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I walked around the empty apartment, thinking about what Violet said. Her hysterical voice echoed off the corners of my mind, driving home just how painfully crazy this entire thing had driven her. My heart shattered. I felt emptier than I’d ever felt in my life. As I walked around the four-thousand-square-foot apartment, I snickered to myself.
How I could have ever convinced myself that this place was big enough for a woman that deserved the world was beyond me.
I placed my hand onto the plain beige walls. I expected them to pulse with life. To remind me why I had done any of this shit in the first place. But instead, the walls creaked. The hardwood floors groaned. It seemed as if the weight of the world followed me wherever I walked, and the whole of my surroundings were weighed down with that burden.
Including Violet.
“Stupid, stupid idiot,” I hissed to myself.
I looked down at the sparkling hardwood floors and found nothing but the carcass of an old man staring back. An old, weary, lonely man with deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and no spark in his features. I looked up and gazed down the hallway, into the darkened expanse of the room I shared with Violet.
It seemed cold. Lifeless. Sterile.
Just like the rest of the apartment.
I’d put my name on the lease without even seeing it. Without walking through it or touring it in any fashion. It was a hasty move, a move made by a desperate man under desperate circumstances. And since I had turned a blind eye to its basicness, it had slowly torn my life apart with its claws.
No wonder Violet felt like a toy in a box.
I ran my fingertips along the sharp edges. I shuffled my feet over the carpet of the bedrooms. I walked back into the kitchen and opened the fridge, seeing it full and blossoming with food. Leftovers. Ingredients Violet had used and manipulated for her own pleasure. It was the only part of this space that seemed to have any life in it. The rest of the apartment looked like it had been abandoned, but not the kitchen.
Tears crested my eyes as I shook my head.
“It was all she had, and she used it as much as she could,” I whispered.
I leaned my hands against the kitchen counter and hung my head. Sounds that could only be described as a dying whale off in the distance bubbled up my throat. My pain and my anguish drowned me out. My anger and my confusion pulled me under. I felt the white-hot pain of my sobs racking my chest as my dying whale murmurs grew to the sobs of a grown man aching in the dark, black pit of his soul.
I had done this to Violet. I was the one responsible for all this. I had taken her out like a damn toy, played with her for a while, then stuffed her away in this fucking box. I’d selfishly brought her back here and put her in this apartment, thinking that her free spirit would be okay so long as I took care of everything. So long as she didn’t have the pressure of looking for a job or paying her bills or minding her own.
Violet had loved me enough to try. She had loved me enough to suck this hell up for as long as she could.
But the truth was? I never should have asked her to do it in the first place.
I rose up and wiped at my eyes. In that moment, I knew Violet was right. Our relationship couldn’t continue like this. Well, whatever relationship was left at that point. She deserved more than a secretive relationship, and I deserved more than the manipulative machinations of my parents. I didn’t want to hide my love and adoration for her. And it was only a matter of time before Amber told someone we weren’t together.
Which would inevitably get back to my parents.
I walked out of the kitchen and stood in front of the living room window. I crossed my arms over my chest, gazing out over the expanse of Manhattan. For weeks, Violet had this view. A view that looked over the corners of Central Park and down at all of the families walking around in coats and hats below. At first glance, it was gorgeous. A luxurious view for a four-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment.
But the view didn’t even hold its luster for a few seconds.
And Violet had lived on it for weeks.
I sniffled as I raked my hand down my face. If I took us public, Brant Corporation would attempt to enforce the contract. And Vivien would be at the helm of it all. She’d punish the family in any way she saw fit, and it was likely that my parents would disown me just to skirt the brunt of her wrath. In fact, I was almost certain they’d disown me anyway, even if Vivien let it run off her back.
Which I knew she wouldn’t.
They’d cut me off from the family fortune. And while money wasn’t an issue, that world was the only world I’d ever known. Despite my misery in it, I was also comfortable. I knew how to navigate it. How to placate people. How to make those people happy in their world. I’d made my bed in my misery, and I’d somehow become okay with it.
I’d have to give up on my parents as well. Give up on any sort of relationship with them we could have had. It would be gone completely if I took this public. They’d see it as a personal betrayal and rip me from that CEO seat faster than my father could sign the paperwork.
“Hope is a double-edged sword,” I murmured.
As a boy, I’d dreamed about it, that someday my parents would want to get to know the real me. I’d dreamed of the hugs my mother would give me without pretense and the kisses my father would give my cheek just because he was happy to see me. I’d dreamed of it as a little boy, and I’d carried those whimsical wants and wishes into my adulthood. I had craved that for so long—their approval and their love and their attention—that I didn’t know what I was striving for, if not that. It had been my focus all my life. It was the one thing that drove me forward in my ambitions.
The approval of my parents had undergirded every move I’d made up until this point.
I wasn’t sure how to let something like that go. It had been a constant string in my life that held everything together. A string I knew my parents willingly exploited. But that was a truth I wasn’t willing to admit. The little boy within me still wanted that hope, still needed that hope in order to survive, in order to get up every morning and feel his life was still worth it.
If I picked Violet—if I left this place—I left behind any chance of ever having a relationship with them. But if I picked my parents, that meant losing Violet forever.
Who had been the reason I’d been waking up and plodding along for three months now.
I stared blankly out at the world below me. Three months. For three months, something other than my parents’ approval had fueled me and pushed me forward. I didn’t know how the hell I hadn’t seen that or acknowledged it up until this point, but it was. External motivation had always been how I got by. Internal motivation was shit, especially because I was so tired. But moving toward something externally kept me waking up. Kept me going to work. Kept me trying to rework plans and bypass clauses in an attempt to have what I really wanted.
The idea of not seeing Violet ever again was intolerable.
