passive, letting them take her away from you. Fight back. Tell Emma all of this, and she’ll understand.”

  “And risk my mom following through on her threat?”

  “It’s some murky stuff,” Denny says. “I may just be a med student, but if she goes too far with that, she might end up in jai
l.”

  I sigh. I’ve gone around in circles in my head, trying to decide just what my mom would actually be willing to sacrifice to keep Emma and I apart. “If it was only me, I’d call her bluff, but it’s Emma… and Mom isn’t dumb. She knew what fine line not to cross when she dealt with Alicia.”

  Denny frowns, and I can tell he’s thinking. “Well, why don’t you give Emma a voice in it, then? A doctor gives a patient a say in their treatment, even if it could end up killing them. So why not let Emma decide what she’s willing to endure to be with you.”

  “Endure? That sounds awful, that she’d have to endure anything just for us to be together is so damn unfair.”

  Denny shrugs. “Life is unfair, all around us. I did this case study the other day where a twenty-six-year-old woman with two small kids, a great husband, career—literally everything you could want—was diagnosed with ovarian cancer on a routine yearly physical. It spread so fast that she was dead in six months. That’s the kind of unfair that is permanent, John. But you and Emma have hope.”

  “That’s heavy, brutal in fact.”

  “I’m getting used to brutal. It comes with being in med school.”

  “So, I tell Emma everything I told you, and then what? Knowing her, she might just say yes to us while my mother goes on to ruin her life.”

  “How do you know her life isn’t already ruined by you breaking up with her?”

  I let out an embarrassed laugh. “I’m not sure I have that much control over her. She’ll get over me.”

  Denny sits back and shakes his head. “Sure, she’ll move on. From the times I’ve seen her, she’s trying to do just that, working and going to school, but there’s something missing. And even though I look back and think about seeing her dancing that first night at Rampage and wishing it was me, I have to admit that what’s obviously missing is you.”

  I lean forward, dragging my hands through my hair, hope trying to force its way into my head. “So I just ask her to walk into the fire with me?”

  “If she’s willing, then yes. All I can say is that if Emma loved me the way she loves you, I’d move heaven and earth to be with her. And if you’d stop worrying about her being too fragile to handle this, then maybe you’d do the same.”

 

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