Tamara could’ve screamed.
“I am not siding with anybody, mama. I just want this to be over. Daddy, maybe you could take Tricia home?”
“Home!” yelped Leticia, and Tamara cursed her own choice of words. That had been unfortunate.
“Mama, please. Dad, what the hell were you thinking!”
“My heart! My heart!” cried Leticia, and Tamara grabbed her mother’s wrist, checking her pulse.
“I’ll have to give her a sedative. And you need to go, both of you. Where’s Terry?”
Donald perked up a bit.
“Ah, yes, it’s a good time for you to lean on him. He told me that you might be getting back together. He has this wonderful business opportunity, Tammy...”
Tamara looked at her father and wondered how a man could be so self-centered. Of course he got along so well with Terry. They were almost the same person.
It was a bit mortifying to realize that she'd married a man who was essentially her father. It had only taken her a couple of decades to realize something that evident.
Leticia had started crying, loud, wracking sobs that had Tamara worrying if she could handle this at home.
“Mama, look at me. Look at me, that’s right. I'll give you a sedative, and we’ll get you into bed, okay? I’m sorry, mama. I’m sorry about all of this. Tricia, please, you need to leave. And tell Terry that I’ll be talking to him.”
“Now Tammy, I have the right to...”
“I don’t care. I don’t care what you have the right to do. Your rights are not my concern right now, do you understand, daddy? I couldn’t care less about your rights. I need you to take Tricia and go away. How could you do this to her? How could you do this to her and to mama? And me, daddy? How could you do this to me?”
Tamara moved fast, getting the first aid kit in which she kept the sedatives, and handed the pill to her mother. Honestly, an injection might have worked better, but the idea would have worried her mother and she didn’t need to be any more worried than she already was.
Tamara watched as her father left with the poor woman who was his girlfriend. Tricia deserved better. Tamara found herself feeling more than a little sorry for Tricia. She needed a therapist to figure out why she wanted to be with a man who, technically, could be her grandfather, thought Tamara.
Maybe she should recommend somebody.
“Come on, mama. Let’s get you into bed.”
Leticia was sobbing pitifully by the time Tamara managed to tuck her in, but the sedatives were working.
“Get some sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up, I promise. You won’t be alone.”
“Letting a marriage fail is a sin, Tamara. It’s a sin and a personal failure. How could I have saved mine? You see what your father is like. You could still save yours.”
Tamara sighed.
“Mama, I’ve been divorced for many years now.”
“You could still save it. Terry, he loves you. He was here last week, you know? He was here for the party. You weren’t here. My own daughter didn’t come but my son-in-law did.”
“I’m sorry, mama, but I had other plans. You should try and sleep instead of getting worked up over this.”
“You need to take Terry back and then make a baby with him.”
Tamara went still.
“Mama, I’m forty years old. I think that ship has sailed.”
“Nonsense. My own mother was forty-four before she had her last baby. We’re of strong stock. You could have a baby now. Besides, there are all kinds of treatments. You’re a doctor, you know that.”
Now her mother admits she’s a real doctor, thought Tamara wryly.
“Mama. Please listen to me. I left Terry. I know you don’t approve, but I left him. So I will never get back together with him. Even if you don’t like it, you have to accept that we're divorced. There’s nothing you can do about that, mama. We’re divorced. I had an excellent reason to divorce him. That’s all there is to it.”
“Nonsense,” said Leticia, beginning to droop a bit.
Tamara tucked her mother in once more.
“Sleep, mama.”
“If you were done with him, if you had no feelings for him, you would have cut him out of your life. I see how carefully you keep him in your life. He lets you do it. You’re meant to be together, the two of you. The pair of you should be together. Before I die, I want to see you together, with a child to call your own. I want to see it.”
Tamara didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or rage.
She found tears running down her cheeks and realized that she'd chosen crying without even realizing that she was making a choice.
“Please, mama.”
“You were so in love with him! So he had a roving eye, he’ll always have a roving eye. It’s a wife’s duty to forgive her husband certain... transgressions.”
“Like you did, mama?”
“I did, for a long time. And today he brought her home, into my home.”
Leticia started crying again, and Tamara held her mother’s hand until she finally fell asleep.
She watched as her mother’s breathing got steadier, and finally sat back, letting her own tears fall.
Terry had done this, thought Tamara. Terry had been pushing her father to do this for a while now. He'd ignored everything she'd told him and done exactly as he pleased.
She didn’t know why she was even surprised. This was exactly what Terry did—exactly what he wanted, consequences be damned. She didn’t know why he'd chosen to do this, but she knew who was responsible.
Terry, and her father, who'd listened to him and chosen thoughtlessness.
Why had they done it? Why had they hurt her mother so much? She had her flaws, but she didn’t deserve such cruelty. Nobody did.
And Terry had said all that to Dave, as if he had some kind of ownership over her.
