Page 98 of Seduced By You

The bell rang. My heart jumped into my throat. Only my parents or Kadon would be at the door. If I had to guess, I’d pick the former. Kadon and I were done. Over. Finished. He’d made his choice, and it wasn’t me.

Rubbing my chest, I answered the door. I’d guessed correctly.

“Maman, Papa.” I stood back. “Come in.” I didn’t ask how they’d found me. It wasn’t important. Dash spied strangers and darted upstairs, his bushy tail stuck straight in the air. He’d hide under my bed until they left. Kadon and Audrey were the only two people Dash tolerated other than me.

“You always wanted a cat,” Maman said.

“I did.” I refrained from saying that, growing up, I’d wanted a lot of things I couldn’t have. If we were ever to put this difficult period behind us and move forward, then barbed comments weren’t helpful.

“What’s its name?”

“Dash. He’s a boy.” I led them into the kitchen. “Would you like some tea?”

“That’d be lovely.” Maman removed her coat and draped it over a chair. “You have a beautiful home, Annaleesa.”

“Thank you.” Dear God, we were behaving like strangers. I reached up for the tea bags. Ouch. That hurt. “Earl Grey?”

“Let me.” She bustled over, taking the box of tea bags from me. I didn’t have the energy to argue.

“You didn’t tell us they’d let you out,” Papa said.

“No.”

He nodded, grasping the meaning behind the singular word. Maman set three mugs of steaming tea on the kitchen table. The atmosphere hung heavy in the air. I’d never been all that good with silences, but as difficult as it was, I kept quiet, sipping my tea. I wouldn’t make this easy for them. If that made me a bitch, then fine. So be it. Surviving a plunge down a mountainside, surgery to remove my spleen, losing the love of my life, and a smashed-up face to boot… I’d earned my bitch status.

Papa gave Maman a nudge. Ah, they’d strategized an approach.

“Darling.” Maman leaned her arms on the table and curled her hands around her mug. “I’ve thought of nothing else but what you said in the hospital, and I’ve done a lot of soul-searching.” She let go of the mug and touched me instead, her fingers warm from the heat of the tea. “I thought I was helping you fulfill your dreams, but the truth is, I was fulfilling mine.”

She glanced at Papa, who rubbed her back in what I guessed was encouragement.

“Growing up, I’d applied to hundreds of modeling agencies, but they weren’t interested. There was always something wrong. I was too tall, too short, eyes too far apart or too narrow, too thin, too fat. Always something. In the end, I realized it was futile and applied to Oxford instead.” She gave Papa a secret smile, a smile lovers shared.

Kadon smiled at me like that.

Or rather, he had.

Not anymore.

“Then you came along. I hadn’t intended to push you into modeling, but I was walking down the street with you one day and a woman approached me. She said she was from a child modeling agency and you were perfect for an advertising campaign she was recruiting for. She gave me her card, and the next day I took you along. They hired you on the spot, and that was that.”

Her grip tightened on my arm. “Please believe me when I say that whatever I did, I thought I was doing for you. If only you’d told me how unhappy you were.”

“I did. Several times. I remember as a teenager begging you to let me go to ‘normal’ school with ‘normal’ kids, but you brushed it aside. You always brushed it aside.”

She bit her lip. “I don’t remember that.”

A snort came out of me, derisive and brimful of a deep-rooted hurt I’d carried inside me for far too long. “Of course you don’t remember.”

She flinched. “We tell ourselves lies all the time, Annaleesa. We convince ourselves that what we’re seeing is the truth. I made mistakes, terrible mistakes, none more so than what I said after Benedict broke up with you and you told me you were quitting modeling.”

This time, I flinched. “You hurt me.”

Until the day I died, I’d never forget the look on Maman’s face as those words came out of my mouth. If I’d taken a knife out of the block and stabbed her with it, the agony wouldn’t have been as deep. Tears streamed down her face, yet she didn’t make a sound. Papa resumed his back rub, round and round as if he were winding a child after dinner.

“Please let me make it up to you. I’ve missed you so much. My life is incomplete without you in it. I shouldn’t have left it this long. I wrecked our relationship; it was on me to fix it.” She shifted her chair and took both my hands in hers. “Give me a chance. I won’t let you down. I love you so very much, Annaleesa.”

The sincerity in those words, the love in her eyes, and the pain etched into her beautiful face broke the dam. Tears streamed down my face. I reached for her. We fell into each other’s arms. Papa wrapped his around both of us.

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