by Q. B. Tyler
I slam my hands on his desk and lean forward. “A YEAR AND A HALF?” I back up and begin to pace the length of his office. “‘If we split up, who’s going to watch out for Michael?’ You said that, when I first wanted to leave. You said those words, and it shook me to my core. You knew he was dead. You played into my fear to keep me in this marriage! You fucking asshole!”
“Wait a minute, Charlotte. I didn’t—”
“Don’t lie to me, don’t you fucking dare sit here and lie to me.” I take a step closer. “YOU OWE ME THAT MUCH. You wasted a fucking year of my life. YOU OWE ME THE TRUTH. You let me think he was out there, waiting for me. That I needed you or he would come for me.” The tears are falling down my face and a part of me is so angry for letting him see me cry. I wanted to be strong and confident but it’s still so raw. The pain is deep.
“How—who even told you that? Where are you getting this information?”
“I hired a private investigator of my own,” I say. “I didn’t think you’d continue looking into Michael so I wanted to have it in place for when we broke up.” I shrug. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“Who is this guy?” he asks, and I’m getting angry all over again by the fact that he’s avoiding the issue and not answering my questions.
“Answer my questions,” I grit out.
“How do you know he’s not ripping you off? I’ve worked with my guy for years…you know that.”
“Oh, and you’re telling me that he keeps reporting that he’s alive? That you’ve been paying upwards of ten thousand dollars a month and he’s just been feeding you lies on his whereabouts?”
“Charlotte,” he says standing, but I put a hand up. “I would not come within kicking range of me because your ability to have kids will be put into jeopardy.” I cock my head not passing up the opportunity to throw in his face one of the many reasons we are divorcing. “Guess it doesn’t matter though, it’s not like you want them anyway.” He stops, heeding my warning. “You lied to me. You lied to me about something BIG. This isn’t…there’s nothing you could have done to me that was bigger than this. You tainted the one thing that made you a hero in my eyes. The one thing that made me feel that deep down you were a good guy. Despite how you’ve treated me, I thought on some level you cared about my well-being.”
“I do—”
“Bullshit,” I interrupt him. “My overall well-being. That includes my mental health, and you know that deep within me I still feared Michael coming after me and ending my life. And you let me go on thinking that was a fucking possibility. So, what? I would lean on you? Need you? Stay with you? Are you that pathetic? That desperate for the love of a woman that you’ll take someone who stays with you for that reason only? I should have left you. Months ago. Probably a year. But I was scared. And you exploited that.” I see the moment that the sadness in his eyes turns to anger and I clench my fists wondering if he’ll actually try and put his hands on me.
Try me.
He doesn’t move toward me and I shake my head. “You honestly have nothing to say for yourself?” He’s quiet and looks out the window, his hands buried deep in his pockets. I shake my head. “Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to look at me either,” I say before I turn on my heel and walk out the door, the tears flowing down my cheeks faster with each step.
I hear the ding of the elevator and I’m walking to my car when I see Will still parked a few spaces down. I get into the car and start the engine. I half expect him to appear at my car to rip me a new one, but I’m sure he suspects there are cameras covering every inch of this fancy garage.
I drive for about ten minutes when I pull into an empty park parking lot. I’ve barely turned off the ignition when my door opens and Will is pulling my seatbelt off of me and yanking me from the driver’s seat, hard.
“Get the fuck in the car, Charlotte.” I do as he says wondering why he didn’t just join me in mine.
“I know you’re mad—” I start.
“Mad? No, Charlotte, I’m furious. What the fuck did you do?”
“You have to understand how I feel, Will. You’re a shrink.”
He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What did you tell him?”
“Nothing about you. This isn’t about you or us right now, believe it or not.”
He snorts. “We’ll come back to that smart-ass comment in a second. You just ran to his office and showed him your entire hand, you could have used this to your advantage.”
“See, you’re not getting it. I don’t care about blindsiding him or using anything to my fucking advantage. This is my life, Will. These are my feelings. And I’m not interested in discussing this with my lawyer or Matt’s lawyer. I wanted answers from Matt. I wanted to yell and scream and…I wanted him to see and feel my raw anger. I didn’t want to wait and calm down, so what, he would get levelheaded Charley? Fuck that! He deserves my anger and my pain. My devastation over being deceived by the man I trusted the most!”
“I get that, Charley—”
“And I can still use this to my advantage, Will. I’m going to tell my lawyer.”
He looks out the window. “Where did you say you heard the information from?”
“I said I hired a private investigator of my own since I was worried that he wouldn’t keep looking into my supposed living stepfather. Why are you asking me all of this? I confronted him, he had nothing to say. It gave me my answer. Why does it matter how I found out?”
“Because it matters, Charlotte! You are getting divorced. Everything. Fucking. Matters.” He rubs his forehead and looks at me finally. “Did you hit him?”
“No.”
“Did he touch you?”
“No”
“How did it end?”
“I walked out when he had nothing to say. He barely said anything the entire time I was in there. He just kept asking how I knew, asked if the guy was lying…” I look at him. “You’re sure about all of this?”
