‘Home.’ I throw the word over my shoulder like an accusation. ‘My home.’ His place doesn’t hold interest for me. Not tonight. Not with him.
‘You can’t leave.’ My heart begins to beat as his footsteps sound behind me again.
‘Fucking watch me,’ I mutter under my breath, hiking my purse higher on my shoulder as though he were after it and not me as he spins me around to face him again.
‘Get in the car.’
‘Get fucked. I’m out of here.’
‘Then you leave me no choice.’ His free hand feeds into his inside jacket pocket, pulling out his phone.
‘What? Are you going to call my mom?’ Despite my mocking tone, inside I’m trembling.
The light from his screen washes his face as he swipes it with his thumb. ‘I’m calling my lawyer. ‘Braunstein, Beckett here. I find myself this evening in position of requiring a filing for divorce on the grounds of abandonment.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘Yes, Olivia left me this evening. Yes, she forfeits her company.’
‘You can’t do that,’ I whisper. ‘That wasn’t our deal.’
‘That was exactly our deal,’ he retorts angrily, unheeding the man on the other end of the line, a man in another country. ‘If you’d sought proper advice, you’d know about this.’
‘I did not sign up for this shit.’
‘I think you’ll find it’s your signature on the paperwork.’
Sliding my hand over the screen of his phone, I hang up the call. ‘You can’t do this, Beckett. Abandonment isn’t leaving for one night because I can’t stand the sight of you.’
‘You don’t get to decide. As you so nicely reminded me, this isn’t a real marriage. We don’t play by those terms. You are the junior partner, signed to certain requirements, and one of those requirement is to remain by my side for as long as I have need of you.’
‘For six fucking months,’ I growl anger and frustration washing through me. I try to pull my arms from his fingers when they tighten like a vice. ‘That was the deal.’
‘Yes. And recess hasn’t arrived yet. Get in the car.’ He releases me and I step immediately to the kerbside, watching as cars pass. Watching and waiting, willing him to make sense. Any kind of sense. ‘Get in the car, Olivia.’
‘I’ll come home with you, because I have to. My eyes cut to his angrily. ‘But I’ll get a cab. I don’t want to be anywhere near you.’
I sense rather than see or hear his deep sigh this time. ‘Please, Olivia. Just get in the car. I’ll tell you whatever you like.’
Chapter 41
BECKETT
The darkness of the car wraps around us, the sweep of the tyres against the road the only sound made. Cars at night are like a private world, and we are each existing in our own separate one tonight.
How had it come to this? Yelling in the streets, hurling threats.
Never in my life has someone made me feel like she does. Angry and exasperated, wired and alarmed. Like I want to put her in a box and protect her from all harm.
Including from me.
In the dark and intimate space, the lights of oncoming traffic sweep over her face, washing her alternately in light and darkness over and over again. This journey is torturous. I fucking hate it and yet I never want it to end. Because of what it might represent. But we eventually arrive at the gates, and shortly following, the front of the house.
‘That will be all for tonight, Dobson.’ Olivia’s body turns towards me in surprise. As the driver’s door closes with a quietclick, I hear her intake of breath but beat her to speaking.
‘That first night, in the car. In this car.’ I turn my head to where her hands rests against the leather, though I resist reaching out to touch this time as the interior light dims. I’m thankful for the lights in the garden tonight, I find. ‘It took every ounce of my strength to leave you.’
‘But leave you did.’ Her tone delivers the unspoken.You managed just fine, you prick.
