Page 36 of The Regrettable Mistake

Every picture that hung on the wall or sat on the mantle in the house was a lie. I ran around and collected them all. My broken mind couldn’t handle seeing the fake memories in that moment. Not when my cell phone still showed an image of Ollie’s head thrown back in ecstasy as he released inside another woman. A woman who he had, just moments before, been trash talking me with.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid.” I yelled at myself. It was crazy because I didn’t want to agree with the heartless assholes, but they were not wrong and I knew that now as I yanked every single photo out of their frames. “It’s all fake. All of it,” I yelled at the pictures as my stomach clamped down under the weight of the horrible, heartbreaking truth. I had been nothing more than a joke to him. My existence had really been as a fucking employee who thought she had a higher standing in his life than she did. I held up our wedding photo as the onslaught of tears made it difficult to see beyond the swirly, blurry image the moisture created. Ollie smiling down at his son as I looked at my husband with all the love in my heart. I ripped myself free of that picture.

Then, I went on a rampage that made me regret my actions later – if only for Denmark’s sake – as I shredded the pictures of Ollie and me and ripped myself out of all the family photos.

I should have ripped Ollie out because he was the evil bastard who put me in that family position without warning me that it wasn’t real. I screamed out all of my anger, sorrow, and frustration as my heart broke over and over again. I couldn’t even pack up and leave it all behind because Ollie’s son was an innocent victim in all this too. No matter how much my heart needed me to walk away and never look back, to start over somewhere else where no one would know who I was or how gullible I’d been, it wasn’t possible.

Den wasn’t the only reason it wasn’t possible. It was a pipe dream that there was a single place in the country, let alone the world, who hadn’t heard about my shameful existence. Only, they all saw me as the villain too. As if I would ever set out to destroy someone else’s happiness.

My anger-filled wailing fell away to be replaced by my grief-riddled, bone deep sadness. I sobbed on the floor in the midst of the mess that I made as my stomach cramped and it was only as I felt a trickle of wetness between my legs that my phone suddenly felt too far away. I’d wanted it to be far. Couldn’t stand the thought that the first thing I would see when I looked at it again was my husband’s satisfied face as he finished inside that woman. I couldn’t take the memories of them speaking about me like I wasn’t even a human being with feelings. I was just some dumb doll to be used for their own devices because I was too stupid to realize that a man like Ollie could never love me.

My head pounded and my cramps worsened as I tried to crawl across the floor to where I’d dropped my phone. The pounding grew far worse and I could almost hear it, like the beat of a drum… Or maybe a frantic knocking on the door.

“It sounded like someone was murdering her in there!” I heard a man say as my front door flew open and my brother and Hutch rushed to my side.

“Holy shit!” Hutch cried out as Steve picked me up and carried me out of the house.

“Grab her purse if you can find it. Meet us at the hospital and whatever you do, do not call that piece of shit and tell him what’s going on.”

“I won’t,” Hutch all but whispered as my twin carried me from the house and tucked me into his car.

“I’m bleeding,” I explained numbly.

“Know that. We’re going to the hospital.”

“Your car.” I couldn’t even get a full statement out. It was strange that suddenly, my worry was for my brother’s upholstery instead of the fact that I was pregnant, bleeding, and cramping. I knew what that meant. My mind had shut down when every one of my sweet memories from the past four years had been stripped away from me.

When we got to the hospital, flashes of light strobed all around us as Steve carried me into the emergency room. It didn’t register that they were people taking pictures. It never registered that someone had contacted my brother, and probably alerted the media, when they heard me screaming like a lunatic as I tore myself free from all those memories in my house.

Nothing mattered anymore.

I had never mattered.

I hadn’t been loved.

I hadn’t even been respected.

There was a giant, gaping hole in my heart and there wasn’t a single repair anyone in the hospital could do to make it whole again. I’d lost a piece of myself back in that house. It was gone forever now and my baby might be gone with it.

That was when reality kicked back in. My brain came back online, and my worry for the life I carried became more important that my grief. “My baby,” I whispered.

“They’re going to do everything they can, Stephie.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t, Sis. I will be right by your side.”

“It was all a joke to them. I’m a huge joke.”

“No. I don’t believe that.”

“You warned me.”

“I did. I’ve seen you together, Steph. It might have started as an arrangement for him, but you weren’t imagining things. There was more to the picture than I ever saw.”

I shook my head. “No, there wasn’t. I saw the video. Heard what he said. Saw what he did with her.”

“Motherfucker,” I heard my brother hiss before something stuck my arm and then moments later, I was blessedly pulled down into the darkness where thoughts and feelings no longer existed.

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