I’d segued from talking about my mother to talking about the relationship I thought I’d shared with Peter. He was silent, giving away no emotions with that back, clad in a navy suit jacket. He never took his jacket off while working, not even when he was alone in his office. I used to think it was a testament to his professionalism, but now I just thought it made him look stiff, overly formal.
“You don’t understand what it is to want for money,” I told him. “We were so frugal when I grew up. I guess that was a good thing — I didn’t even know how to be extravagant when I moved here to try and find work. But I couldn’t save money, couldn’t pay my student loans, couldn’t even afford to feed myself half the time, had to go without a bathroom in my crappy apartment. And you were delighted when you set me up in the penthouse, delighted that I was shell-shocked by all of the finery and the card I was supposed to use to buy everything I’d never had before, your demand that I couldn’t feel weird about it.”
“You were also very eager to spend my family’s money,” Peter commented without turning around to address that notion to my face.
“Because you told me I should be,” I said. “If I knew you were going to throw it back in my face later, I would’ve never agreed to try this relationship out with you. Should I start saving up, Peter? Move back into my hovel so I can pinch pennies to pay you back for your misplaced generosity?”
He laughed mirthlessly. “You could never pay me back. Do you know how much that penthouse goes for each night?”
“Tell me,” I spat. “I’d love to know. I’m sure you’re very excited to rub my nose in it.”
But for some reason, he didn’t. I was relieved. I knew that place was expensive, but it was beautiful, and it had become my home — my refuge in the city. I could see all the things I loved about New York from that penthouse, and it made me feel like I was really living my dream.
Even if that dream was quickly shifting into a nightmare.
“This has been a huge mistake, hasn’t it?” I asked, mostly talking to myself at this point. “We’re from two different worlds, and yet we both care about money a little too much — me because I don’t have very much of my own, and you because you think my family is taking advantage of yours. I will tell you this. Say what you want about me, but you don’t get to label my mother. You have no idea what we…what she has been through. She deserves to be happy, and she was happy with your father — even if that came along with the baggage of having you and all your various hang-ups in the family. You have crushed her with these falsehoods, with these inventions, and I’m leaving to go and try to pick up the pieces.”
“You’re leaving?” This time, he did turn around, disbelief etched on his handsome face.
“Did you think I could just stay here, tucked away in the penthouse, while my mother suffered because of you?” I sneered at him. “Just how out of touch with normal human beings are you?”
Peter sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Gemma, I hired a private investigator who turned up some disturbing things about the way your mother’s been acting.”
This was even more of an affront. “You’ve had someone spying on my mother’s private life? Does your father know what you’ve done?”
“The private investigator discovered that my father gave your mother access to his money for her expenses and some improvements on her home, and she’s been funneling the funds into a savings account, one she only just opened, and one she hasn’t mentioned to my father.”
I was silent for a long time, wondering just how much I should reveal. No — Peter didn’t deserve that truth, and I wasn’t going to give it to him, no matter how compelled I was to be honest with him. He had stabbed me in the back, sabotaged our parents’ happiness, because he could never understand the finer points of desperation. He’d never been desperate over something a single day of his life. He’d always gotten exactly what he wanted. I’d even pushed through my boundaries to give him the kinds of experiences that thrilled him. What had I gotten in return for continuing to feed into his entitlement?
That ended now.
“There are things that you will never understand about my family — the way my mother is, the way I can be,” I hissed at him. “Part of that is because you refuse to see. And the other part of that is because you are incapable of imagining suffering because the idea is so foreign to you. You think that no one has a hard time in this world because you’re coasting through it? We all come with baggage, Peter. Ours just doesn’t have dollar signs.”
How many times was I going to turn on my heel and march out of his office, eager to be rid of the man once and for all, to put this travesty behind me?
This was going to be my last.
Chapter 13
“We make a miserable pair, don’t we?” my mother tried to joke, looking over at me on the couch from her perch on the armchair. We were watching television, but neither of us seemed to be following the story of the program we’d settled on, something about love and torment and ultimate redemption.
“It’s not the first time the two of us have gone through a breakup,” I offered weakly. “It’ll get better.”
“God help us if it doesn’t,” my mother muttered, but I still heard her. She was sadder than I was. My mourning was tinged with anger and more than a little guilt.
I wished I didn’t, but the thing I missed most of all was the penthouse. It was a ridiculous thing to miss when I’d had the entire city at my beck and call, getting into nightspots that some celebrities couldn’t even get into simply because I’d been on the arm of one of the richest businessman in the Big Apple. But that penthouse had been so incredible. The view had been stunning, and one that not many people got of the city they lived in. It was beautiful day or night, the skyscrapers around the hotel gleaming in the sun or shining with thousands of stars of their own light, brightening the darkness.
I’d have been lying if I didn’t say I missed the man I’d cavorted with around New York City, but it was as painful to think about Peter as it was to be a witness to my mother’s suffering.
