Chapter 2I Left Before the Vows

Sometime after midnight, Vanessa shook me awake.

"Julian, get up and go apologize to Miles. He's in a bad way."

I looked at her, then shut my eyes in exhaustion.

She'd said those words more times than I could count.

After I started dating her, "I'm sorry" turned into a reflex.

Stomach pain made me call her, and the call woke light-sleeping Miles. I apologized.

I asked Vanessa to visit my mother's grave with me, which left Miles without anyone to go shopping with. I apologized.

I said I wanted a child, Miles overheard and panicked that a baby would take Vanessa's attention. I apologized for that too.

This time I didn't even open my eyes. "I'm not going."

Vanessa slapped me without warning.

The taste of blood spread slow and metallic through my mouth.

Something I couldn't read crossed her face, but her voice stayed cold as ever.

"Your mother let jealousy eat her alive, and in the end she couldn't take it and killed herself. Do you want to go the same way?"

The tears came before I could stop them.

The day my mother was found hanging, I'd have followed her. I would have, if Vanessa hadn't driven a knife into her own arm, over and over, right in front of me.

Her hand had shaken around the handle, hot and slick with blood, and she'd looked at nothing but my streaming eyes.

"If you die, I'm going with you."

She was my guardian angel after that.

What I learned later was that the only person she'd ever really guard was the adopted brother who refused to grow up.

She knew exactly where my deepest wound was, and she pressed her thumb into it anyway, just to shut me up.

We stared at each other through a brief, unbearable silence.

Vanessa opened her mouth awkwardly, and Miles's personal ringtone cut her off.

"Julian's trying to take you away from me. What's the point of being alive if I'm alone? I might as well jump."

The call cut out in a burst of shouting.

Vanessa grabbed her coat and shot me a look of pure resentment on her way out.

"If anything happens to Miles, you and I are finished."

I spent what should have been my wedding night alone in the house.

The gossip outlets ran it from every angle. Even the housekeeper looked at me with contempt.

"Ha. Dumped before he's even through the door. That marriage was never going to last."

I sat in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows for a long time. Then a message from Miles came through.

"How's it feel to be Glenmoor's favorite punchline?

"Your mother went through the exact same thing, didn't she? After she died, everyone decided she'd stolen another woman's husband and killed herself out of guilt.

"But I'll let you in on a secret. I'm the one who put the poison in her water. Vanessa cleaned it up for me afterward."

My ears started ringing and I couldn't move.

Everyone had always said an innocent woman would never have let a mistress walk into her own home.

When my mother was later found hanging in the Rowe family chapel, the public took it as proof she'd been guilty all along.

Her death turned into dinner-party conversation. Nobody brought flowers to the funeral. They left bags of rotting garbage instead.

The room tilted. I ran to Vanessa's study and tore through it until I found my mother's autopsy report.

The cause of death was right there in plain type: poisoning.

The suicide everyone believed in was a scene Vanessa had staged with her own hands.

I got to my feet in a daze and nearly went down. When I turned around, Vanessa was already standing behind me.