Page 565 of Filthy Elites

ChapterTwenty

I want to break something.Scream. Hit someone.

That’s not me, I’m not a violent person. Well, I haven’t been wholly myself for a while, have I? Not sinceher. Not since her mother.

When I walked in on Audrey with my father over a year ago now, I let anger consume me on behalf of my mother, an anger kindled every time I saw her. It bloomed into a fiery rage the moment I met Erica and desire the likes of which I’d never felt crushed me out of nowhere. Erica, who looks so much like her mother, the woman humiliating my mother.

I’d thought I was righteous, until this morning.

What the fuck?

My parents and I had brunch with my grandfather in town, because he’s not going to be here for Thanksgiving next week. We drove past Erica on our way back, and my parents started talking about her.

“Lovely girl, isn’t she?” Mom said.

I saw my father frown in the rearview mirror. “I wonder how she’s doing at the Academy. Audrey tells me she’s had some troubles with her old friends. Something about a boy.”

“Not a surprise. She’s quite a looker, that one. Just like her mother.”

The entire exchange pissed me off; how my father takes advantage of my mother, how blind my mother is to what’s happening under her own roof. And deaf, too. Does she sleep with earplugs?

“No one likes her,” I spat. “She doesn’t belong at the Academy. She belongs in Westside, with the rest of the lowlifes.”

“Chase! That’s so unkind. Just because people don’t have the kind of privilege your father and I provided you with doesn’t make them lowlifes. Half the doctors at the clinic come from the westside.” My mother’s outrage only served to deepen my hatred.

When we got to the house, I headed straight to my car, eager to put as much distance between my parents and me before I said something I couldn’t take back, but my mother called me. “Come in here for a second, sweetheart.”

“The guys are waiting for me,” I lied.

“They can wait another fifteen minutes. I think it’s time you and I talk for a while, all right?”

I shouldn’t have shown my temper in the car—or insulted the mess of a school on the westside, even if one of their students is arrested a couple of times a week.

I dragged my feet to the house, and followed my mother to the living room.

“I would have preferred not to discuss this.” She wandered to the open-plan kitchen, pulling a bottle of white wine out. She poured herself a generous glass before shoving the bottle back in the fridge. “But I see it might be necessary now. You’ve been bitter for a while.”

She sighed and crossed to the seating area, sitting down on her favorite armchair. I leaned against the wall, bracing for whatever was coming.

“Sit, Chase, please.”

The please worked: I joined her, choosing the sofa.

“Your father and I…” She hesitated. “When we met, I was young and experimenting with many things. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, and I got pregnant.”

I’d known that. They had me when my father was in his first year of his master’s and my mother was just about to go to med school. I’d been unplanned, but they chose to get married and make it work. “Yeah. So?”

“I wasn’t sure who the father was at the time,” she admitted. “There were several options. I’m not going to lie to you, Chase. It would have been much simpler for me if my baby daddy had been anyone other than your father.”

My jaw opened and closed.

What? What the hell?

“The other men I’d been with…”

“I don’t want to know this, Mom.”

“And trust me, telling you is far from comfortable, but you need to hear it. I’d hate for your relationship with your father to be strained over nothing. We’ve let it simmer for too long already.”

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