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Me, being thoroughly against any kind of therapist wading through my past issues, would say it was because I really fucking hated being in other people’s houses.
It wasn’t because I was a snob of any kind, if you knew even the slightest bit about my childhood, you’d know that. Then again, no one knew the slightest bit about my childhood, not even my closest friends, so whatever. It didn’t matter whether the house in question was a studio apartment or a six-bedroom mansion outside New York.
Pete’s family estate was a six-bedroom mansion outside New York. On six acres. There were seven point five bathrooms. Why rich people thought they needed more bathrooms than bedrooms was anyone’s guess.
He’d get all pissy whenever I booked my own hotel, going there for weekends, holidays, family gatherings. He thought it was rude and because I hated his family. He was half right. I did hate most of his family. His stuck-up, frat boy brother who worked in stocks and made sexist jokes and ordered his prim little wife around. His father, who was pretty much the exact same version yet more crude and bigoted.
I liked his mother a lot, though. Somehow, she’d remained married to her awful husband for twenty-five years, I had no idea how. She came from money herself and didn’t marry him for his. She was incredibly intelligent, had a master’s degree in English lit. We spoke for hours about books, hidden away in her library, drinking expensive wine I didn’t have the heart to tell her I hated.
I also had drunk enough of that wine to ask her why the fuck she was married to such an asshole.
Because she was a kind woman with rich people manners, she did not tell me to mind my own fucking business. She smiled softly and said, “There are many ways my husband may seem wrong to other people. But he wakes me up gently with coffee and a kiss on my forehead every morning. Has for the past almost thirty years.”
I blinked at her, waiting to say he also worshipped at her altar behind closed doors.
“That’s it?” I blurted after a few beats of silence.
She reached over and squeezed my hands. “Sometimes, honey, that’s everything.”
She’d held on to that single thing for almost thirty years. That one glimmer of kindness that she somehow let erase everything else horrible and selfish about the man. That conversation had sent a chill down my spine, foreshadowing a future I might have with Pete.
But Pete was dead to me now. I’d never see his family again and never have to have arguments about staying with his parents or going on trips with friends.
I hated everything about the experience of staying with people. Walking quietly when getting up to pee in the middle of the night. Not knowing where to put my bathroom supplies. Creeping into the kitchen for water, praying for it to be empty so I wouldn’t have to make awkward small talk. Not knowing where mugs were.
All of the shit I fucking hated.
So after enduring it for years when I thought that being a woman meant suffering through things I hated to make people—namely men—more comfortable, I decided I was no longer going to make myself miserable.
I was a grown ass woman with a disposable income. If I was going on a trip somewhere, I could afford a hotel room. A rental. I did not make excuses as to why I was booking said room, though Pete always spluttered many to colleagues, fraternity brothers, whoever had invited us to stay with them. Sure, he likely apologized profusely and blamed everything on me when I wasn’t around, but I didn’t give a shit.
It was something that barely anyone, save for Jessica and Aiden, understood. They were the only two friends I had anyway. Which was fine with me. I didn’t long to have oodles of girlfriends who went on ‘girl’s trips’ and piled into a house in the Hamptons, sharing rooms and banal stories.
No thank you.
And yet here I was. In someone else’s house.
In a criminal’s house.
As his fiancée.
But hopefully not forever. Not now that I’d made the deal with Detective Greg Harris. He’d seemed determined to bring Cristian down. Not just determined but almost maniacal. It scared me a little. But I supposed that was good. He was going to go above and beyond to catch this guy. That meant good things for me.
I just had to play along to keep Jessica and Eli safe.
Had to continue to live in someone else’s house. But the problem was, it wasn’t that much of a problem. The vaulted ceilings, the marble flooring, the old money aesthetic that was edged with Italian charm, the state-of-the-art gym and coffee machine ... I loved all of it.
And I hated myself for it.