“Yes,” he says and grabs the folder that he pulled out earlier but never opened. “Here,” he says softly, his anger subsiding now that he knows things didn’t go as bad as he was thinking. “You promise me he didn’t touch you?” he asks as I begin to thumb through the overwhelming amount of evidence that Michael Taylor no longer walked the earth. I nod and he leans back in his seat. “You’re going to kill me, Charley.”
“Sorry,” I say, although we both know that I’m not.
“We’ve talked about that.” I smile faintly at his inability to stop being a counselor for two seconds. “You’re going to need to tell your lawyer.”
“I know.”
“Today.”
“Fine, Will.” I try to keep the irritation out of my voice.
“That was risky,” he says after a few moments. I don’t reply because I don’t know how to. “Do you feel better?”
“I’m glad to have the truth out in the open. I’m glad that he knows that I know the truth.”
He nods again and the awkward silence becomes deafening. It feels like there’s a mountain of unsaid words between us and neither of us are making the first attempt to climb. “It’s not about you or us, believe it or not?” he says, repeating my words back to me. “What the hell was that about?”
“I just meant I hadn’t told him about you. At this point he’ll probably drop the cheating hypothesis as he doesn’t even have a leg to stand on. He’s a lying, manipulative bastard. Glass fucking houses,” I grit out. “I dare him to keep accusing me without proof.”
I’m exhausted. The adrenaline from the last hour and a half is wearing off by the second and I wonder after rage if there’s a sixth step: exhaustion or maybe defeat. I’m exhausted, I’m drained, I feel like I’ve run a marathon, and I just want to crawl into bed and sleep for a week. He nods and I know that he has something to say. “What?”
“It’s just the way you said it that’s all.”
“The way I said what?” I say, not able to curb the irritation in my voice.
“Don
’t pick a fight with me, Charlotte.”
“I’m not.”
“You are, and I’m not giving in to this bullshit. Everything about this situation affects us, every decision you make affects me too, whether you want to admit it or not, because you have this fear of repeating the cycle of being the wife of someone who doesn’t give a shit. But we are in this together, Charley. I give a fucking shit.”
I bite my bottom lip as tears pool in my eyes and I almost want to get out of the car and leave. But the fear of not knowing when I’ll see him again stops me. Sure, I’m pissed right now, but in two hours I’ll want him to hold me and tell him I love him and I may not have that luxury. So fast-forward two hours. I move toward him and despite his fuck off demeanor his rigid posture softens dramatically when I climb into his lap. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. And I actually am this time. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You’re right, you shouldn’t have.”
My hands find his face and I slide them across his cheeks and into his hair, pulling his head down toward my lips. He plants a kiss on them and when I try to slide my tongue through his he stops. “Charley.”
“What?”
“You should get home.”
“Why?” I ask as I begin to kiss his neck, my tongue rubbing the skin just over his pulse point.
“Because we are in a park in the middle of Atlanta.”
“So?”
“And it’s two in the afternoon.”
I shrug and he shakes his head. “This is not lying low.” I guess, but I’m feeling vulnerable right now and I need you.
“We can talk on the phone, but I think we’ve played with fire enough times today.”
I pull out of his arms and I can still feel the wall between us as I move toward my door. “I’ll be at Lauren’s.” I place one final kiss on his lips. His coldness feels a bit like rejection and I want out of this car that is making me feel as if the walls are closing in by the second.
* * *
IT’S BEEN A WEEK, OR as I like to refer to it, twenty-one days left, when I’m sitting in my lawyer’s office waiting for him to wrap up a final meeting so we can talk about a few things. I had told Cromack about Matthew’s yearlong lie and he was almost drooling over the information.
“Hell, that man is literally trying to throw money at you,” he’d said, and I could see the dollar signs flash in his eyes. Although he is handling the case pro-bono, the amount of the settlement does count toward his end-of-year bonus, so I’ve read from some research. And when the numbers start getting up around where my settlement will be, the bonuses look a lot like yearlong salaries. I’m a little early so I pull out my Blackberry to find messages from Will. Things have gotten back to normal between us, after that day when I learned about Matt. The next day we both apologized for our tempers, our words, and our actions, and chalked it up to dealing with this shitty situation the best way we can.
One thing did come out of that though. We are on the same team, the same side no matter what; turning against each other isn’t an option. He showed up at Lauren’s house that night with flowers and pizza, and we watched a movie with Lauren, then retired to my room and made love for hours. I couldn’t even stop the tears from falling when he woke me around 4 a.m. to slip out of my bed. You’re so close, Charley. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I haven’t seen him since then and we are both climbing the walls.
Will: Skype sex later?
Me: Absolutely.
Will: Great. Bring your vibrator. The pink one.
I smile thinking about the video I sent him this morning of me masturbating with it. Not only did I masturbate, I did it to completion, giving Will a very up close and personal look of my orgasm as his name left my lips. Needless to say, it resulted in immediate phone sex, and intermittent “sexts” throughout the day.
