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Every warning Devin had ever given me about his mother was chiming in my head right now. Maybe he was right: now that he wasn’t in my face constantly, I was starting to appreciate that I did need to work out how to hold my own in this world—and that was true whether or not I ended up marrying him. I might have some choice about the course my future took, but I could do nothing about my past.
“Angel, nice to see you. I’m not comfortable with you just letting yourself into a place I’m staying in, though. Could you please give me some warning about when you intend to arrive next time, or wait to be let in?”
“It’s my property,” said Angel. “Did you sleep well?”
I tried not to reveal my frustration in my face or movements. If I lost control, I would just keep enabling her to outplay me. “Pretty well, thanks.” I tried to nonchalantly get myself a coffee, which was harder than it should have been considering I didn’t actually remember where anything was in this place yet. You didn’t need to use the kitchen that often if you were constantly ordering takeaway meals. “And thank you for checking up on me, honestly. I know Devin asked as a favour because he’s going to be a bit busy over the next few weeks.”
“You don’t have to cover for yourselves,” said Angel apparently to her coffee. “There’s no shame in having problems, arguments, not being able to stand the sight of one another for a while. And then, it’s not like your relationship is the usual thing.”
“Not the usual thing…” My wariness was making me even more disoriented. I put sugar in a cup and stared down at it, flinching backwards when Angel’s hand, dripping with rings, came over the top of mine with its one ring that somehow seemed to dwarf my hand though it was tiny and tasteful.
“You should know what I mean,” she said. She took the cup off me and started putting it through its paces in the coffee machine. “I don’t know how he convinced you to fall in with him on this quest for vengeance, but from my perspective it’s a big problem.”
There she was, doubting me again… I was truly sick of it. “If you have a problem with your son’s choice of future wife, I wish you would take it up with him and not me. I feel like you’re just bullying me now by coming to me with your objections, and you should know I don’t respond well to bullying.”
“Oh, I think you respond exactly how you’re wanted to behave,” said Angel. I was breathing hard, trying to not look like I was about to explode. “You’re well-known in our community, of course… Do you know what you’re called?”
“I have no interest in knowing,” I tried to head her off.
“The little princess,” she snapped back, smugly denying me any right to ignorance. “You’re seen as a fragile toy who has no agency of her own—and it’s hardly a label you can fight when the first time you left your house in weeks was to participate in this farce of a kidnapping.”
“As if no other person you know has ever taken advantage of the wonders of home delivery—” But even before she cut me off, I realised I was just playing into her prepared game when I spouted shit like that. The little princess, always needing someone to come running to tend her—not even able to succes
sfully change the course of her own life until someone else came along to yank her out of the old one.
“If you really involved yourself in the world around you, then you would have known something very critical,” said Angel. “The situation between Devin and your parents is no coincidence.”
I was going to stay quiet, let her tell me what she meant, but my mouth ran ahead of my brain. “Are you saying they deliberately got themselves into a state of debt with him?”
Angel gestured me towards the table with her hand holding my coffee. We were about the same height seated, and yet I felt like she was looking down on me. “He’s done very well with you indeed, hasn’t he? You can’t even imagine that he is anything but the victim in this situation now. Your parents were never in debt to Devin, or anyone involved with our family, in the first place. Devin bought that debt off its original owners—I know, because he was short on cash in the form they wanted it at the time and he asked me to back him up.”
He had chosen to have them in his debt. But… “You’re lying.” That would mean everything he’d said to me about honourable behaviour… well, it didn’t completely invalidate it, I supposed, but it made it less personal to him. And it seemed to me like there would be something pretty dishonourable about burrowing himself into a situation that never concerned him just to… to fuck with my parents? To have an excuse to get me? I couldn’t make any sense of it.
“Presumptuous of you to accuse me of lying,” said Angel. “Actually, you’re not the one I’m screwing over here. I promised Devin I wouldn’t say anything about the situation. Those Mahoney twits didn’t have a clue who they were in debt to; they’d organised their petty revenge through one of those services that will take your money and give it to some meathead with an appropriate weapon and neither side has to know exactly who’s involved. So when my boy showed up telling them they had to pay him or else, they might have contracted with him for all they knew. Wouldn’t occur to them that there could be any other way for him to work out what they’d been up to.”
She said one of those services like she was talking about a laundromat picking your linen up at your door. “How would he have worked it out, if he had nothing to do with it to begin with?”
She wafted her fingers at me over her cup like she was driving away steam that was no longer there. “Figure that one out for yourself.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you’re just screwing over your son here… for what, to help me? I don’t believe for a second you like me that much.”
“You shouldn’t believe I care for you at all,” said Angel. “That’s why I had to do it. It’s worth more to me to get you the hell out of our family than the nuisance of having my kid be shitty at me for a year or two.” Her smile was gracious even as her words were vicious. “Call it a technicality if you like, but he never specifically asked me to keep it quiet from you. It was assumed as part of our existing deal, I suppose, but Devin has been around the block long enough to know better than to lean on assumptions.”
My thoughts swirled around and around like the coffee in my cup. Everything was different if it wasn’t chance that had brought our paths together. Devin was no longer acting with the hand he’d been given, no longer giving anyone a chance, however minimal. The cards had already fallen, and he’d come after us for reasons… I couldn’t even imagine why he might have done it.
How had I ever thought I would be safe to engage myself to this man when I didn’t know the first thing about why he behaved the way he did? It was like arranging to marry someone when you didn’t speak a word of the same language. I’d been so stupid to think the slight hint of a connection we seemed to be making mattered.
“Well, I had best be going.” Angel tipped her coffee cup to her lips at a draining angle and dropped it down on the table with a ringing clatter that made me jump. I just bet she was perfect at timing the drinking of her coffees to leave the area at the absolute most devastating moment. “You need to be really careful, Julia. You don’t fit into this world. Maybe you would be better just going back to your parents’ property, and… enjoying the view.”
I saw red so hard I didn’t come back to myself until the door clicked behind her. I snatched the cup she had emptied and hurled it at the door, ducking behind the table at the smash and flying shards of porcelain. When I peeked back over the edge of the table, there was a clear dent in the door at around head-level, where I’d found my mark.
There was nothing for me to fear from that sight, but I wanted to hide from it just the same. It was dragging me right back to the last time I’d become so helplessly angry I smashed things. It was the day I had met with the new girlfriend of the boy who kidnapped me, and she’d told me in her sweet little voice that she was not going to let me mess around with her man any more.
Well, and I didn’t want him, did I? He’d always been expendable, easily replaced by any number of other boys like him. He was not special to me.
But in that moment, I’d wished he could have been. I’d wanted something I played at wanting all those times to make boys who didn’t know any better think they wanted it with me. All those other boys who had been wrong for me.
It didn’t matter what I wanted back then. I’d had my frustration and nowhere to direct it except at my walls and my door and the old trinkets my parents used to gift me for birthdays that I was never terribly attached to anyway.
