wedding, they’re going to kill me."
“Who?”
“I owe a lot of people a lot of debts. They are the kind of debts that you can’t default on, they’re the kind of debts that you can bankrupt yourself over. And they’re the kind of debts that you have to pay back unless you want someone to chop you up in little pieces and send you home in a box to your wife and children.”
I lean closer and put my hand on his forearm. What is he talking about I wonder to myself? Who is this person who I used to think that I knew?
For a second, I wonder if he’s actually telling me the truth but when I look into his eyes and into that lost and concerned and frightened expression on his face, I know that he is.
“Franklin Parks is a very bad man," my father says. “I know that, probably a lot more than you do. I would not be asking you to do this for me if I knew that there was even a chance that there was another way out of this.”
"Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
He shrugs and looks away but continues to hold my hand.
"I thought that maybe there was a chance that you could fall in love. I thought that maybe there was a chance that he could be a good man for you and you two could actually be happy. I didn’t want to send you into this arrangement with your guard up. Maybe that was a mistake.”
“Daddy," I say. I don’t call him this often, and I haven’t called him this in a long time.
“I love Henry,” I whisper.
New tears start to roll down my cheeks.
“I caught Franklin with another woman yesterday morning and I went to talk to Henry and we started to reminisce and…" My voice trails off.
“I love him and we should have never broken up. I want to get back together with him.”
“I know that you love him, honey. I didn’t think that you ever stopped. And maybe you could be together sometime after this. I thought that maybe Franklin could be faithful to you, but now I doubt that. So, maybe in the future, you and Henry can try to give it a go again.”
I shake my head, no, no, no.
“I know that what I’m asking you to do is an impossible thing. I know that it is unfair and awful and old-fashioned and completely out of line. But please know that I would never ask you to do this if I thought for a second there was some other way out of it. My life is in danger and they’re going to kill me if this doesn’t happen.”
“Who? Who is going to kill you?” I ask. “Franklin wants to buy the company and he may want me, but I don’t think that he will kill you if I refuse.”
“It’s not just Franklin. He’s my ally. But he’s only my ally if you become his wife. After that, especially if you break his heart, he’ll have no reason to stay on my side.”
Dad keeps going in circles and still avoiding the crux of the issue. I press him, but he refuses to tell me anymore.
“I can’t,” he says, shaking his head with tears of his own now welling up in his eyes. “If I tell you anymore, then your life will be in danger as well. I can’t protect you much, but this is the least that I can do and I will at least do this.”
I walk back to my apartment with a heavy heart. I thought that he would be on my side and he would try to help me figure this out, but now I realize that he is in well over his head.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m certain that my father is not lying, but I still don’t know the details of what I’m facing.
I don’t know why his life is in danger and I don’t know why Franklin is the only one who can help him.
When I get to the bottom of my building, I keep going. I want to see Henry more than anything and yet I don’t have the heart to tell him what happened.
What would happen if I were to marry Franklin? I wonder. What would my life be like?
While before I thought that marrying him would force me to come up with an exit strategy, now I wonder if I’ll have to stay married to him forever in order to make my life work out.
32
Henry
I still think back to that moment when I watched her leave the apartment to go see her father. I thought that talking to him would help fix this, but it just makes things worse.
I didn’t see Aurora after that. Whatever her father said to her solidified her decision to marry Franklin and to separate herself from me.
I don’t speak to her again.
I wait and wait and wait and then the doorman comes up and knocks on the door and tells me that Aurora has asked me to leave the apartment. She did not even have the decency to tell me this to my face. I call and I text and I email and she does not reply.
Eventually, I receive a note that says that she will always love me but she has to do what she has to do to protect her family.
As I watch her walk down the aisle on television, toward his beaming and arrogant face, I wonder what I could’ve done to stop this from happening.
I’m angry.
Pissed off. But it’s more than that.
I know that whatever the Tate family has going on, it is dangerous and beyond Aurora’s control.
She thinks that she can be safe by climbing into the eye of the hurricane, but she doesn’t realize that to ever get out she’ll have to go through it again.
One thing is for sure, I will love her for as long as I have breath in my body. It doesn’t matter that she may not feel the same way.
I will do everything that I can to protect her, even if it means keeping her safe from afar.
But to do this, I have to find out the truth. I need to know exactly what Franklin Parks has over her father. I need to know why she is walking down that aisle. And I will find out the truth if it’s the last thing that I do.