“Your parents…” She inhales shakily. “Your mom came to see me in our old apartment. After you left.”
“Lana, it’s okay,” I whisper. “It’s okay.”
“She gave me—” Another violent hiccup as she sobs. “She gave me two million dollars.”
“What?” Everything goes still.
“She said,” Lana gasps for air and I rub her back between her shoulder blades, “She said that you… You didn’t want me… She gave me two million dollars so I wouldn’t… So I wouldn’t go after you or talk to you. Christian,” Lana weeps.
“What.”
Of course my mother would do something like that. She hates when I haveanythinggood. She didn’t want me to go to rehab because of our company’s image. She didn’t want me to go home and take the sabbatical. She doesn’t want me to be happy.
“But then,” she cries. “Then I thought you’d come back. I thought… I thought you’d come back and…”
“I did,” I say.
And she nods.
“I’m going to have a conversation with my mother about this.”
“No! No, she’ll kill me! I— That’s how… She’s right. It’s the only reason I have the store and the house. She told me to use it so I wouldn’t be… So I wouldn’t be the trash I grew up as.”
My eyes go wide enough for them to pop out of my head.
“What?”
“Christian—”
“I’m going to go talk to her, right now.”
Her hand pulls on mine. “No, please. Stay with me. I just need you to stay with me right now, okay?”
“Anything.”
“You can’t…” Lana heaves. “You can’t talk to her about it. She’ll find a way to take the shop from me and the house, and I can’t lose you again—I won’t?—”
“Shh, no,” I try to calm her. “You’re not going to lose me and she is not taking your shop or our house, okay?”
Lana nods, breathing in through her nose and out through her puckered lips. “Okay.”
“I’m going to talk to her about it tomorrow,” I say softly and she shakes her head. “I will because what she did wasn’t right. She had no business going to you or treating you like that. None of what she said was true.None of it.You are not trash, Lana. And I did want you, I’ve always wanted you.”
She keeps nodding and she fists the lapels of my suit. “Take me home.” She inhales deeply and shakily. “Please. Please.”
“Yeah, baby.” I let her cry herself into calmness. Her makeup smudges on my suit as she releases her grief, and I call on the limo to meet us out front. “Come on.”
My heart breaks into tiny shreds the louder and harder she cries, my own emotions bubbling up my chest and gathering in my eyes.
I could burn this world for her with no remorse.
In the penthouse, Lana sits on the couch and bends to undo her heels. But I kneel and grab her ankle. “I’ve got it.”
Lana has been moving like a zombie since we left, like the tears have completely exhausted her for the rest of the weekend before we go back to Willow Springs Monday afternoon.
I remove her left shoe first and set it aside. Then go on to her right.
“I hate her,” Lana murmurs, her voice hoarse and thick.
