Page 61 of Down Shift (Driven 8)
“Are you answering a question with a question, Mander?”
“Only if you’re going to keep avoiding answering it.” Our eyes clash in a battle of wills as the smirk on his lips challenges me to talk.
I sigh in resignation. “What was the question again?” I ask, knowing damn well what it was.
He laughs when I ask another question and bumps his shoulder against mine. Reaching out, he links our fingers and narrows his eyes. “Yes, Getty. We’re really doing this. Crossing boundaries.” He twists his lips and just stares at me for a second. “You know . . . I had no intention of telling you any of that. Zero . . . but I want you to trust me. How can you trust me when I’m not being honest with you?”
And there he goes. Laying down the gauntlet to see if I’ll pick it up and reciprocate. I tilt my face up to the sky and focus on the swaying pine trees above me to buy time as I gather my courage by the bootstraps.
“My father came to visit me today.” My voice is steady, even, and yet all I hear in my own ears is the sound of my nerves. My anxiety over letting someone know about my old life. I hate the feeling that comes over me, anticipating the flush of shame when I confess who I used to be, what I used to let happen to me.
Then I try to pull my hands from his, create some space between us, anything so he can’t feel my hands grow damp or the nerves tremor through them, but he squeezes them tighter. “No,” he says resolutely, and brings the back of my hand to his lips and kisses it.
Tears burn in my eyes. At a kindness I don’t deserve from this man who has withstood so much more than me and yet is standing here asking me to trust him. And in the safe moment he’s created for me to purge my fears.
My gaze scans the horizon, the ocean and its continuous ripples, before I find my voice again. “My name is Gertrude Caster-Adams. Or rather Gertrude Caster, since I’m no longer married.” I laugh nervously because the name that’s been mine for almost twenty-six years sounds foreign to my own ears. And I’m not sure if I expect him to recognize the last name, but a part of me sighs in relief when he does nothing more than brush his thumb over the top of my hand in reassurance. “I grew up in Silicon Valley. Computer giants may have run the town, but my father built an empire selling real estate to these overnight millionaires.”
Recognition flashes across his features and yet he remains quiet. Allows me to move at my own pace. And my mind’s a scattered mess. Unsure how to start. Where to go. So I begin when it all changed.
“When I was eleven, my mother died of a pulmonary embolism. A freak thing after a routine knee surgery.”
“Oh, Getty.” The sound in his voice almost breaks the dam holding back the tears that I don’t want to shed. He knows the pain of losing a mother. I take comfort in the thought and clear my throat to continue. “At a young age, I recognized my father as being a controlling elitist. Or as much as a child can understand that concept . . . but I never knew the full obsession of his need to maintain his societal status until after she died. It was crazy how much she’d sheltered me from it, but once she was gone, I was the only one left to bear the brunt of his wrath. A teenager who needed her mother more than anything, and his solution was etiquette classes and debutante balls. Education was imperative—the best private schools where who you were friends with was way more important than your grades.” I shove away the memories of being told I couldn’t play with kids who were just as miserable as I was in the prison of a school. How I was forced to go to social events and boring teas just because of who was hosting it or its attendees. Barbies were unacceptable child’s play. Video games were akin to the devil. But hours spent with the women’s Junior League was time well spent.
“I was miserable. All I wanted was to be a normal teenager who listened to music way too loud and talked back enough to get put on restriction so I could have time to myself.” My laugh sounds miserable at best. “My junior year, I was introduced to Ethan Adams. I knew of him because his father ran a commercial development company that was growing by leaps and bounds as much as my father’s was on the residential side of the business. Little did I know that chance meeting—or I guess I should say orchestrated meeting—would be the beginning of the end of me.”
So many memories flash through my mind from that time.
