“What? Do you seriously imagine he’s in love with you?”
That’s exactly what I’ve been imagining, or at least hoping, despite how preposterous it might seem.
How pathetic I must look.
My knees start to buckle, but I resist. Stiffen them. I won’t show this man weakness. I won’t show him how his words have sliced me open, every ounce of pride spilling onto the floor at my feet. But he hasn’t finished with me yet.
“It was obvious from the start that he was intelligent. Now we also know he’s dishonest. And grasping.” Warren’s self-satisfied smile makes my skin crawl. “He was never interested in you. All he wanted was access to this family and our money.”
“Ant? No. I don’t think so. You need to leave. Now.” This is absurd.
Except the idea Ant is looking for an investor and didn’t tell me, snags in my mind, catching on how this came to be. On Antoriginally saying no to my proposition. Then suddenly changing his mind. The day after Warren was all over the news. Could there possibly be some truth to this?
“Wake up to yourself. Surely, even you can see this has been a long con. He’s preyed on you, a lonely, desperate woman, for financial gain. And as soon as he’s got what he wants, he’ll disappear and you’ll never see him again. If I cut him a big enough cheque, he’d be gone without a backward glance.”
Lonely? Okay, yes, I guess I was lonely. But desperate? Is that how other people see me? Is that how Ant sees me?
“Lili, please,” Mum says. “You need to listen to Warren. He could be dangerous.”
Warren turns on Mum. He’s on a roll.
“He’s hardly dangerous, Marion. He’d have to be far smarter than he is to cause me harm." Unsurprisingly, he's making my pain all about him. "But now that we’ve caught him in his plans, we can have him thrown out.” Warren stands and heads for the apartment phone. “I’ll call security. Get his access card cancelled. Housekeeping can pack up his things.”
Finally, what’s just been said registers with me. I lunge for the phone before Warren can reach it.
“No. I said leave. Now get out!” I shout. For a moment, it looks like Warren will wrench the phone from my hands. “Don’t even think about touching me,” I hiss.
“Fine. I’ve warned you. If you are too stupid or too wilful to see the facts of the matter, there is nothing more I can do. But you can tell your boyfriend he will never see a cent from me or my company. Regardless of what he threatens.”
My fingers itch to throw the phone at his arrogant head, but I do nothing more than lift a trembling hand and point. Warren stalks to the door and yanks it open.
“And until you’ve come to your senses, you are no longer welcome in my home.”
For a moment, I think I’ve misheard him. Surely, he can’t be serious? I try to catch Mum’s eye, but hers are fixed firmly on the floor. Yet again, there’s no help from her.
I hate that house. It’s never been a home for me. And he knows it. But it’s where my mother lives. Banning me isn’t about the house. It’s about banishing me from the family. Hurting me.Disposing of me.
Even in the midst of my turmoil, I don’t miss that pronoun. It’s not my mother’s home. Or even their home. It’s his.
And I don’t miss the implication that, should I choose Ant, it means losing my family. My mother. She may not be the mother she once was, but she’s all I’ve got. If I choose Ant, and Warren turns out to be right, what do I have?
With a deeply unsatisfying hiss of the hydraulic door closer, Mum and Warren disappear, and I race for the bathroom, bringing up what little food I’ve had today in a violent heave.
Along with a piece of my heart.
None of this makes any sense. I’m almost certain I never told Ant what Warren did. Although, it’s true he could have researched him. And he was all over the news. It wouldn’t have been hard.
But it was me who approached Ant, not the other way around. Although it’s an inescapable fact that he didn’t agree to it until after the news articles about Warren.
Ant isn’t even my boyfriend; it’s all fake, or at least it was. So, how would being with me in that capacity help him? Unless he wanted to use it as fake leverage to fake break up with me.
Then I remember asking him if there was anything else he had to tell me. He said there wasn’t. So, whatever else is true, in that moment, he lied to my face.
Maybe his lies were only by omission, but they’re still lies. And what’s his excuse for why he kept lying?
He could’ve told me about how he’s looking for investors when he told me he owned those companies. Why keep that to himself, unless he didn’t want me to know for some reason? Surely that’s something you would share with your … whatever I was. Am. Was. I don’t even know. The fact is, I’ve never known.
I can’t make sense of any of it. Except for the one thing I know to be true. Ant lied to me. First, about his job. Then, about needing capital funding.
