Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 109976 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 550(@200wpm)___ 440(@250wpm)___ 367(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109976 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 550(@200wpm)___ 440(@250wpm)___ 367(@300wpm)
I felt my gorge rise at the memory and had to do breathing exercises to keep from throwing up. I’d already done that more than once before the cops and EMTs showed up at the apartment earlier this evening.
Then they’d brought me in here and I’d been so scared. They were asking me things I didn’t have the answers to, questions about why he’d done it, since he hadn’t left a note. Had the gun not still been in his hand I’m sure they would’ve thought I’d pulled the trigger myself.
Who would expect the golden boy to take his own life after all? No one knew the truth about him and his family. Looking in from the outside, they’d only see the wealth and prestige that came with being part of the senator’s family.
But no one saw the ugliness that laid beneath the surface. Just like me back then when I agreed to marry him. I’d fallen for his good looks and smooth talk, but it had only taken me a few days after the wedding to see the real truth beneath the well-hidden smear of slime.
My skin crawled and I felt bile rise up in my chest as I listened to the lawyer and the cop go at it. I knew since he was Gavin’s that he’d be the best, that I need not worry, but I also knew this was going to raise a lot of questions.
Gavin and I weren’t even friends, barely acquaintances, at least to the outside world. Only he and I knew what was between us. That I’d done the unforgivable and fallen in love with someone other than my husband.
The truth is, if I could’ve divorced Vance I would’ve done it a long time ago. But I was too afraid, of him and his father. Of the threats he’d made if I ever left him. Thank heaven he never knew that I’d fallen for Gavin.
He knew by then that I was no longer in love with him, if I’d ever been. It was easy to fall for his good looks and to believe in his lies until the veil was ripped away from my eyes.
But we both knew within that first year that I couldn’t even stand his touch. He didn’t care what I felt though, and had found joy in my displeasure, laughing even as he tormented me. He’d long stopped pretending by then and I only got to see the monster that he truly was for the rest of our ill-fated marriage.
Giselle
My life, though seen as ideal by those who wrote about us in the tabloids was anything but. After years living in the limelight because of my profession, it was the first time I truly understood that nothing is ever truly as it seems. Especially the flowery bullshit that gets written up in the society pages.
I’d started looking at everyone around me with new eyes, wondering what their real story was. Imagining that everyone’s life was just as screwed up as mine. Thinking that we were all living under a veil of very well crafted lies.
I developed a strong case of anxiety disorder in the first few months after getting married which only made my innate shyness even worst than it already was. Added to the shame I felt for being as dumb as I was to marry him, I’d become something of a recluse, hiding even from myself.
While the rest of the world saw the affluent hot new couple who didn’t seem to have a worry in the world, my reality was anything but ideal. But the senator and his wife had a team of well paid liars working for them who could spin anything into sunshine, and so everyone thought my life was a fairytale while I lived in abject misery.
Things had only gotten worst after I met Gavin. At first I felt guilt, even though I wasn’t in love with my husband we were still married and I’d taken my vows seriously and was deathly afraid of committing that greatest of sins for a married woman.
It didn’t matter that my husband was a cheating snake and nothing at all like the upstanding character I’d seen and read so much about in the papers before meeting and marrying him.
The fact that someone like him had even given me, the small town girl the time of day had blinded me at first. My modeling career was just reaching its zenith, and I knew I only had a few more years at best before younger and prettier girls came along and the job offers started to die out.
I’d never made it to the top, but I wasn’t doing too bad either. But after eight years in the business I knew that his offer of marriage six months after we met was the best offer I was going to get.