Page 7 of The Trust We Broke
I’m here, with a Juris Doctor law degree from Harvard and no student loans, as a result. But much to my father’s chagrin, I work for a not-for-profit law firm as a defense attorney who represents those who have been harmed by the system.
I pull the truck up outside the main house, turn off the engine, then lean my head back against the headrest.
All I can see is the image of a younger Grudge waiting on the steps for me.
Even now, energy rushes through me, like a lit firework throwing sparks everywhere. There is no discernible pattern to it. But it’s hot and fizzes within me.
Like it always has.
Jesus, I’ve felt it for as long as my memory can recall him.
We’ve known each other since I was five and he was six. One minute, we were the rarest kind of friends. The next, we were teens, with hormones and changing bodies. I remember the day after I turned sixteen, he looked up at me from fixing an old bike and my stomach flipped in a way it usually didn’t. Finally, we were lovers. He was the man who took my virginity with such care, I cried afterwards from the tenderness of it. Later, when Ilearned more about my body, he made me cry in desperation, in need and want.
I rub my thighs together at the memory, then bite down on the side of my fingernail.
I wanted to tell him the truth about why I divorced him back then. Blurt out why I’d done it. But some things are best kept in the past. It’s been ten years since my father forced my hand to sign the papers. That day was the last time I acknowledged my father’s existence until I walked into the hospital a month ago and didn’t stay long.
Even when he won prestigious awards and gained features in well-respected magazines, where my connection to him could have furthered my career, I kept my distance.
I wouldn’t even be here at all, if I thought Mom could cope alone. But I know that the illusion of this family is the only life raft she has to cling to.
“This isn’t helping,” I mutter to myself.
I pull my things from the passenger seat and step out of the truck. As I do, my phone rings. Juggling everything, I answer it.
“Lucy De Bose speaking.”
“Please don’t hang up,” Henry says. “I just want to talk with you, Lucy.”
I silently curse. I should have checked who it was. “I think you said everything there was to say when you cheated on me.”
For six whole months before I found out.
“And I was a fool. A moron. But, please, can we talk this through? You don’t just throw away three years, Lucy.”
I glance up at the sky and roll my eyes. The threat of snow clings to the frigid air. “Apparently, you do.”
There’s a pause. “I deserve that. You shouldn’t have found out the way you did.”
I huff. He told me he was going on a business trip, which was not unusual. He kissed me at five in the morning when he left for the airport.
“If it were up to you, I wouldn’t have found out at all.”
When I woke later and went to make my coffee, I saw he’d left one of his gadgets behind, plugged into the wall. And as I was looking at it, a message popped up from someone called Fleur, telling him to hurry back to bed because she was hungry for his cock again.
I called him, and given his flight information, he should have been in the lounge at La Guardia. Instead, he sounded breathless and gave me some bullshit story about how his camera wasn’t working for some reason.
I cracked Henry’s password on the first attempt. For a so-called intelligent man who worked as a consultant, his password was easy, the first I’d tried. His date of birth.
There, I found their whole history.
I’d missed the signs for months.
We both had busy jobs. There were peaks and valleys in our time together, but I’d put it down to us building our careers.
An hour later, I was up to my eyeballs in Fleur’s social media, and sure enough, there were photographs of the two of them. By the end of the day, my things were in storage, I’d had a sexual health check, and was checked into a hotel.
“Anyway, it’s not about how I found out. It’s the fact it happened in the first place.”
