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Back when I was a kid with grazed knees. Back when I was a kid looking at the world with hopeful eyes and a grin full of optimism.
Part of me wished I was still there.
I flicked the cigarette butt down onto the ground before my manners caught up with me. I hoped Frederick wasn’t looking too hard from the window as I dropped down and scooped it back up, keeping it in my palm until I passed the kitchen bin on the way back through.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said for the hundredth time. “I didn’t mean this to be an unwelcome burden on you.”
I shook my head. “No, Fred. Not at all. This isn’t unwelcome, if anything it’s long overdue.”
As rancid as my insides felt as they digested the full implication of Fred’s insight — and they really did, even in the fucking shock — there was a strange hum of truth and knowing to the revelations.
I knew they were right.
They sat right. They felt right. They illuminated all the strange little discrepancies one’s emotional involvement thrusts to the sidelines.
Now it was all about enough concrete evidence to shunt the cunt I’d thought of as my saviour as far into the darkness as damnation could manage.
“Amelia was a good girl,” Fred said, like I needed to hear it again. “She’d never have wanted to betray you. Not by choice. I’m sorry it’s taken me a long, long time to say it, sir. But I had no choice. At that point none of us really did.”
I managed a nod. “I understand, Fred. Believe me, I understand.”
And I did understand.
I remembered more than enough of our environment as we grew up to understand people were forced down slipstreams they’d never have taken by choice, no matter what the rewards may have been. I remembered enough of how stiff upper-lipped my father was on his road through life as well as ours, and why that fuelled so much of his initial outcry of my relationship with Amelia in the first place.
Amelia George wasn’t one of us.
She was from a street-level criminal family in London and had run away as a teen to make a new life for herself. She was a cleaner who’d walked into this job with a beautiful smile to make up for her lack of experience. More than enough to land her as a live-in employee here with us. She was one of five siblings, none of whom were managing to do good for themselves, nor had any perceived class to show for it. One of a family of bad names who was managing to haul herself into a better future, but not a better future alongside me. Not as far as my father or his ilk were concerned. She was absolutely not the kind of wife my father or any of his professional contacts would have wanted or expected from the next in his family line.
Which is exactly why he’d tried to reason with me over my choices, night after night as I argued the toss with him.
But I love her, and she loves me. We’re together. We’ll always be together. No matter what life throws at us.
Commitment. This is commitment. From her as well as from me. I don’t give a shit what any of you have to say about it, I’m in for good. This is for fucking good. No matter what.
Until he’d proved me wrong.
Until he’d called her into his office one day while I was listening in from the sidelines and offered her a cool million if she’d run away from our world and never come back.
Offered her a cool million in cash for leaving me and telling me it was for good. That she didn’t love me. That she’d never loved me.
And that’s when my heart had been shattered into a million pieces. When she agreed. When she flicked through the case of money and told my father that she would indeed tell me she’d never loved me. That it would come easily. That the confession wouldn’t be a problem and she’d never come back, no matter what.
Because she didn’t love me.
That was the truth of it.
Or that’s what I thought was the truth of it.
Until Frederick filled me in on the opposite.
“She was a good girl, sir,” he said again. “She loved you. She would talk about you all the time, whenever you weren’t in the same bloody room as her. She wouldn’t shut up.”
I held up a hand, because I couldn’t hear this. I didn’t want to hear this. It was still too much. Still too fucking raw.
Every ounce of ammunition I’d ever needed was in my fucking gut. It was true. This quest for Paige was worth it. Because in some way, on some level, love could actually really be fucking worth it. Thank fuck the fucking truth was finally with me.