I’d left Peter because he told me he was responsible for breaking off my mother’s upcoming wedding — just weeks away — to his father. This was all because of a stupid misunderstanding. I’d joked to Peter, while helping my mother make cake and dress decisions, that she was a gold digger for the family fortune, choosing the priciest options for the wedding. The joke fell flat.
Troubled by what I’d said in jest, Peter had done some digging and discovered a quirk that he had no way of understanding. My mother had been asking for money from his father for various things, but instead of spending it, she was funneling it into a savings account.
Her actions made sense to me, but they looked suspicious to an outsider — suspicious enough for Peter to take Frank aside and tell him his bride-to-be wasn’t all that she seemed.
I was so ashamed that it was my idiot brain that had made the joke in the first place. Peter wouldn’t have hired a private investigator to go over my mother’s life and practices with a magnifying glass otherwise.
I looked over at her, looking tiny and frail wrapped up in a crocheted blanket whose colors had faded significantly since my childhood.
Her suffering was all my fault.
I supposed I couldn’t guarantee that neither Peter nor Frank would’ve eventually run some kind of background check on her prior to the actual marriage, and I didn’t know if there was some kind of prenuptial agreement that would have been drafted up. The Bly family was worth billions, both father and son. It would probably make sense for such a thing to be signed. Net worth that ranged in the billions was a tricky thing. And Peter had mentioned, in that final, nasty fight we’d had, that his father had been deceived before.
But it had been my stupidity that had made Peter think to dig into my mother, to see if she really rang true. And her savings account, if a person didn’t know her, didn’t know just what had happened to her to make her do it, did look suspicious.
I was the one at fault for her wedding being called off. My mother had to contact all of the businesses she’d contracted — caterers and bakeries and dress shops and reception hall — herself, informing them that she would no longer be requiring their services. That had been just as difficult for me to witness. She had been thrilled to be marrying again, to throw a wedding to celebrate the love she had for Frank, and I had been the one responsible for all of it being taken away.
I sighed and tapped at my phone, unable to watch the two happy lovers reuniting after overcoming their differences on the television. I ordered pizza online to spare us the effort of foraging in the kitchen for lunch. The bread had gone bad a couple of days ago, fuzzy blue mold colonizing the loaf, neither of us having much of an appetite after our hearts had broken. We mourned the same way, I realized, spending this time with my mother. We liked to hunker down and huddle around our misery. She preferred the television to distract her, and I escaped into my phone, paging through meaningless memes and quips and quotes on social media. Neither of us liked to eat, or to leave the house. We needed to eat, though, and if someone brought some hot pizza to the door for us, fresh and smelling good and already here, maybe we’d find it in ourselves. It had worked before, earlier in the week. The leftovers had just run out today at breakfast. It would surely work again.
We did make quite a pair. It might’ve looked pathetic from the outside, but it made sense to the two of us. We didn’t want to see anyone or anything. It was a self-imposed hermitage, a time for us to untangle our lives, examine the places where things had gone wrong, and move forward again.
I was unemployed and single and homeless all at once. My mother had graciously let me move back into her house, but she hadn’t had much of a choice. I’d shown up at her front door with just my purse, tears streaking black mascara down my cheeks. I hadn’t bothered even packing a bag at the penthouse. I hadn’t wanted anything there. It was full of things that Peter had bought me, or that I’d bought myself, with his money. I didn’t want anything to do with any of that. They were all tied to him, and I just wanted to purge him from my life, from my brain, from my memories and feelings. From my heart, too, but that was proving to be harder to achieve.
Almost of their own accord, my fingers opened my messages on my phone, tapped on his contact. Still visible was the text that had cemented his suspicions about my mother. It was a photo of her posing sassily in a frilly, fluffy wedding dress. I’d joked that she’d asked for the most expensive dress in the entire store, and he hadn’t answered.
He’d texted since then. Several times. The most recent of which was yesterday.
That one read, “You have food rotting in your refrigerator in the penthouse. The bellhop had the room opened up. He thought it was a dead body. That you’d offed yourself in there. You could think of other people for once. Think about what I felt when they called me, when I rushed over there.”
I snorted. What I thought about was how ridiculous it was for Peter to think that I would’ve killed myself over him. I wasn’t that torn up.
“What’s funny?” my mother asked.
“Just something stupid,” I told her. “A dumb joke.”
She blinked at me as if she found it surprising that I could still have a capacity for enjoying jokes. She’d seen me cry a lot, but she couldn’t know the extent of those tears, or their motivations. I was sorry, sure, about the way things had ended with Peter. It was personally devastating. But it was even worse that I’d ruined my own mother’s relationship. I found myself crying over that more and more often and less over Peter.
An older text from him, for example: “Very mature, Gemma, ignoring all attempts at communication. I guess I should’ve expected as much from a twenty-three-year-old.”
When could I be done with twenty-three? I’d thought that this was going to finally be my year, the age when I’d come into my own, a job, a penthouse, a wonderful boyfriend. Instead, it had been a travesty. I was eager for twenty-four, if only to leave this entire year behind me.