I go to send him another text when Cromack walks through the door. “Charlotte Pierce.”
“John Cromack,” I giggle and his face, usually cheerful, is stoic.
I’m not stupid; Cromack is usually so happy to see me because this case is pretty much a cakewalk and it’s making him look damn good to the partners. When he sees me, our chats usually consist of what I’ve done that day, questions about what to do about his rebellious teenage daughter, or if I’ve seen my secret boyfriend. But right now, he does not look pleased.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
He eyes me, running his finger over his bottom lip. “I think I underestimated you.”
“What?”
“You’ve played all of this perfectly. If you’d be willing to take the LSATs and go through three years of law school, I’d say you’d make one hell of a lawyer.”
“I don’t understand.” I take that to mean I’m a good liar? Good at manipulation? Going straight to hell?
“I asked you from the beginning if there was anything about this case that would surprise me. I said no surprises, Ms. Pierce.”
“I—I don’t know what I’m hiding from you,” I whisper softly and in this moment I don’t.
“Tell me about your marriage counselor,” he says, crossing his arms in front of him and I know without a shadow of a doubt he knows.
“Your face tells me all I need to know, Ms. Pierce. So, what are we going to do about our communication problem? Because…when I told you I would be meeting with your marriage counselor, it didn’t behoove you to tell me that he’s the man you’ve been sleeping with for five months? You didn’t think that was important to mention?! Before I went into a meeting with him and your husband’s goddamn attorney!” he shrieks, and I wince.
“I—” I sigh. “I’m sorry. I just… Will said he could keep it together and that you wouldn’t be able to tell.” Tears well in my eyes, knowing that this is all about to blow up.
“Oh, you couldn’t. Stein is none the wiser. Your boyfriend played it well. Wasn’t too biased. Made pretty general, blanket statements. Even said some things about you…not sure if it was just to even the playing field or due to doctor-patient confidentiality. Regardless, I only know because I started thinking about the coincidences.”
“Coincidences?”
“Like, your marriage counselor being the son of one of the partners here. But then I thought well, you know, maybe he just felt bad and offered to help her out by putting her in touch with someone here. Not a conflict of interest; it’s his job to help out either party of the marriage and if your husband already had the attorney you would certainly need help finding a good one. But then…why would I be doing this pro-bono? Of course,” he crosses his arms, “this case is no longer pro-bono due to this recent chain of events. But then I remember Montgomery—his father—wanting to speak with you, and hearing rumblings that day that his son was in the building. He’s around from time to time for divorce cases, so it’s not unheard of for him to be in the building. But then seeing him during our interview, it just all clicked. It was just a hunch and I was only about eighty percent sure, but you confirmed it.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I whisper.
“Mmmhmm,” he says and I wonder if he hates me now. I look up to see him stroking his beard and looking at me from over his glasses. “You’re a ballsy lady, Ms. Pierce.”
I clear my throat. “What happens now?”
He shrugs. “Nothing. We go about business as usual. We continue the proceedings as we have been.”
“What did Will say?”
“A lot of psycho-babble generic bullshit to be honest. There’s only so much he can say without violating your doctor-patient confidentiality and also without implicating himself on top of that.”
I thumb the hem of my dress and look up at him. “Your attorney-client privilege only applies to me though, right?”
“Mmmhmm,” he says, steepling his fingers under his chin.
“Well are you—I mean…” I stumble over my words. “Are you going to tell anyone?” My hands begin to shake as I think about this entire thing blowing up in our faces whe
n we are this close.
“Ms. Pierce, Dr. Montgomery did not tell me anything. If he would have said, ‘I have been sleeping with this woman for months,’ then Stein would have left me in his dust as he raced to the ethics board. But he didn’t. I had a hunch and you confirmed it. You, Ms. Pierce. And as you said, you and I have attorney-client privilege.”
I nod getting his point.
My secret is safe.
Will’s secret is safe.
We are safe.
At least for now. Thank God for loopholes.
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me, Ms. Pierce. It’s my job. And thanks to your marriage counselor not being able to control his erections around his patient’s wife, you’re about to make me a very rich man. Well, more so than I already am,” he chuckles.
Great, so he’s probably gone to Will’s father shouting accusations. Hell, J.R. probably confirmed it long before I did. Ergo, a hefty chunk of change that the firm probably did not want to part with. “Lawyer hat off, still attorney-client privilege,” he says, “but I know you don’t have any decent father figures so I have to ask…you sure you know what you’re doing?”
I let his question sink in, wondering what in the world I should say. I go with the truth. “No, I don’t.”
“I admire your honesty, Charley.” He pauses, and I smile thinking about how this is the first time he’s called me Charley. “Do you love him?”
“More than life itself.”
“He feels the same about you?”
“Yes.”
“Let me ask you something,” he starts. “What are you going to do when this is all over, you’re divorced, you’re free, you’ve got more money than sense,” he says waving his hand around, “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…”
“Be with him? Get a job? Try to regain some normalcy.”
“Mmmhmm, and are you planning to stay in Atlanta?” he asks and I wonder where this line of questioning is going.