Tamara closed her eyes, trying to shut out that look on Dave’s face, but she couldn’t. That contempt, that dismissal—the way he'd closed himself off from her, right after he'd opened himself up to her like that.
What could she do?
Chapter 11
"Terry, we need to talk."
Tamara had done some thinking, and she'd made a few hard decisions.
She could take care of the first of them before she moved on to the rest.
"Now is not a good time, Tammy. We can set up an appointment, how about that? Dinner tomorrow night."
"Now, Terry. I insist."
"Well, now..."
"I insist. I'll come wherever you are."
Terry hemmed and hawed some more, but she was firm for once, and she got him to agree to meet her at a cafe. She didn't wait and let herself change her mind or chicken out. She drove straight there and she got herself a cup of tea, and waited until Terry showed up.
He came late, of course, and he brought his current girlfriend along with him.
It told her exactly what he thought of her, of course. It told her what he'd thought of her the whole time. What her mother had thought, what her father had thought.
She'd even gotten a glimpse of what her life would be like if she let Terry dictate its course like this. Because that was what he'd been doing, wasn't it? Every single time she considered getting involved with somebody again, Terry turned up and she turned away from them. Every time she even thought about truly moving on, there he was.
No more.
"Terry. And you're Ally, aren't you?"
"I've heard so much about you!" gushed Ally, and Tamara realized, with some shock, that this was what her father had done to her mother.
Well, Tamara was stronger than that.
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Ally. You're as lovely as I thought you would be. But I do need to talk to Terry in private, it's about a few things personal and financial. Would you mind if we talked alone?"
"Oh, of course not. I thought... I thought it was because you wanted to meet me. Terry said..."
"Of course she wanted to meet you, baby! Bee
n practically begging me to bring you along. And my Ally here has been trying to get me to introduce her to the only woman I ever wanted to marry. Isn't she something, Tammy?"
Tamara kept her smile steady.
"You are definitely something, Ally. You're strong, and beautiful, and smart, and you deserve happiness in your life. You deserve to have everything you dreamed of, you deserve every opportunity to make your dreams come true. You have your whole life ahead of you. You deserve everything. You're worth everything."
Tamara said it from the heart, forcefully. The idea of this child falling prey to Terry's charm, being stuck with him for years... It was awful. She deserved more. Everybody deserved more than that.
"I... Thank you."
She looked puzzled, thought Tamara. She wished she could give everybody the confidence to chase happiness, true happiness.
She wished she could give herself that, too.
"Would you mind, though, Ally? I'm sure you understand that I want my personal finances to stay private."
"Oh, of course. Terry is so good with money, he's helping me invest, too."
Tamara kept her eyes on Terry.
"Is he? Well, isn't he clever."
The young woman put her headphones in and sat at another table with a cup of coffee.
Tamara turned to Terry.
"I'm severing all contact and all connection with you."
For once, Terry seemed speechless. For once, he didn't have a booming laugh and something funny to say.
"I want us to work out an agreement about the money I invested in your latest venture. The only way you'll get out of giving me any of it back will be by filing for bankruptcy, officially. I can promise you that, Terry."
"Now, come on, Tammy! It's that new man of yours, isn't it? I looked him up. So you think you don't need me anymore now that you've got him?"
Tamara leaned forward a little bit, wondering how she could have seen this parasitic relationship for anything more than what it truly was. Her desire to make it all right had clouded her judgment so severely, and for so long. She'd fallen in to the same trap her mother had fallen into. She'd just come to it from a different direction.
"I do not have to explain myself to you. I don't have to explain anything to you. But you see, what you did yesterday, when you got my father to do what he did—I saw you clearly for the first time in so long. You did it for fun, didn't you? My mother, she loves you, but it was still fun for you to hurt her like that because you don't like her."
"Tammy, it was just the right thing to do. A family should always get along."
"And the women should always be the ones to swallow their feelings and their pride so that the men can act as if they did nothing and they owe nothing. Listen to me, Terry. We are not family."
"Well, now..."
"No. We are divorced. We have been divorced for years. We have no children. For a while, that was the abiding sadness in my life, but now I see that as a blessing. We don't have children. That means we are not family."
"You can't wish family away."
"I'm not wishing you away. I'm cutting you off. There's a difference. I was foolish. I divorced you because I wanted to stop being hurt, but I kept you in my life and kept getting hurt anyway, all because I didn't want my divorce to be like my parents' divorce. I wanted to be better than that and I ended up being just like them. Worse, in some ways. But not any longer. This is done. You are out of my life."
"I can destroy you, Tamara."
That vicious change from cajoling to threats. How had she forgotten that? She'd spent years dreading it, trying to avoid it.
"I'm sure you could try. But I can destroy you, too, Terry. I know far too much about your dealings for you to risk it. You might think that I wouldn't, that I just wouldn't stoop that low because I never have, but things have changed."
"I'll make sure your new man knows just what you're really like."
Tamara shrugged.
