Page 67 of Caught Between Two Billionaires
“I was thinking of starting work at the studio again,” she says, referring to the yoga studio. She started working there maybe a year after the will. She teaches classes or works behind the desk. They basically pay pennies, but it helps her feel in control of her life.
“The doctor said you should rest.”
“Doctors,” she says, waving away cancer like it’s nothing. “I feel fine.”
She doesn’t look fine. There are still shadows under her eyes, but they aren’t as pronounced as before. I can’t look at her and not see the way she looked in that room full of her enemies. That day may not have broken her, but it broke something in me.
Impulsively I reach over and touch her hand. She looks surprised. Then she folds me into her skinny arms, resting my face against her shoulder the way she did when I was little.
“What happened?”
Only two words, but they have the power to make me cry. Maybe because there’s already such knowledge in them. Out of anyone she knows what it’s like to be hurt by a man. I let the tears fall, because love is terrible, terrible, terrible. And it doesn’t go away.
When I can speak again, it isn’t Christopher that I talk about.
“Sutton walks around like nothing can surprise him, like nothing can shake him. He’s so freaking capable, it’s like vibrating in him. It would be just a day’s work to make a business deal and then build a house.”
“I see,” Mom says, in this speculative voice like maybe she does see. Maybe her motherly instincts have somehow told her that her daughter had a wicked threesome in a French hotel.
“But I left, and worse than that, I think I let him down. He wanted me to save that library. He never told me that, not with words.” He spanked me with a nonfiction book over the counter, though. “It’s something I felt from him.”
“Wasn’t it his company?” she asks. “He could stop the construction if he wanted.”
There was that story about the horse, though. About Cinnamon. You didn’t throw away a horse because it was wild. You kept it, even when you weren’t sure what to do with it. And then one day someone came along, someone no one expected, to tame her.
That old library lives and breathes as much as any animal. Christopher doesn’t feel that. For all that he genuinely cares about me, he sees the building as a commodity. Real estate.
“I think maybe… finding me was his way of stopping the construction.”
It meant he put his faith in me. There’s a knot in my stomach that says I let him down.
And I let that old library down.
“I didn’t get you into the treatment study.”
“And I didn’t want to do it. I would have, for you, but I didn’t want to.” She would have put herself through the pain of needles and chemicals, because I want her to get better. Does that make me selfish or stupid? Maybe both. Or maybe I’m just a little girl who wants her mother.
“Daddy would have paid for the treatment,” I say, feeling stubborn.
“Yes,” she says, simple and certain. “He would have insisted that I do it, too, even if I didn’t want to. You and he are a lot alike.”
“I don’t know whether that’s a compliment.” On some level I’ve been doing to my mother what Christopher does to me. Using my protection of her as a crutch. She did need me once, the way I needed him to dive in after me and rescue me. But she doesn’t need me to make smoothies or buy butterfly gardens in her name.
“Of course it is. I loved your father.”
“He loved you back.”
“He asked me out, you know. That night at the art gallery. Asked me on a date, like we were young and foolish. I said yes, of course. I could never say no to him.”
My throat burns. No wonder she had thought he wouldn’t leave her out of the will, among many other reasons. And we’ll never get to ask him why he did. Was it a moment of anger toward my mom? Was it a lesson for me? But he didn’t have any answers for me.
“Do you wonder why?” I ask.
“Sometimes. Not much, these days. He was a complicated man. Ambitious. Afraid.”
That makes me look up at her. “Afraid?”
“Afraid that someone was using him for his money. He couldn’t let it go. He never really trusted anyone.” She’s looking into the past now. “He loved me the same way I loved him, without being able to help it. That kind of love, it takes away your control, and he hated that.”
It breaks my heart to think of how different we could have been. If she and Daddy had gone on a date and then another. If they had finally been able to reconcile their love into building a life together. So many possibilities ended the night of that exhibit.