“My father was this cold, harsh man. He demanded perfection. A lady never makes mistakes or causes a scene, Gertrude.” I sneer at the thought. “So when I met Ethan, he was like a source of the warmth I’d been missing in my life. He made me laugh. He focused on me, when for years I’d been focusing on how to make my father happy. He courted me properly. Stolen kisses here and there because sex was for marriage and he planned on marrying me. He made me feel loved when for so long after my mother’s death, our house had been like a morgue. He made me feel hope . . . like if I just hung on through my father’s demands long enough, then he’d marry me and whisk me away and it would all be better.”
“Now I know how hard it was for you to sit here and listen to me without saying anything.” The strained resignation in Zander’s voice pulls my eyes toward him. I can sense his anger at where he thinks this story is going. There’s concern, warmth, compassion there too. Three things I haven’t felt in so very long and yet I now know why I’d been hesitant to believe they were genuine.
Because Ethan had made me feel that way and look how that turned out.
“I know.” I smile, because it’s so easy to do with him. I nod, ready to unload more of the weight from my chest. “What I didn’t know until after the storybook wedding was that I was basically a dowry in a business merger. The tying bond between two families that allowed my father to take over the Adams empire when Ethan’s father passed away and gain someone to take over all of his when he eventually retired.”
“A pawn.” Disgust laces his tone.
“Yep.” A lone tear slides down my cheek. I rub it away instantly. I’ll allow myself only one. Retell this like the story it is, Getty. Like you’re the narrator, and then you can break down in private later over the memories that still hold your heart hostage. My breath is audibly shaky when I draw it in. “It was gradual at first, but it didn’t take long for Ethan’s true colors to shine through: He was as cold and callous as my father was. Maybe even more so, now that I’ve had time to reflect on it. Our wedding night should have been my first indication, but I was too nervous to really comprehend how bad of a situation I’d gotten myself into.” Silence falls as the memory that stains my soul and stands out as the one that hurt the most replays in my mind’s eye. And I’m so glad that Zander is polite enough not to ask more, because the wounds are still raw all this time later.
The fairy-tale first time was anything but for me. There were selfish demands and disregard of my pain instead of soft words of encouragement and proclamations of love. A few grunts, some criticism from Ethan, and then I was left alone in a gigantic bed with tears drying on my cheeks and blood on the sheets as he left the hotel room for a while. Only to return later with the scent of perfume on his collar and alcohol on his breath.
“Getty?” Zander’s searching tone pulls me from the black memory.
“Sorry. I was just . . . Never mind.” I force a smile to my lips to tell him I’m okay. “If I’d felt controlled under my father’s thumb, living with Ethan was more like a noose around my neck. Perfection was expected and anything less was punishable: organization, white-glove cleanliness, appearance, manners, meals, everything. His paranoia grew over fears he was going to lose his position in the company and lose everything. That fear was taken out on me. Ridiculous accusations, constant criticisms, complete control over my life.” My voice breaks on the last sentence, too many memories haunting me to remain unaffected.
“So you left?” Zander
prompts in a way that tells me I don’t have to explain about the reasons any more. That he understands how personal they are and he doesn’t need to know the specifics because he can infer.
“Yes.” I swallow over the lump in my throat. “I filed for divorce in secret and then left in the middle of the night, but somehow he was prepared for it, because he’d already frozen all my accounts. My father did the same to my trust accounts, when it shouldn’t be possible.”
I can all but see the cogs of his mind clicking into place. How upset I became at his accusation of being a trust fund baby. Why I have expensive things but need my job desperately.
“And now they’re here,” he says in affirmation.
“Just my father—that I know of.” And I hate that momentary panic of wondering whether Ethan is lurking nearby in town. I push it away. Focus on getting it all out. “I knew he’d find me eventually. The long-reaching arms of Damon Caster are inescapable. But I needed enough time to make sure I was strong enough to face him. That their hold over me had lessened. And those words, hold over me . . . I’m so embarrassed to even admit that I let someone have that.”
Shame has me averting my eyes from his. I look out to the water, watch the ocean breeze create patterns in the water, and bite back the self-reprimands over the life I used to live.