"You could try. I doubt he'd listen to you, but I'm sure you could try. We're done in every way, Terry. I'm changing my locks. I will not be welcoming you into my home or my workplace again. You will not be welcome in my life."
Tamara's legs felt shaky as she got to her feet.
"Now, you listen to me, you little..."
"No."
She turned around and walked away, leaving such a big part of her life behind. Leaving a conviction she'd lived with almost all her life ripped and torn in tatters. She would not be one of those mature people who could be friends after their divorce.
She would not have the solace of thinking that the children she'd lost in her womb, if they'd been alive, would never have been hurt by how she handled the divorce, even if the divorce would have hurt them.
She let the tears come once she managed to get a cab and jump in.
There it was, the memory she'd locked away for so long—her miscarriages. The way she had, sometimes, let herself dream of a world where her body hadn't betrayed her, and she'd managed to give them life. A world where they'd lived.
She'd wanted to live her life as if they lived.
But they hadn't lived.
And she'd been so caught up in that fantasy that she'd almost forgotten to live, too.
Tamara let herself cry as she was taken home. Felicity would be there. She knew that Felicity would be there. She'd texted.
Tamara ran out of the car as soon as it stopped, still crying, and fumbled her way to her apartment, to find that the door was ajar, and Felicity was inside.
But not just her.
Dave.
***
Dave didn't know why he couldn't just let it go. Twice—he'd been slighted twice in favor of that man who didn't even deserve to tie her shoelaces.
He could see what life would be like if he got involved with Tamara, really involved with her. She was at her ex's beck and call. He didn't understand why, to be honest, but it didn't matter. She obviously was.
So he'd done some digging, as he always did, and he'd found a few interesting things—like the fact that Tamara had never been legally married to the man she believed was her ex-husband.
Would that make a difference?
He didn't know, to be honest.
He'd considered sending her an email and just letting that be the end of it, but he owed her more than that, didn't he?
Tamara had given him something back. She'd given him his daughter back, his sense of family back, his will to live for more than just success back.
So he owed her, even if they were finished.
Dave had made up his mind and made his way over to her clinic, only to see that it was closed for the day. That had worried him a little. All right, more than a little.
Tamara was dedicated to her work. She would never close the clinic without a good reason.
So he'd gone looking for her, despite telling himself that he no longer cared, that this was none of his business anymore. He'd gone to her home, and he had been let in, not by Tamara, but by her friend.
And he'd decided, immediately, that he liked her.
Finally, somebody in Tamara's life who didn't take advantage of her! Somebody who didn't just take all that she offered and then demand more. Somebody who would be there for her, truly be there for her, when she needed them.
So he and Felicity had talked, for far longer than he'd intended to stay, and he was beginning to understand some of the parts of her that Tamara had hidden from him. And maybe from herself.
He'd begun to understand why it was important for her to be on good terms with everybody, even when it meant hurting herself. He'd begun to understand why she cared so much.
And Felicity had, after consideration, hinted at a few things that had made him a little ashamed of himself and how he'd pushed her.
He'd been about to leave, knowing that Tamara needed time with her best friend, not with him, when she turned up.
***
“Dave?”
“He just turned up. I think you need to ta
lk, the two of you.”
“Tee, I...”
Felicity just walked to Tamara and folded her into her arms.
“I know. I know, Mara. Did you tell him you’re done with him?”
“I did. I... I threatened him, if he ever tries anything again. Tee, my mother.”
“I’ll go over there and check on her. Don’t worry about her, you know I can handle Leticia. She’ll be angry now, I can handle anger. It’s only when she’s falling apart that I can’t handle her.”
“I know. Thank you. I... Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. This is what best friends are for, remember? Call me if you need me to come. I’ll make sure Leticia is fine.”
Felicity turned to Dave.
“Work things out,” she ordered, and she turned around and left.
Tamara faced Dave. She’d hoped she could have some time before doing this, but there it was.
“Dave, I owe you an apology.”
“No. Well, maybe, but... I found out a few things about your ex. I think you probably suspect most of the things about the financials, but there’s something else you need to know.”
“I... What?”
“Tamara, he was already married when he married you.”
Tamara froze.
“What?”
“He was married to somebody named Cassandra Adams.”
“Cassie? He was married to Cassie? But... I knew Cassie. I met Cassie.”
“They got a divorce ten years ago.”
“Ten years? But... That means he was married to Cassie when we got married. So... So it was never real? None of it was real? You have to be mistaken, Dave. I couldn’t possibly have not known something like this. I... This isn’t...”
“I have all the records here. If you need to check them.”
Of course she did. She had to check them. Tamara’s mind sped as she flipped through the pages he'd printed out and tried to make sense of what she was seeing, of all the lies she'd never uncovered.
“Cassie used to come over to our place all the time. She was one of his best friends. They were always together. I... I don’t understand.”
Over 40 And Head Over Heels: BWWM, Over 40's, Billionaire Romance (BWWM Romance Book 1) Page 12