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“If you need anything, you know where to find me, or just dial 0 on the phone. The line will go straight through to me.”
Wow, I’ve never been anywhere where you could do that except in a store or some business office.
“Thanks.”
He leaves, then I’m left alone to my thoughts.
I look around the room once more, and the gravity of everything hits me. I’m out of my depth just for being here, andthis—everything about the house and the man I’m supposed to marry is way out of my league.
My father gave me a cushy lifestyle where we traveled to all sorts of fun and fantastic places. But this… this is a whole other sphere of existence where everything screams of not just wealth but power. It’s in everything I see.
Nathan and his family don’t even come close to this. They definitely don’tnow.
Feeling like my life is draining again, I lower myself to the bed and take my phone from my purse to check for messages. Sure enough, there’s a message from Madison telling me she’ll be here soon. There’s also one from Dad that came through half an hour ago.
It’s a simple text asking me how I am, but I can almost hear the angst in his words. I message back letting him know I’m okay, so he won’t worry any more than he already is.
I know he feels terrible about what’s happened and has felt so for a long time.
He wouldn’t tell me the extent of his debts and how he continued getting into more debt after Mom died, but I managed to get him to tell me a little more about how it began and what he did to try and save Mom.
He confessed that he literally spenteverything. For a man who was already wealthy, that would have been a hell of a lot of money.
Mom had a glioma that the doctors had instantly classified as inoperable due to the high risk of death or serious complications following any attempt at surgery.
With that knowledge, I can just imagine what my father must have done to try and defy fate.
Dad told me that when they’d used up all the options in the States, they traveled to all four corners of the Earth, trying different innovative medical treatments and programs. But nothing worked. The most they got from their attempts was extending Mom’s life by another two years from her diagnosis.
All that time, I thought my parents were off vacationing and living their best lives. But really, Mom was dying, and my parents were both trying to shield me from the truth.
I wish I’d known what was going on. Had I known, I wouldn’t have been so crushed after Mom died when I found out Dad knew all along that she was so sick.
But I’m no stranger to the both of them hiding the truth from me. Mom did it, too.
I didn’t know who my father was until days before my twelfth birthday.
My parents had a summer romance when they were in their late teens.
Back then, Dad was in the Navy. He was serving in the Bahamas, where Mom happened to be vacationing with her sisters. They met and fell in love, but they came from two different worlds. At the end of the summer, Dad sailed off to the Mediterranean, and Mom came back to Florida, not knowing she was pregnant with me.
She raised me by herself, and whenever I asked about my father, she’d make up some story about him living far away. Thank God I was just a child at the time who didn’t question her, but perhaps that was why she made him sound like an angel.
My parents didn’t see each other until eleven years later when my father ran into Mom at the diner she worked in. He was on a business trip and recognized her straight away. I was there eating dinner. I remember him taking one look at me, and I knew he was my father.
It was his eyes. Not just the color but the way he looked at me. Like I belonged to him.
The problem was, at the time, Mom and I lived with Jack, her abusive boyfriend, who would beat the hell out of her and roughed me up every chance he got. Mom wouldn’t leave him because she was scared he would kill us.
On the day of my twelfth birthday, he nearly did. But my father stopped him.
It was like watching a movie where just as the bad guy is about to take his final strike, the hero bursts in and saves the day. That was what my father did.
Jack had beaten my mother senseless with the same baseball bat he used to hit me when I told him not to shout at her. He took out his gun and was just about to shoot us both when my father crashed through the door. That apartment we lived in was so rundown the door flew off its hinges and smashed.
Dad fought Jack and won with a punch that knocked him straight to the ground.
He saved us. Had he been a second later, I wouldn’t be here today.
