Page 53 of The Ring
A few seconds later, Mila, a petite brunette thirty-something woman who is one of our staff members stationed in Paris to keep the flat clean and ready for guests, opened the door.
Mila let me in and took my bags. “I’ll put these in your room,” she said, heading in that direction. Then she suddenly turned around, as if she had just remembered something. “Oh, I almost forgot, you have a visitor waiting for you in the living room. He’s been there for almost three hours.”
I hadn’t been expecting anyone, but I thought maybe it was Laurie—he had mentioned he’d visit soon, just not when. I walked into the living room and found a Winthrop standing there—just not the one I had expected.
TJ was there, not Laurie. For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating or imagining things. But as time went on and he remained there, I knew I wasn’t. Still, seeing him felt like looking at a mirage.
He tensed as he noticed my presence in the room. “Hey,” TJ said as he turned to look at me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, icily. I didn’t want him to realise how much his presence was unsettling me.
“I came to talk to you,” he replied.
I had had this conversation in my head many times before it actually happened. But as it was happening, I realised I didn’t want to have it—because if all the imagined versions had taught me one thing, it was that no matter what he said, there was nothing that could excuse what he did.
“We have nothing to talk about,” I told him firmly.
“What about us?” TJ asked, his voice laced with desperation.
“There is no longer anus,” I replied, keeping my voice steady. “You slept with my mother.”
Part of me wanted to repeat those words over and over like a mantra to remind myself not to waver. But I also didn’t want to say them again. Every time I did, it felt like I was reliving the pain of that night all over again. It still does.
He sighed, clearly frustrated. “If you could just listen?—”
“I don’t want to listen,” I snapped, cutting him off mid-sentence.
“If you could just—” he tried again.
“Fine, go on,” I interrupted, giving him a look to hurry up and crossing my arms over my chest.
I didn’t want to, but I figured the faster he finished, the faster he would be gone. And I really wanted—needed—him to leave.
He seemed to be trying to say something, but the words seemed caught in his throat. After a few seconds that felt like hours, the only thing he got out was, “I—I didn’t… mean to.”
“Well, that definitely fixes everything,” I shot back sarcastically.
“You are so exasperating,” he snapped.
“Me?” I asked in disbelief, dropping my arms. “I’m not the one who caused this whole mess. No matter what you say, there’s nothing you can do to change the past. You had sex with my mother, and that ended us for good.”
I looked at him like he disgusted me—which, in a way now, he did—and as if he were a stranger, which, in some ways, he was. I could never have imagined the boy I fell in love with at twelve could have done something like this to me. It was like hehad become a completely different person. He changed right before my eyes, and I didn’t even notice.
TJ looked taken aback by the way I was staring at him, but then he stepped closer to me. “Are you sure about that?”
I walked backwards towards the open window. “I am.”
I wasn’t.
I wish I were.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, sounding so cocky.
He was unbelievable. He went from looking like a sorry puppy begging for forgiveness to being all smug and full of himself in a matter of seconds.
“If we’re really over, then why are you still wearing it?” He pointed to the ring on my left hand—the finger where people wear engagement rings.
He had given me the ring on my last birthday, in a kind of proposal-not-proposal way. He said he knew better than to propose to me with only one ring, and that one day, in a not-so-distant future, he would. But he knew I was the one he wanted to spend forever with, and that’s why he wanted me to have it.
