Page 32 of Her Kensington
“You know everything. I promise.”
His eyes urge me to believe him, to trust that the person sitting in front of me is the person that I believe him to be. Everything in me wants to trust him, but hiding those two from me is so massive. The rational part of me knows I’d be crazy to let this go, but as I stare into his dark, pleading eyes, all I want to do is believe him.
“Do you have any idea how it felt, opening the door to them?”
“No, I can’t imagine.” He sits looking defeated for a few seconds before he jumps up and starts collecting the few things I have scattered around the room.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking you home, where you belong.”
“Harrison…No, I—”
“I’m not going home without you. I know you’re not going to forgive me just like that. But I won’t leave you here.”
“I’m not ready to go back yet,” I admit quietly. I’ve got too much to process right now. “What are you doing?”
“If you’re not leaving this room, neither am I,” he says as he toes his shoes off and gets comfortable resting back against the headboard.
“I came here to get away from you.”
“Not that easy, sweetheart.” The cocky grin he gives me has butterflies tickling at my stomach but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him get away with this so easily.
Scooting back up the bed so I’m sitting beside him, I focus my eyes on the mirror on the opposite wall, refusing to look his way. His dark stare does things to me and I know it’ll have me caving if I look at him for too long.
“Tell me everything. Everything you’ve been avoiding telling me, right now,” I demand.
“Uh…okay. As I said, Rebecca and I had been together since we were kids. Our parents were, still are, friends and it was almost kind of assumed that we’d end up together. I’d loved her from as early as I can remember, and everything was so natural between us. As the years went on we got more serious. We went to the same uni so we could be together, our parents rented us a flat. Then not long after we turned twenty, Rebecca found out she was pregnant. It was a total accident. We both had said we wanted a family but not while we were still so young, and students, but we did what we had to do.
“Watching my babies grow was the most incredible experience. I’d wake up every morning excited to see how much her bump had grown. Everything was perfect. Until she had them. Then the postnatal depression kicked in and everything started spiraling out of control.
“I thought it would all work itself out. That she’d recover and become the mum I always believed she could be. And she was, in a way, for a while. We got married, moved into our own place. But then she lost one of her closest friends and she fell back into the rabbit hole. I ended up moving us all back into my parents’ place so I could have some support. Rebecca spent most of her time out with friends, socializing, spending as much money as possible and as little time at home as she could.”
A lump forms in my throat as I imagine how a young Harrison would have coped with all that.
“I didn’t believe for one minute she’d throw away what we had. I thought aside from her struggles that we were solid. She was seeing a therapist; I thought it would all get sorted and we could move on with our lives. Well, she moved on with her life. She’d been sleeping with him for months behind my back. I was at home with our kids while she was out there living the high life.
“Everything was about how it looked to the outside world. So she wouldn’t allow me custody, she took me for everything she could and ran off with him and took my kids.”
I can feel his anger oozing from every pour as he spits those final few words.
“They were my life. But off she went, and enrolled them in the most expensive boarding school she could find. I was only allowed to see them on my allotted time slot if they weren’t busy with school stuff, or any of the other activities she arranged for them so she didn’t have to parent them.”
“Wow, Harrison. I’m so sorry.”
“It is what it is. Now she uses them as a bargaining tool to get whatever she wants. She’s sick.”
A thought pops into my head.
“She made this happen.”
“Made what happen?”
“She phoned the house earlier. She knew they were coming and that I was home.”
“Fucking bitch,” he spits, getting up from the bed and pacing from wall to wall. “What did she say to you?”
“She told me that I was living her life and that you were lying to me.” I can hear her conniving voice loud and clear in my head. “She told me to have a nice evening. She had this all planned.”
