Page 2 of Devastate Me

“Did he know?”

“Of course, he knew.” She snapped at me, almost as if she had been trying to take a bite from my flesh and those words were her teeth. “I suspected your father couldn’t have children, since I’d been pregnant once before you came along, and it certainly hadn’t been Jeremy who’d gotten me that way. After a while, he wondered why I hadn’t managed to get pregnant again, so I stopped being as careful with…” She hesitated a moment before naming him again. “Clark.”

“You did this on purpose?”

“Of course not. I would never have done it, if I’d known for sure back then that he couldn’t have children. I certainly didn’t want any. Clark and I were normally careful, but there were a few times where things might have gotten out of hand.”

My stomach wanted to fall out of my body. She couldn’t even keep her own lies straight anymore. It wasn’t a mistake. If anything,Iwas the mistake… She hadn’t even wanted me. From the sounds of her first supposed admission, she had me to keep my father happy, and now she was telling me that she never wanted a child, and that I was an accident. Never in my life had I wanted to hit someone before, but my mom was pushing the limits of my sanity.

“You… you…”

“Y-you, you…” My mother mocked me with a fake stammer. “I fucked Clark because he was good in bed and your father was rarely around in those days. He was always at the beck and call of his parents since they lorded their money and the company over him until his grandfather passed away. If you’re looking for someone to point the finger at in all of this, you might want to shake it in the direction of your wretched grandparents.”

I couldn’t believe the way my mom was speaking to me about all of this, as if our lives hadn’t just fallen completely apart. Her marriage had just imploded, which might not mean anything to her, but it had taken my whole life with it. Jeremy Williamson wasn’t really my father. Which meant…

“They’re not really my grandparents though, are they?”

Mom chuckled. “I’m sure they’ll throw an ungodly fit when they find out.” She sneered at their picture which hung on the wall. “Serves them right for being unbearable tyrants all these years.”

“I wonder why they never liked you?” I questioned, though she didn’t miss an ounce of the sarcasm.

“Your problem is that you grew up believing all their bullshit about remaining a good girl until marriage, and keeping your nose clean, so that you wouldn’t mar your future husband’s reputation.” She rolled her eyes and proceeded to head up the stairs.

“I suggest you pack up anything that has any meaning. Jeremy was serious when he said he didn’t want to see us when he got back.”

“He said he didn’t want to seeyou!”My voice was cold, just like Jeremy’s had been.

Her quiet laughter rang out in an ominous tone before explaining her version of reality to me. “Keep telling yourself that he’ll still want to be your dad. Mark my words girl, he won’t. He’ll throw you out with the rest of the trash, and if he doesn’t, those pretentious nitwits he calls family will do it for him.”

~*~

Two weeks later

My mother hadn’t been wrong. After she and Clark took off to parts unknown and left me behind to suffer the fallout from their betrayals, their karma came calling for me. They hadn’t even offered to take me with them. I wouldn’t have gone if they had, but it stung to be left behind without so much as a backward glance from my biological parents.

I tried to go about life as normal and finish out my semester, but the dirty tissues that covered my desk and overflowed my trash can made it very clear how I spent my private moments.

I was thankful for the cozy little studio apartment Jeremy had insisted on putting me in after he walked me to my dorm last semester and saw my roommate being spit-roasted by two men from the football team. Not being in the dorms meant thatno one had to see me cry tears over being left behind by my mother and her long-time lover while the man I’d always known as my dad ignored my calls and texts.

When I got up the courage to go see him at his office, I was told that he was out of the country on business. His secretary also informed me that he had no interest in a meeting when he returned. A meeting. That’s all my relationship boiled down to with the man who raised me from birth.

It left me concerned about my future. The rent on the apartment was paid up through the end of September, since he’d signed a year lease and paid in advance. It had been Jeremy’s way of getting around the waitlist for the place, considering it opened midway through fall semester after a student dropped out.

Technically, I had a college trust fund. I hoped that it would continue to pay the bill for my tuition and books, but my belly was aflutter with nerves that it wouldn’t be the case. Try as I might, I couldn’t focus on the book in front of me. While good grades had always come easy, studying and learning from a book never had. It was why I was so adamant about never missing a day of school. I needed to be in person to hear the lectures and participate in labs, otherwise the material didn’t sink in.

A rapid knocking on my door startled me. I slowly shuffled my way there, hoping against hope that this was not the knock that would end everything for me, all the while knowing that it most likely was. Another, more impatient, knock sounded before I heard a key turning the lock.

“What in the world?” I pulled my phone out to dial 911, but the service wasn’t working.It had worked just fine that morning. I stuffed the phone into the back pocket of my jeans just as several strange men piled into the too-small space.

“Are you Nova Antares Anderson?”

I shook my head. “No. My name is Nova Antares Williamson.”

“Either way, you’re being evicted.”

“You can’t do that. My apartment is paid for until September.”

“Correction, Jeremey Williamson’s apartment is paid for until September and he doesn’t want you squatting in his place any longer.” The man reached into his coat and pulled out a stack of papers that were held together with a paperclip before tossing them at me.

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