reason for it. She’d been living under her new name for a good five years before we met, so how had her mother found her? That was the one niggling question left on my mind; now I know the answer.
The self-recrimination I’d felt on the way back home after learning all that I had in the last few hours was enough to make me hate myself, especially when I recall my anger at her after the hell she’d most likely been through. As of right now, that anger has been redirected, and now it burns even brighter than before.
I’m going to incinerate down to the ground everyone who had a hand in tampering with my wife and bringing about the destruction of my marriage. Everyone who played a part in robbing me of the first year of my son’s life. I won’t forgive anyone, no matter who or what past association we might share. I’m not sure how Dana convinced herself that I would choose her over my wife and kid. I never gave her the slightest indication that I saw her as anything more than the friend she once was.
I listened to her nonsensical spouting, wondering how the fuck I’d missed the fact that she’s out of her fucking mind. With each word, she came closer and closer to never making it off the estate alive. And when I recalled how she’d been there at my side after Giselle left, offering me comfort and a shoulder to lean on, I imagined snapping her neck like a twig.
I did a very good job of hiding my inner thoughts as I listened and heard what she really thought of my wife for the first time. I was putting together her words with what I’d learned from Gordon and came to realize that she didn’t know much about Ann Winthrop. She only knew that the woman posed a threat to my wife and went with it.
I want to go scorched earth, I want to leave a path of destruction in my wake, starting with this thing standing in front of me, but I keep reminding myself that my family needs me. And besides, I need to know all of it before I make a move. So I can’t throw her ignorant ass out the window, which for all that it was on the first floor was still a good ten feet up from the marble terrace down below.
So I kept my calm and turned back to face her finally. “So, you, under the guise of friendship, found her mother, and what? How did you know they were estranged, or that the mother would do what she did?” I couldn’t bear to look at her, so I kept my gaze trained somewhere above her head.
“It was obvious, wasn’t it? I mean, why else would she go to such lengths to keep her out of her life? Someone like her should’ve been announcing to the world that she was marrying someone like you, but instead, no one but that stupid friend of hers from college was here for the wedding and no one ever saw or heard anything about her family.”
“That still doesn’t answer why you went looking for her mother or how you knew that what transpired would be the end result.”
“Like I said, it was easy to read between the lines. I wasn’t sure who Ann Winthrop was, or what she was about, but I knew that her daughter had a very healthy fear and dislike of her.”
“I figured at the very least if you saw that and maybe met the mother that your infatuation with her would change. You always seemed to have her on a pedestal, like you thought she was above everyone else. I never expected things to work out as well as they did.”
For a second, she seemed to forget that I was in the room and the sickening smile on her face was almost too much for me to handle. “If I’d known she would turn out to be such a threat, I would’ve gotten rid of her sooner.” She turned those eyes of near insanity on me again, but I couldn’t find any pity for her. It was obvious, at least now it was, that she’d gone off the deep end. Or maybe she’d always been like this, and I just never noticed.
“Why did you have to work so hard on changing her, building her confidence? Why couldn’t you have left her as she was? That