“Get out of here!” Mr. Montgomery’s voice cracked like thunder, but my mother’s sobs were louder—so loud my father rushed in, and behind him, Mrs. Montgomery. Behind them Chloe and Matteo. Even the staff came running. Everyone got to witness their shame.
Mrs. Montgomery lunged at my mother slapping her hard across the face. “You whore!” Her voice hoarse with rage. “Get these whores out of my house.”
I looked at Vaughn through tears, his eyes fixed on mine as he slumped back against the far wall and slid down until his ass hit the floor.
My father, red-faced and silent, stood apart from all of us, still as a statue, while Mrs. Montgomery tore at my mother’s hair and smacked at her face over and over. He pulled at his collar like the scene was choking him, but he made no move to stop it. He let Mrs. Montgomery beat on my mother until her lip was bloody and her cheeks turned an awful purplish blue.
The maid and the private cook and some of other staff were the ones that separated us all. I screamed and cried into the palms of my hands as Matteo’s mother dragged me through the hallway away from it all. My life was over. My summer ruined. How could my mother do this to our family? How could she do this to my father? To me?
Why did we follow the sounds? Why didn’t we just stay in the library? I wanted to go back to that spot, that time before I saw what I saw. I’m sorry we thought it was a hurt animal. I’m sorry we wanted to help it. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” That’s all I kept repeating.
“You listen to me, child,” Matteo’s mother spoke softly, cupping my face in her hands to catch my attention and blot away my tears with the hem of her apron. “That had nothing to do with you. This was their mistake, their sin, not yours. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
But that was a lie, because when I stepped out of the Montgomery house it was as if the doors to another life slammed closed behind me. Their infidelity may have been their sin, but I took the brunt of the consequences in its aftermath. I stood in the middle of my parents’ bitter divorce, where I was robbed of every cent my family had ever made, then was sent away to boarding school in a convent so I wouldn’t ever grow up to be like my whore of a mother.
And I never saw Vaughn or Chloe or Matteo again.
