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He would flash me that million-dollar smile that always held a warning only I could see.
I count backwards from ten and remind myself he’s not here.
He’s dead.
He’s gone and he isn’t coming back.
But why do I still feel his whispers over my shoulder, following me, doubting me?
Haunting me.
“Beth?” Audrey’s voice breaks my intense stare on the clock. “Does all of that sound good to you?”
I glance between my lawyer and the sheets of paper stacked neatly on the table. Across from me, I feel two pairs of searing eyes assessing my every move. Eyes filled with pity, questions, regrets.
I've already looked over the contract. This meeting is merely a formality to get everything signed off.
My husband left me with a lot of things, most of which you can no longer see—memories, a mind unable to trust even the smallest decision because he made so many for me, internal bruises that will never fully heal, scars that my clothes hide.
But as his wife, I was also left with the shares in his law firm. It has taken me two years to decide what to do with them. A small part of me wanted to keep them.
I had ambitions. I once wanted to be just like the men sitting across from me. In fact, one of the men refusing to meet my eyes is Mathew Smith, and before he and Rob opened their own firm, I interned for him. He believed in me enough that he offered to transfer my internship to their newly opened London office for the experience.
It’s been ten years, and the experience I have can’t be found in here, textbooks, or even in a courtroom.
He shipped me off and right into the hands of a monster.
I was beyond saving the minute I walked into Robert Ellison’s office. He was successful, gorgeous, and also my boss, which should have made him off limits.
I soon learned that rules didn’t apply to men like Rob, and he mentored me in a lot more than law.
The second I set eyes on him, a tingle erupted at the base of my spine—something primal. Something I foolishly mistook for attraction.
The attraction was there, no doubt, but that vibration in my very core, I now know was my fight or flight instinct. But I was distracted prey. He hunted, he captured, he devoured.
He took me under his wing because he said he saw something special in me.
What he really saw was weakness.
He saw how easily I would bend and contort my beliefs, my gut instincts, my intuition, and my trust in myself because I thought he knew better. I fell in love halfway across the world in a building very similar to this one. I’m pretty sure I also got pregnant there.
My eight months in London turned into eight years of hell.
By the time we returned home, I was a shell of the ambitious young woman that got on that plane.
I returned with a ring on my finger and a three-year-old.
After I left him for the first time, he found me and swore he was going to change. And he did until he put another child in my belly.
I take responsibility for my weakness, for my inability to see beneath the mask he wore even when I knew what lay beneath.
I refuse to carry the burden of how he manipulated it and used it until I was nothing more than an echo of my former self.
The people in this room may not be able to see what he did to me for so many years, but they know. They probably always knew and decided to turn the other way because 'boys will be boys', and their buddy was a little rougher than most, but I was probably into it.
I wasn’t.
“Beth?” Audrey repeats, dragging me out of the dark shadows until I sit straight and shake the tremble from my hands.
