harm myself; I’m not that weak. Instead, I’d turned my rage into something more. I’d thrown myself into work even more than I had in the past, which only made me richer than I already was. And I guess you can say the extreme sports I’d taken up was a drug of sorts. Whatever it was, it had helped me put her out of my mind as if she’d never been.
It’s not wise to think of the person you hate most in the world and what you’d like to do to them while scaling a treacherous rock face on the side of a steep mountain overlooking a cliff. My mother had been terrified that she would lose her son, but had I not thrown myself into those things, she’d have lost me to jail instead because I would’ve hunted this bitch down and knocked her fucking head off had I seen her at any time in that first year.
I’d held onto the house for some twisted reason, knowing that bringing another woman there would be the nail in her coffin. I’m still not sure how I knew that seeing as she’d disappeared without a trace. But somewhere deep inside, I knew that the love she’d had for that place had been real, and being a damn female, the thought of another woman being in the place she’d seen as hers would gut her.
I couldn’t leave it as it had been, though, fuck no. Each time I walked through the door and saw the evidence of her touch, I’d wanted to commit murder. So I’d hired someone to gut the place from top to bottom and remove all the froufrou shit she’d been into, turning it into a more modern state of the art home. I hated it, her designs had been more suited to the place, but I was killing her with each piece I removed and replaced. At least in my mind, I was.
I’d taken on more work, traveled more and more to get away, to keep my mind occupied so that it wasn’t filled with her. The one time I tried to fuck someone else had been a disaster and had made me hate her even more than I already did. And then the thought of her in someone else’s arms had turned me into a complete fucking monster.
I’d gone on a tear that had lasted months, something only my mother had been able to bring me back from. But I barely paid her any mind even then, since she was the only one who still sided with my ex-wife. Of everyone around me, it was only my mother who insisted that Giselle hadn’t left me on her own, that she hadn’t deceived me all those months we were together.
Everyone else agreed with me that she was a gold-digging slut who deserved to have her throat slit and left in a gutter to bleed out. Something I’d sworn I’d do if I’d seen her in those first few days after she left. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t taken anything when she left, that even the account I’d opened for her had gone untouched all this time. I convinced myself that she’d been after my money, and the only reason she hadn’t taken me for more is because something had come up or she’d realized that I wasn’t an easy mark and had moved onto someone else.
That thought had damn near put me in an institution. But even when my mind came up with these scenarios, there was always a part of me that questioned whether or not it could be true. The girl I’d known, the sweet, soft-spoken angel who’d wormed her way into my heart, hadn’t had an ounce of avarice in her. I’d had to damn near browbeat her into taking any form of money from me, and gifts used to leave her speechless.
Had it all been an act? Had I fallen for the oldest con? I’d driven myself crazy with those questions and more until I had to put her and our time together out of my mind, or I would’ve lost myself for sure. In those days, mom had begged me to look for her, so convinced was she that there was something else at play here.
But I couldn’t see what that could be. Giselle had never mentioned anything dark in her past, and though she didn’t like talking about her family, I’d just assumed that they’d had a rocky relationship like so