Page 58 of Empowered
Sarah – for she was wholly Sarah again, her blond wig folded up and in a spare paper bag someone handed her – sat in the corner of the quiet lounge Lucas thought so highly of. He sat across from her, jacket removed and necktie askew. His five o’ clock shadow was more prominent now. She had barely noticed it back at the club.
Mr. Blackbourne’s bodyguard stayed a respectful distance away at another table, on his phone but cautiously alert. The closest table of guests was far enough away to give Sarah and Lucas the illusion of true privacy. Subdued jazz music playing over the speakers helped bolster that effect.
They shared bourbon and house made garlic bread. Sarah didn’t care about fitting into her tights or dress any longer. She took a hearty bite of bread and washed it down with Lucas’s favorite brand of bourbon.
She had no idea why she was entertaining him. Curiosity? The knowledge that her night was over? That she had wasted a trip to New York when she could have stayed home all weekend and had the same amount of fun?
Whatever her reason, she knew she didn’t want to do much talking. So she let Lucas yap all he wanted once the drinks were down and they were left alone by the staff for the hour.
“I met Jill at Princeton. She wasn’t a student, though. She was the granddaughter of one of the department chairs and often stopped by to visit him. Lunch, mixers… stuff like that. Didn’t think much of it at the time. I only happened to meet her when we crossed paths at one of those mixers hosted by her grandfather. The man didn’t even head a department I had anything to do with, but Damon was interested in it, and convinced me to tag along.”
Sarah drank more.I care about this, why?
“You’ve seen her. She’s beautiful, but she’s also charming to a fault. Within five minutes I was intrigued by her. Within fifteen I was in love.”
My head itches.Damn wig. Sarah pulled one of her hairpins from her wallet and used it to scratch an ornery spot on her scalp.
“We started dating, of course. I was in Heaven. If you ask Damon, he’ll tell you I was the most insufferable lovesick fool at Princeton. What’s sad is that he didn’t even go there anymore. He was doing grad school in Oxford, and I had decided to stay at Princeton. But he visited often enough to see how I had changed. He was also the first person I told when Jill announced she was pregnant. He told me to make something right about it, because when you’re men like us, you can’t get away with lovechildren in your twenties.”
“Only in your sixties, right?”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking when I said that.”
What was with this guy and all the apologizing? Lucas said sorry more than most live-in help. “So you married her.”
“Or offered to pay for… you know.” Lucas was suddenly incapable of eye contact. “But when she told me she intended to keep it, I planned a celebratory getaway and proposed to her. We got married three months later. I finally bested Damon at something, and it was having the biggest pregnant bride at my wedding.”
“She’s gotten bigger since then.”
“My ex has become skinnier.” Lucas shrugged. “Wish I could say that we got married and gradually fell out of love from there, what with my career taking me back and forth between two, sometimes three countries and suddenly having a kid to take care of, but things didn’t go quite that smoothly.”
His voice quieted. Sarah shifted uncomfortably in her seat, as if he were about to tell her about wicked conspiracies.
Close.
“I had always known that Jill is… ill. She’s not well, let’s put it that way. Part of the reason she visited her grandfather so often was because of her own tumultuous past. She was mercilessly bullied at her boarding school growing up. Said it started because she was late to develop, and from there it spiraled until she was the class whipping girl. She coped by drinking.”
“I see.”
“She was in recovery from a lot of things when I met her. Her grandfather paid for her treatments since he was the one who paid for the boarding school and felt responsible for her trauma. He was a good man. I was upset when he died a year ago. Anyway…” Lucas continued to search for more bourbon in his glass. He would have to order another, but that required summoning a server, and he was too deep in his personal story to bother. “I don’t know what triggered it. Might have been motherhood, or the fact I wasn’t around that often. All I know is that one night I came back and she was in the middle of a bender.”
Kind of ironic to be talking about this while they drank alcohol, but here they were, and Sarah seriously considered getting drunk to deal with this.
“I put up with it for two years. Two years too long, Damon said. He had the misfortune of coming over to our place in Copenhagen and seeing how bad she had become. Our son wasn’t even being looked after by her anymore. Her mother came over to take care of things.”
“That’s messed up.”
“But you know what? Because I was an idiot and still in love with her, I tried everything. I hired the best doctors, tried to get her to go to the best programs. I wanted her sober for Victor’s sake. And for mine, of course, but by then I was realizing that our marriage was over. We would never be able to recover from it, because during one of her benders she cheated on me with a rival family’s oldest son. It was a giant fuck you to me and my family. When I confronted her, she called me the most vicious names. Claimed I had done things I never did. Threatened to take my son to a place I would never be able to see him again. Then she had the gall to say that she had gotten pregnant on purpose. Just stopped taking her birth control, because her grandfather had gone into debt paying for her life and she needed to make sure her family got money. Why she didn’t wait for me to propose to her naturally I have no idea. Maybe she felt her demons coming back and wanted to seal the deal before I found out the truth.”
“That she was an alcoholic?”
“Among other things. I don’t know how much of it was her trauma and how much was her actual personality, but the more she drank, the more violent she became. I finally left her after she attacked me during one of her rages.”
“Jesus.”
“I took Victor with me. I couldn’t stand to think what she would do to our son. He’s a baby, for God’s sake. Not that any child should have to deal with that, but one as small and helpless as that? I didn’t want to think about what she could do to him, and I didn’t want to think about what I could do toherif she ever did lay a hand on him.”
Sarah didn’t want to imagine that, either.I’ve seen men in that protective mode.Nigel had done unspeakable things in the name of his sister’s safety. What was a man capable of when it came to his own child? “Obviously she cleaned up her act if she’s living here with your son.”
