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‘Violet… I love you. I forgive you. Now, please, find a way to forgive yourself.’
This time the silence on the other end was the silence of a disconnected line.
Violet had hung up on her.
‘Was that your sister?’
Carrie jumped and spun around.
She hadn’t heard Andreas come in. Normally she was very attuned to his movements around the villa but she had been so engrossed with her one-sided conversation with Violet that she hadn’t heard him return.
He was standing in the doorway, his black tuxedo on minus the jacket, a sombre expression on his handsome face.
She nodded.
‘What you said…you believe me.’
She nodded again.
‘Since when?’
‘Since you told me,’ she whispered before hanging her head in shame. ‘I just couldn’t admit it. Violet is my Achilles heel. She always has been.’
He paused before asking, ‘Why is she seeing a counsellor?’
‘Because she’s a drug addict.’
Suddenly she could hold it in no longer. She slumped onto her dressing room chair and burst into tears.
The tightness Andreas had experienced when he’d listened to Carrie say she believed him, to hear her defending him, became a tight ball to see her dissolve before his eyes.
These weren’t tears, these were racking sobs, each one tearing his soul.
In three strides he was before her, crouching on his haunches to cradle her head on his shoulder, stroking her back, her tears soaking through his shirt.
It was a long time before the sobs lessened and she removed her face from his shoulder and wiped it with her hands.
Red-rimmed hazel eyes fixed on him and she inhaled deeply. ‘My sister is a drug addict. She is in recovery in America, living with her father because one of her drug dealers beat her into a coma when she couldn’t pay her tab.’ The tears filled her eyes again, spilling over to race down her cheeks, shoulders shaking. ‘She nearly died. My baby sister nearly died.’
Stunned at this revelation, Andreas took a moment to process it.
‘That bastard didn’t just seduce her. He fed her drugs. He gave an innocent girl a drug addiction.’ She covered her mouth then dropped her hand as she gave a long, ragged exhalation. ‘I must have been blind. I had no idea how bad her addiction was until a few months after her expulsion.’ Her lips made a little grimace of distaste. ‘I found her in bed with a much older man. There were drugs on the floor…she denied it but I knew she’d had sex with him in exchange for the drugs. She had no other money. Her father had cut her allowance off when she got expelled; she’d been able to afford her own until then. I was only a recent graduate and not earning very much. She had no money and absolutely refused to get a job.’
He got to his feet and ran a hand through his hair, kneading his scalp. ‘Why wasn’t she at school?’
‘Because she’d been expelled,’ she reminded him.
‘I know but she could have gone to another school after she’d taken her exams.’
‘She wasn’t allowed to take them.’
Anger coiled in his gut. ‘The headmistress promised me Violet could sit them.’ He had insisted on it.
‘Then she lied to you. Violet wasn’t allowed to set foot in that school again. I tried to arrange for her to sit the exams somewhere else but she refused. She gave up on life. She’d stay out all hours and never let me know where she was, then turn up steaming drunk and high as a kite, often cut or bruised from fights she’d got into and I’d patch her up and pray it was the last time I had to put ice on her face or sleep on her floor because I was terrified she’d choke on her own vomit, but it never was. She was arrested God knows how many times, hospitalised, had her stomach pumped… I honestly thought she was going to kill herself.’
Andreas sat heavily on the bed facing her, his heart pounding.
Carrie’s beautiful golden skin had paled as she’d relayed this tale of horror that no one should ever have to live through, and to think his beautiful Carrie had been the one to live it made his guts coil again in fresh anger and self-loathing at the part he had unwittingly played in it.
After a few moments of silence, her eyes found his and she continued in a voice so low he strained to hear.
‘I watched her try and kill herself for three years and there was nothing I could do to save her, and I tried everything. I locked her in her room; she smashed the window and jumped out. I staged numerous interventions with professionals; she just laughed in our faces. I even flushed a bagful of her cocaine down the toilet and got a punch in the face for it.’ She gave a shaky laugh. ‘Natalia has my sympathy. I know what a mean right hook Violet has.’
