that the revenge and the trauma and the guilt and the pain that she’s carried in her heart for so long will only damage her more over time. She needs medication and therapy and a lot of love and support, and I’m prepared to give my whole life to making her better. She wanted to fix me? Well, she has. She has made me become the person I needed to be, the person I was always afraid to be. She made me be okay with being the real Pascal Dumont, not a man in my father’s shadow, not a minion following in his footsteps. And now that she’s fixed me, I have to fix her.
I have to heal her heart, her soul, help her become the woman she’s meant to be without all the pain and horror that molded her into someone else. I want to help her be a mother, a wife, a friend. I want us both to live free from the shackles of the people we used to be.
Those people died with my father.
Now we’re starting anew.
“Are you doing okay?” I ask her.
She nods and adjusts the neckline of her black dress. Ironically, it’s her maid uniform.
“I’m just worried,” she admits.
I bring her hand to my mouth and kiss her knuckles. “Tell me why, and I’ll handle it.”
She gives me a wry look. “I’m not sure that you can. I’m worried about my mother, for one.”
Ah, yes. Her mother has not taken this very well at all. If Gabrielle needs help for her fragile psyche, then Jolie needs ten times that amount. When she arrived at the hospital, even though she saw Gabrielle lying there in bed, IVs and monitors hooked up to her, her first words were about Gautier. Where was he, what happened to him? I guess she had heard the news and refused to believe it.
When I told her the truth—and I mean all the truth—she wouldn’t listen. Even when I said I had proof, she waved it away. I was so afraid that she was going to start yelling at Gabrielle and blaming her that I had to remove her from the room before she did any further damage to her daughter’s mind.
It’s only now, in the last day or two, that she’s started to calm down, and her truth is starting to come out. I guess that’s what being questioned by the police, psychiatrists, and trauma experts will do to you. Not only was Jolie brainwashed by my father, she suffered his abuse from practically the moment she and Gabrielle arrived at our house.
Again, I feel awful for not having noticed, for never paying the help any attention. I never saw the signs, and I fear that if I had, I would have brushed them off because they didn’t concern me. I was such a selfish bastard, I was the only thing that mattered in my life.
When Jolie was further examined, they discovered bruises and cigarette burns up and down her arms, covered by the long sleeves she always wore, in the same way that my father almost always wore a long-sleeve shirt, even in the middle of summer, to cover up the jagged scar left by Gabrielle’s corkscrew. We all knew it was there, though we didn’t know why or care to, but to him it must have been a daily reminder of the one who fought back.
Now Gabrielle doesn’t have to fight anymore.
“Your mother will be fine,” I tell her. “It’s going to take time, but she’ll get there. Please don’t worry about her.” I want to add that she doesn’t deserve it, but I know that Gabrielle doesn’t see it that way. Ever since she was a child and under the abuse of her father, the two of them became a unit. Even when they split, even when Gabrielle had no choice but to leave to save her own life, Gabrielle’s whole focus was to come back and save her mother, even if her mother didn’t want to be saved.
And she didn’t want to be saved. She made that clear.
Now, though, she might not have the choice.
“So what’s the other thing you’re worried about?” I ask her. “Is it the press?”
It’s just the two of us standing in the room, the wolves at the door. The press has been hungry for the both of us since this happened, and I can’t blame them. This is the story and scandal of the century. Two feuding brothers, good and evil, heads