My thoughts were different than his. “I used to. He was my world, someone I could look up to when I was a child. Always there when I needed him. Then he was gone.”
“I am sorry, Catherine. Death within a family has an eternal toll.”
“Only he didn’t die.”
While his breathing was labored, he allowed me the grace to tell the story or not to without pressure. Why I felt as if I could trusthim, I wasn’t certain. But I did. “Nothing so tragic as simply being able to see him in a cemetery, saying kind words when I brought flowers from time to time.” I hated admitting the perfect nuclear family I thought I’d grown up in had been a lie for most of my life. “He failed my mother and me. More than once.”
How strange that I could feel him stiffening, not because he was furious with me for telling a story, but because he was angry that I’d gone through pain.
“A few years ago, my mother discovered he was having an affair. She tried to hide it even from me, working through the pain not only of the girl being much younger, but that it had been going on for over a year. When she finally told me, she was nearly a shell of herself. Not because of the affair as much as the way he’d treated her when she was doing nothing more than hoping to repair her marriage.” The pain of our cocoon being shattered troubled me to this day. At least my mother had found some sense of happiness, enjoying life as a beautiful and sought-after divorcee.
Living in the middle of nowhere.
“Men can be pigs.”
Alexander wasn’t a romantic, very much like a bull in a china shop, but at times, he knew exactly what to say to me to make me feel at least a bit better. “Yes, they can. My hero was wiped out in a few minutes of holding my mother while she sobbed. The things he said to her, trying to make her feel as if she was the problem were terrible, so unlike my father.”
“What did you do?”
“I confronted him, but only after learning he’d had more than one affair.”
“How did you discover he had?”
I traced the names mindlessly, uncertain I could continue with the story. The conclusion in some ways was much worse than the main body. “An anonymous tip. Would you believe that? I get them all the time as a prosecutor, but imagine going into work one day, opening your email and discovering very graphic pictures of your father with a woman your own age. I confronted him and threatened to release the photographs if he didn’t give my mother everything in the divorce.”
“Did he?”
“He did. I guess he understood me well enough to know when I stated I was going to do something, I followed through every single time. Without question.” My words of conviction prompted me to turn toward him. Locking eyes with his, I could clearly tell he was at a loss for words. A first.
There was the same crackle of electricity, the same powerful draw to him that I’d experienced on the sidewalk long before I’d become his guest. But being here in this space with him was being allowed a visit into the most vulnerable side of him.
And I doubted he’d ever gift me something of this magnitude again.
The feeling went way beyond our physical needs, and a desire that had already consumed us into a much deeper, darker chemistry. I’d yet to explain why no matter how often I’d tried. Maybe for him, as he said, in death there was life.
How profound.
How very sad.
He wasn’t the kind of man who awarded second chances and I doubted he’d ever felt a moment of guilt for taking a life, but he was a man. A man with strong requirements, needs that transcended all.
“In my eyes, any man who betrays his family is a true monster.” His words were stark, cold and full of his own hatred.
“You’re right. He is a monster, but they come in all shapes and sizes.”
“If you’re trying to insult me, it’s not working, Catherine.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do at all. I’m not even talking about you.” I gave him a quick dart of my eyes and he was more than curious, but that’s where the story ended.
“Who was your father?”
“No one. A man who fell in love with my mother. I’d heard he was the fairytale. It’s funny. They never talked much about how they met. As strange as it sounds, I miss not knowing.”
While he didn’t grill me, I had a feeling I hadn’t experienced the end of the questions. He was under the belief that I’d somehow been involved with his father’s death. Did I worry that things were adding up? That I’d been lured into working the case for nefarious reasons, yes. I knew in my heart something was off, as if we’d been shoved into the middle of a vicious game. Only I feared if I was right, he’d lose what little sense of control he had.
That I wouldn’t be able to control him.
If so, he’d be lost forever.