And the idea of never seeing my parents again was only mildly aching.
I turned away from the window with a lighter heart. I knew what I had to do. I went to bed that night with a new goal and a new plan in the works. I got up that early the next morning and showered, hoping that night a night away from me might solidify for Violet how much she loved me, too. I placed some calls to my personal accountant, telling them what I wanted to do with my investments, my trust fund, the money I had in my savings up until this point. I had them transfer things to other places and create compound interest accounts that would grow and mature for a nice retirement cushion. I reworked all of my bank accounts at seven in the morning before printing off all the paperwork to sign and fax back.
Then, after piecing myself together, I gathered my things and headed for my parents’ mansion.
“Raymond! Good morning. To what do we owe this visit?” my mother asked.
“Ray’s at the door?” my father asked.
“Dressed and ready for work,” my mother said.
My father walked up behind her and looked at me curiously from beyond the door.
“What are you doing here?” my father asked.
Again, feeling like a damn guest at the childhood home I’d “grown up” in. Only this time, I was an uninvited guest. And I saw that my father was less than pleased with it.
“Oh my gosh, don’t tell me,” my mother said, smiling.
She clapped her hands as I gripped my briefcase next to me, filled with copies of the documents I had signed that morning. I looked at my watch and saw it strike eight in the morning, and like clockwork my phone began buzzing, alerting me to the new accounts created and the old accounts closed out. If I had done the calculations right over the phone with my accountant, I had enough money stashed away for a full-on retirement by the time I was forty-eight, as well as keeping Violet and myself afloat for the next four years.
Until we could establish our new life together.
If she’d still have me.
“I was hoping to speak with you guys before any other word got out,” I said, grinning.
“Oh, you did it! You really did it. You proposed to Amber, didn’t you? Oh, my gosh. I have to call her father. I have to call and set a time with Amber t—”
“No, Mother. I didn’t propose.”
“Then what the hell are you doing on our porch?” my father asked.
“I came here to tell you guys that I was never seriously dating Amber in the first place,” I said.
I watched both of their faces fall before my father’s skin turned red with anger.
“What?” he asked.
“You... lied to us?” my mother asked.
“Don’t act like you haven’t lied to me your entire lives. The two of you are practically known for it. I’ve come here to tell you two that I’m in love with Violet, and nothing is going to change that,” I said.
My mother rolled her eyes. “Here we go again.”
“You know, Vivien told me she ran into that woman in town the other day,” my father said.
“What?” my mother asked.
“Not too far from your place, actually,” my father said curiously.
“I don’t owe either of you an explanation. The only thing I wanted to say is that you don’t own me,” I said.
“That contract owns you,” my father bit out.
“Nothing owns me except myself. I’m in love with Violet, and I’m going to be with her. And if that means breaking some contract, then so be it,” I said.
“This will ruin our company!” my father roared.
He shoved my mother out of the way, and the damn butler had to catch her to keep her from falling to the floor.
“How could you do this to our family?” my mother breathed.
“You are a spoiled, selfish little boy. You always have been,” my father said.
“How would you know? My grandparents raised me, remember? While you and Mom were off making more money than you could have ever needed, Drew and Ione were doing your job,” I said.
“What? So... this is some sort of punishment because all of the tailored clothes and the home-cooked meals and the family vacations abroad weren’t enough for you?” my father roared.
“Please don’t do this to us,” my mother whispered.
“You’re being a fool, son. And I sure as hell am not going to let you sit in that CEO chair if this is how you’re going to repay this family!” my father yelled.
“The contract penalty will swallow our bottom line whole. Don’t you even care about that? Don’t you give a damn about what this family has built for you?” my mother asked.
I held up my hand, but my father knocked it out of the way.
“You will not put your hand up to—”
“I don’t care,” I said plainly.
Those three words stopped my parents in their tracks. My father’s nostrils flared with righteous indignation, and my mother finally got her feet underneath her enough to scowl at me like she usually did: pursed lips, with small lines around them that filtered into sunken-in cheekbones.
Their own misery had sucked the life out of them, and I refused to end up like that.
“Don’t you want me to be happy?” I asked.
It was the plea of a small boy, who couldn’t understand why his parents were the way they were. For a second, my facade cracked, and the bleeding heart of my younger self came pouring through. I cradled him. I tried my best to keep him from peeking out, to keep him from witnessing the damage that had already been done.
My parents stared back at me with hard eyes, their lips unwavering as they refused to respond.
“That’s what I figured,” I said.
“If you walk away from this, you’ll never come back,” my father said.
“What?” my mother asked.
Her eyes whipped up to my father, and I watched them fill with panic. For the first time in my life, I saw she didn’t agree with him. And a glimmer of hope ignited in my gut.
“If you walk away from this—if you break this contract—there’s no place for you at that company. Or here,” my father said.
I looked over at my mother, who was so shocked she couldn’t speak. But that was the issue. She wasn’t speaking. She wasn’t stepping up for her son, her baby boy she claimed to love so much. She simply stood there, with her jaw hanging open as my father drew the line in the sand.
And with that line, I knew. I knew I’d never have a real relationship with my parents.
“Goodbye,” I said.
I felt without another word said or another glance back. I slipped into the car and closed the door, then settled my briefcase into my lap. Within the confines of the leather entrapment held the legal copies of all my financial assets. And while thirty million dollars plus the seven million I had in accounts and other assets wasn’t something to shake a stick at, it was all I had.
I’d never experienced that feeling before. The feeling of money somehow being finite.
“Where to, Mr. Rose?” my driver asked.
But I knew it was worth it. The fear I felt and the panic in my veins and the idea of something so necessary being so finite was worth every cent I had stashed away.
And without another moment of hesitation, I rattled off Lydia’s address.
