Page 164 of The Scandal You Started
As she swiped up her phone and car keys from the corner of the dining table, she heard behind her, “I’m going to call V.”
Rayna’s phone kept buzzing with incoming messages and phone calls in her trouser pocket as she stared at the four gravestones lined up in front of her.
Specifically, the second headstone, engraved with the name Yasmin Taylor, dated 11 October 823 to 4 April 863 below.
The drive to the cemetery had taken ten minutes, though Rayna honestly didn’t remember a second of it. Neither was she sure how long she’d been standing there. And for the first time, she didn’t know what to say to her mum either.
Normally, the one-sided conversation of all the things she had to update her mum on flowed in her head—she didn’t like saying it aloud like George did—but there was nothing in her mind. Just a broken, barren post-apocalyptic landscape, dried of thought and emotion.
Drained of hope.
Another handful of slow minutes passed before Rayna’s phone buzzed with a call again. She wasn’t sure what made her dig it out of her pocket that time, but she did.
It wasn’t Victor, or George, or Dominic, or any of her friends and colleagues.
It was her dad.
She swiped to answer with tired movements and brought the device to her ear. “Hello?”
“Rayna?” her dad said quickly. “Rayna, child, where are you? Why haven’t you been answering your phone? Victor and George, Dominic, all your friends—they’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour. Where are you? Are you okay?”
It’d been an hour?
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t realise how long it’d been.”
“Where are you? Why weren’t you answering your phone?”
She glanced between the four graves of Alex, her mother, and Frank and Samara Aynsley, George’s parents. “I’m at the cemetery.”
Her dad was quiet for several moments.
“What happened?” he asked.
She blinked mutely at the etching of her mum’s name, not knowing how to explain what she’d read in those notes nor how it was making her feel.
“Dad,” she heard herself say. “Why did you and Mum get divorced?”
Her dad made a quiet noise of surprise.
Understandable, she supposed. Neither she nor he had ever brought up her parents’ divorce. Rayna had never asked, and if her dad had mentioned it, he’d always skirted around the topic with hinting comments, but nothing ever so direct.
“I…” he started, then stopped and sighed. “We loved each other, Rayna. We did. Neither of us ever doubted that, and I don’t ever want you to either. But…maybe we married too young and didn’t really know who we were, or maybe we didn’t discuss the important stuff, thinking that love was enough, but we began realising that we wanted different things in life.
“I wanted a bigger family and to slow down, but your mum wanted to focus on her career. And we argued about it; there’s no hiding that. But it got to a point that we both realised the way we loved each other wasn’t enough to keep our relationship going. We were holding each other back from what we really wanted, and it wasn’t fair for one of us to ask the other to give up on that.
“Your mother would’ve been miserable if I’d asked her to cut down on her work at the lab,” her dad said. “And I couldn’t do that to her. She would’ve come to hate me, and that was the last thing I wanted. But I knew, I saw that I didn’t fit into the life she wanted to create, and she didn’t want to be a part of what I pictured for us. We had to give each other up, and thankfully, we loved each other enough to do it on good terms.”
The numbness encasing Rayna’s mind was cracking as she compared her father’s words to her relationship with Dominic.
“Did you ever regret it?” she asked quietly.
“At first? Yes, I did. It hurt, of course it hurt, knowing that love wasn’t enough to keep us together, that our marriage was over. I regretted that we didn’t become the couple we’d imagined we’d be when we first married.
“But after? No. How could I? We were both better for it. Happier with ourselves and for each other, and we ended up finding the people we were meant to be with. The ones who loved usandwanted what we did. Victor was the man I could never have been for your mother, and Isha wanted the slow life I did too.
“I know for you,” he continued, “it probably didn’t feel like a good thing. Divorce isn’t easy for children, even amicable ones. But I promise you, Rayna, leaving each other was the best thing Yasmin and I ever did for ourselves and for you too. If we hadn’t, it would have gotten to a point where our arguments would have hurt you more than they already did.”
“Hmm,” Rayna hummed, the sound hardly audible.
