Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 112638 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 563(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112638 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 563(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
I looked around the room, waiting for . . . what? Someone to walk through the door and back me up? There was no one in the world who could protect me. I always knew that, but suddenly, the weight of my loneliness was pressing hard against my chest, making it hard to breathe.
“Lying’s the cowardly way out, son.” Dad’s fingers wrapped around my shoulder firmly, warning me not to plead my case. “Come clean and face the consequences like a man.”
He didn’t believe me.
He was never going to believe me.
He just wanted this to go away for him and for Miranda, so there’d be no more shouting, screaming, and slapping.
Gracelynn, despite lacking everywhere I excelled, was still their favorite child. The normal child. The one who laughed, and cried, and yawned when others did.
The painful realization I was truly alone in this world slammed into me.
Staring Gracelynn down, jaw clenched, eyes dead, I shrugged. “Sure. I pushed her. My only regret is I couldn’t finish the job. Better luck next time, I guess.”
And then it registered to Gracelynn. That this was all real. Not a part of our stupid, made-up games. I could see it in her eyes. The flash of regret, followed by the adrenaline rush. The recognition that whatever she was doing, it was working, at least for now. That she was finally winning against me at something.
But I would never let her win. Not if I still had breath in me.
I turned around and stalked out of the hospital room, leaving behind the poor imitation of what was supposed to be my family.
Later that night Miranda returned from the hospital without Gracelynn. Dad and I waited in the dining room, staring at our hands silently.
“Doug, a word,” Miranda clipped, summoning my father upstairs. They locked the bedroom door behind them. I pressed my ear to their door, my mouth dry.
“. . . too much, for too long. This is sheer neglect. I cannot, in good conscience, allow my daughter to become prey in the hands of your out-of-control son. I’ve had enough, Doug.”
I knew what really bothered Miranda about me, and it had nothing to do with Grace.
I looked exactly like my mother, the late Patrice Chalamet.
I was a constant reminder that she had been alive. That once upon a time, she had stolen Douglas Corbin from her. That if it weren’t for Patrice, I would have never been born.
Gracelynn wouldn’t have been either.
There was an alternate utopia for Dad and Miranda. A version of reality they’d almost managed to achieve. And it was yours truly who crapped all over it.
The servants talked about it all the time. Whispering as they fluffed pillows, prepared nutritious meals for us, drove Gracelynn and me to our tennis and ballet practices.
As the story goes, Miranda and Dad had been dating on and off throughout college. She overlooked Doug’s indiscretions—whatever that word meant—and wouldn’t let him out of her sight. When Dad went to a friend’s wedding in Paris eleven years ago, Miranda had wanted to join him. But it was a private event, consisting of fifty people, with no plus-one invitations.
That’s where he met Patrice. A glamorous wannabe actress from Rennes and the maid of honor. The two had a rendezvous (again, no idea what that meant), after which Dad went back to America.
It never occurred to Doug that Patrice would come knocking on his door two months later with a positive pregnancy test, white as a sheet. Legend says she vomited all over his shoes to prove her point before he even finished asking what she was doing there. And that Miranda was in his apartment at the time, In a less than decent condition, one housekeeper had said snidely.
Dad’s dad—my grandfather—forced his hand into doing the right thing. So Dad married Patrice, a complete stranger.
The servants always said my grandfather never liked Miranda.
Too high maintenance. Too much of a social climber.
Miranda’s answer to the public humiliation had been cold blooded. She fell pregnant with Dad’s best friend’s child shortly after. A man by the name of Leo Thayer. An Aussie heir to a beef-export empire. So thorough was her counterbetrayal that Gracelynn was born looking so much like Leo that the paternity test Miranda had sent Dad confirming Gracelynn wasn’t his hadn’t been necessary.
Versions varied about what happened afterward. I heard a few stories from a few servants. But the most popular tale was of how my father and Miranda had rekindled their affair before Gracelynn and I had gone off our wet nurses’ milk.
Only now Miranda wasn’t the prized girlfriend—she was the mistress. Until Patrice died, and she got promoted to wife.
Miranda, like her daughter, couldn’t stand to lose to anyone. Especially a ten-year-old kid.
“I’ll talk to him,” my father murmured. “Make him understand what he did was wrong.”