is family, Lucy. You, however, are not.”
“You will change your mind when I have the baby. You will,” she says with determination.
“I’ll never be what you want me to be, Lucy. I see you for who you really are. Now stop contacting my clients, or I will be forced to take further action.” I hang up on her before she can answer and spew out some more shrewd bullshit.
The fucking nerve of that woman. She’s digging, asking for money from people she shouldn’t be discussing anything with. The next person she steals from will kill her. She’s lucky I didn’t, and the only reason for that is because of her sister.
Now, look where that’s gotten me.
My office door is pushed open again, and Sydney walks back in, without knocking as usual.
“They’re all incompetent! Thea trained them, and yet they are still calling her. And when they can’t reach Thea, they call me. What the fuck, Atlas… as if I fucking know the answers.” Sydney places a profit report on my desk, pointing to the figures in the right column—the numbers are all red. “As you can see the daily income was impressive when Thea worked for you, now it’s plummeting.”
“Get the figures back in the black,” I tell her, pushing the paperwork away from me like it’s burning my fingers. I don’t have time to run a clothing business, Theadora was meant to do that, I was supposed to have nothing to do with it.
Chloe and Jesse had no idea how to run that business. They had Thea doing all the work, and well now, Jesse, he’s dead. I let him off, only to have him scheming against me the following week. I couldn’t let that slide, so I took care of business. A bullet to his head, while his wife wept next to him. It was no less than what he deserved, and it’s exactly what he got.
What Chloe doesn’t realize is I did her a favor. Having a man like that in your life isn’t what a marriage should be. Jesse cheated on her any chance he could get.
It’s a Benji and Lucy situation.
How are people so dumb to stay with someone who uses them.
Sydney crosses her arms over her chest as I look up at her.
“You need her back,” she says, her eyebrows raised above her glasses line. “Apologize, then offer her job back. We need her.”
“No,” I tell her firmly.
Sydney is one of the only women in my life who hasn’t used me. And because of that, I have kept her around for so long she seems to think she has a right to talk to me the way she’s doing.
“It’s going to fail then.”
“I don’t need it, I earn enough money without that line.”
Sydney lets a breath go and shakes her head. “You do need it. It makes you good money, and one day, you’ll want Thea to come back to her job. Trust me, when you’re over this… this-is-her-fault shit and start seeing things more clearly, you’ll want her back.”
“Get the fuck out, Sydney, before I damn well fire you.”
Sydney turns and walks out, shutting the door firmly and hopefully not coming back.
I log in to a fake Facebook account I’ve created—I don’t have a personal account—and search for Theadora’s name. She pops up right away. Her profile isn’t private, so I can see her posts easily and have been checking them often. She isn’t someone who posts about her every thought—it seems she posts photographs with some text every once in a while. Or maybe birthday wishes to her best friend and even some workmates. That certainly was the extent of her online presence.
But now, when I check her page, I see pictures of her smiling as she stands in front of the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and with a flower in her hand as she sits on a gondola in Venice. But the one where her cheeks are full from the smile on her face is the one where she’s standing on the snow in Iceland. That image I save and then log off.
You can not want to be with someone and still want them, can’t you?
Because Theadora fucks with my head, and she isn’t even here.
Blaming her is exhausting, but she is, after all, my easiest target.
Chapter Four
Theadora
My bags are heavy, and I wonder why I bought so much stuff while I was on holidays. I should have packed lighter and got rid of some excess clothing or something, especially when