Case in point, the first text Peter had sent me after I’d left his office forever: “Don’t think you’re going to get to keep on living in the penthouse. I’ve learned my lesson with charity cases.”
Such a prince.
And yet here I was, agonizing over each character of each of those three messages, wondering if there was something hidden there, something I couldn’t discern. Maybe there was something I was missing, some meaning that could only be read between the lines.
I was pathetic.
“Don’t contact me again,” I typed, then sent it. I felt an odd finality when the indication that my message had been delivered popped up. But then I panicked when it changed to “read,” meaning that Peter was holding his own phone in this very minute, examining the words I’d sent him to divine their own meaning. I worked swiftly as another icon popped up, showing that he was writing a message back to me. I tapped on his contact and punched the block button with my finger. Instantly, his name grayed out, a red warning icon informing me that Peter Bly had been blocked from contacting me.
I realized I’d been breathing hard during this entire encounter, as if I’d been running away. Whatever. It was done. I deleted Peter’s number, deleted those messages, as if doing so would scrub him from my brain. All I wanted to do was forget all of this and move forward.
And I knew that I couldn’t do it without telling my mother the truth.
“Mom?” She turned to me, and I almost faltered, but I steeled myself instead. She deserved this truth, and I deserved whatever consequences stemmed from its revelation. “I have to tell you something, and it is really hard.”
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” she asked, sounding tired.
“No. It’s worse than that. I…I know why your relationship with Frank ended.”
“Gemma, I know why it ended, too,” she said. “Because of dishonesty on my part. Because of Peter and his private investigator. Because Frank couldn’t trust me.”
“No.” I shook my head. “It ended because of me.”
“That just doesn’t make sense,” my mother said, attempting to dismiss me by turning back to the television. Something had driven the lovers apart again on the program. It was as if they couldn’t ever get it right.
“It’s true,” I insisted. “Listen to me. Peter wouldn’t have been involved if it wasn’t for me. The private investigator wouldn’t have dug as deeply if it wasn’t for me.”
She smiled sadly. “Your presence in Peter’s life, your relationship with him, didn’t end my relationship,” my mother said. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I can, and you should, too. I…made a joke. A bad joke. I don’t know why I made it. It was the day you and Frank came into Peter’s office, the day you and I went out to make all the decisions for your wedding.”
My mother teared up at my mention of those joyful preparations, and I wished I could stop, wished I could avoid hurting her even more, but she had to know the truth. I had to tell it to her.
“I said to Peter, in an offhand way, that you were eager to spend Frank’s money.” I swallowed hard. “That you were a gold digger. And I made the joke again when you tried on fancy dresses. You know. The one you only tried on for fun. With all the tulle.”
“I remember the one,” my mother said faintly.
“It wasn’t until later, after you had called me with the news that the wedding was canceled, when I confronted Peter about it, that he told me it was my comment that had prompted him to make the inquiries.” My heart was beating rapidly, my breath coming and going just as quickly as it had been when I blocked Peter’s number from my phone. The truth hurt so much, but after it was out of my mouth, just hanging in the air between us, I felt almost a great relief. Now my mother could understand that I was the only one to blame, not her. Now she could move on from her own heartache, stop watching these damn movies that gave too much stupid hope and not enough reality. Sometimes, the hero and heroine d
idn’t end up together again. Sometimes, they had to just pick it all up and tell themselves that life had to go on. That was the truth.
“Do you really think I’m a gold digger?” my mother asked quietly.
“No, of course not.”
“Then why did you say that about me?” She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, and that hurt even worse. “That’s not a kind thing to say about anyone, Gemma. Especially about your mother.”
“It was just a joke.” It sounded like a weak excuse, and it was. If I hadn’t said it, maybe things would've been the same. Maybe we would’ve been making last-minute wedding preparations today instead of letting the shadows get long inside the house, neither of us interested in turning on a lamp.
“I know you and I weren’t very rich, when you were younger and still living here,” she said, drawing herself up with broken dignity. “But I like to think we had what we needed. And we had each other. That was the important thing. I know our lives were frugal, that we had to be careful with the money, but I resent the idea that you imagined I might throw myself at money, given the opportunity.”
“That’s not what I wanted to do,” I said. “And I agree. You gave me everything when I was young. I know…the sacrifices you made. And I’m thankful. It was a stupid joke. I was only trying to be funny, trying to impress Peter.”
“A lot of truth is said in jest, Gemma.”
“Nothing about this was true.” I shifted on the couch, thoroughly miserable now but embracing it. My mother deserved to be angry at me, to rake me over the coals, and it was up to me to take it. This was her right, just as it was my mistake. “I was just as uncomfortable as you to spend that money. Peter was always pushing me. Did you know he paid for everything? Every single expense I had was settled with his money. He said he wanted to do it because he had more money than he knew what to do with and I didn’t have any money at all.”
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