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He snorted. “You don’t believe that any more than me. Don’t delude yourself.”
She stared at him. “They were working on you and not me.”
He let out a sigh. He might as well just let it all out at this point. “They were working on both of us, Elise. I can’t believe you didn’t see it. It was there all along.”
“Both of us at once?”
“Together,” he said. He couldn’t believe shestilldidn’t see it.
“No,” she said.
“Yes,” he argued. “I didn’t know it right away. Then I got it.”
“When?” she asked, crossing her arms.
“After we started to date. Don’t think otherwise. Things started to change with us before that. Or before I even knew. Looking back, my father admitted that it’d been the plan all along, but my father and your father told them it wasn’t going to work.”
“My father knew this? He was in on it? He lied to me when I asked him!”
He didn’t want to throw Richard under the bus that they were all trying to ride out of town for the storm evacuation. But he’d talked to Elise’s father earlier and told him he was coming clean. He wanted everyone to know so they could prepare.
In his mind, there couldn’t be any more secrets.
In order to get Elise to understand, and for them to get back to where they were before Grant slipped, she had to know the truth and she had to believe he never meant to hurt her.
That no one did.
“He didn’t lie,” he said. “But you have to talk to him about that. This is about you and me.”
“You lied to me then,” she said.
“Never,” he said seriously. He refused to have her believe that. “Everything I’ve said to you is the truth. Everything I feel too. No one can force you to feel another way about someone. You know that as well as I do. You’ve lived it in your life with your mother.”
“Don’t bring her up now,” she snapped.
He was losing control of the situation.
“Elise. Just calm down. You want to know and I’m telling you. My parents mentioned the Fierces thought we’d work and everyone said no way. They all knew how you felt about me. I wasn’t playing their game either. Then you and I decided on our truce. From there it was all me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. Her arms were still crossed, her body tense, as if she was bracing herself.
“The truth is because you wouldn’t have given me a chance if you knew. You were so set against me to begin with and I finally got you to open up. You were even more adamant about them not setting you up. If you knew it was me they had planned what would you have done?”
She held his stare, then she took a deep breath, then another. Her eyes filled with tears. “I wouldn’t have let it happen. I would have felt as if I was being manipulated.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I wasn’t letting anything stand inourway. So I asked them to stop. I told them that I figured it out and that I was going to do this on my terms. No one else’s.”
“So they knew all along we were dating? My father and your parents knew before I announced it?”
This part he hated to admit. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry about that but not the rest.”
“I feel like such a fool,” she shouted. “My whole life people did this stuff to me. They told me what to do or controlled the narrative to their words. I never had a voice.”
“Oh fuck that, Elise!”
She seemed taken aback by his shouted words. He rarely lost his temper, but he couldn’t hold it back.
“Excuse me?” she said. She was dead calm. Not arguing. Not raising her voice.
