Page 37 of The Monster I Loved
I heard the front door slam soon after. Women were more trouble than they were worth. My mother once warned me of that when I was too young to understand. Boy, did I wish I’d listened.
My phone rang, and it was a number I didn’t recognize.
“What the hell? I just can’t understand why your new mission in life seems to be making mine unbearable.”
Summer. Seriously?
“Everything isn’t about you.” I tried to keep my voice calm. I wouldn’t let her win.
Silence.
I smirked. “You seem to be forgetting that we’re willing to give the tenants a monetary donation.”
“This might be hard for you to believe, but money isn’t everything, Thaddeus. That building is special...to them.” The tremble in her voice was impossible to ignore.
My jaw tightened. “I’m not having this conversation with you. Speak to Melissa. She’s the lawyer.”
“Don’t you dare hang up on me after what you did!”
I snorted before I could stop myself. “After what I did? You have to be fucking kidding me. This is business, it isn’t personal. I’m not about to change course because I feel sorry for the former Starlight tenants. Not everything is about you, Summer.”
Her voice cracked, and I was pretty sure I heard a sniff. Was she crying? “You are heartless.”
Her words knifed at me. Why did her opinion of me matter so much?
“Says the woman who wiped up my mother’s blood as if she was nobody. Says the woman who lied, who took the side of a killer over the person she’d promised to spend the rest of her life with. But sure, yeah. I’m the one who’s heartless,” I snapped at her. Venom coated my tongue. Only Summer could make me so angry I wanted to...
Silence.
“You’re a murderer, Thaddeus. I kept a secret. They’re not the same fucking thing! You murdered my dad in cold blood in front of me like he was nothing, like I meant nothing to you. You’re evil. Pure evil, if you can’t see that. How do you live with yourself?”
White-hot anger pulsed through me, and it hurt to swallow it back down. “I thought this was about the Starlight building, about the tenants. You’re making this aboutyouagain, Summer. Your dad killed my mom. I killed your dad. We’re even.”
She didn’t miss a beat. Same old argument. “It was an accident, what my dad did. What you did was murder. That’shardly the same! You’re sick, Thaddeus. They should never have released you from jail. They should have left you to rot there.”
A fresh wave of fury burned through my veins. “Sometimes, I wish I’d killed you too, then I wouldn’t have to deal with your shit now. What you did was just as bad. If I deserve to rot in jail, you should be dead.” I didn’t mean it. I wanted to hurt her, badly. How could she be so deluded to think that she was innocent in all of this?
“Fuck you,” she snarled.
“Great comeback. Get off my phone.”
I hung up. Red filled my vision. Women seemed to be on a mission to piss me off today. Summer had let her hard-ass act drop, and her woe-is-me real-life attitude had returned. I ground my teeth. She’d done exactly the same as this ten years ago. Her dad was sorry. It was an accident. I broke her heart. She managed to make it all about them.
Them. Them. Them.
All my feelings and decisions should be based on them.
After the building inspection came back and it said it was unsafe, I thought she’d do the right thing and give in. But her foolish head wanted somebody to spend millions making the building safe for people to live in forfree. She had zero understanding of the way the world worked, it seemed.
Let my dad walk free for killing your mom. Let’s get married after I hid the truth about you. Just donate the building after you do all the hard work of fixing it.
She was fucking naïve. Starlight’s sale would be finalized in days, then Fitzgerald would do whatever was in our best interest.
Because that was the world we lived in.
Summer
The Halloween party came around quickly, and I made my way up the hill on foot, having left the car at home in the driveway, replaying our phone call again and again. I shouldn’t have called Thaddeus. It was a moment of weakness. And in the moments of weakness after that, when I’d tried to call back, and he ignored me. I’d hoped he’d say something to talk me out of my plan. But he hadn’t. He’d cemented it. Thaddeus believed in getting even.
