AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He’d returned with several promising opportunities. I’d spent most of the day in a meeting with a potential investor and left encouraged, but exhausted. It looked like we might get our funding after all.
After everyone had left for the club, I went upstairs to my study and poured a drink and lit a cigarette.
On the opposite wall, the curtain covering Edwin’s portrait stared me down. Holding me in its grasp.
I downed the whiskey and crossed the room and jerked it ajar. Edwin’s tall, angular face looked down at me. Eyes stern, shoulders back. Looking every bit the perfect Welsh soldier.
Before Clara, this painting had always made me feel safe, watched over. But now that I knew what he’d done to both of us, it felt like mockery.
Poison crept into my veins, coupled with desperate rage.
“Fuck you,” I breathed.
My feet carried me to the bedroom closet down the hall and I gathered up his knives and returned to the study. Leaving all the doors open because…fuck it, Clara wouldn’t be back till midnight.
This was my secret. My opportunity to let my pain show.
I lit a cigarette and sank into the chair, propping my feet up on the desk. Edwin gazed at me blankly. Gone for six years and yet so alive in this room tonight.
The knives lay in a pile in the drawer at my side. I’d moved them a few weeks ago. My fingers closed around the one Clara had found that day. The one she’d said belonged to her. I leaned back, cigarette burning on the ashtray, and balanced it between my two index fingers.
“I hope that wherever you are…I hope it hurts,” I said, my voice husky.
It felt unnatural, talking to a ghost.
But it also felt good.
“She trusts me,” I said aloud, keeping my eyes on the blade. “She sleeps in my arms.”
Silence.
“You never fixed me, Edwin,” I said.
Did I believe that? My chest tightened, but I forced myself to keep talking.
“I fixed myself. Not for you, but for Caden,” I said. “You were just there, manipulating me into thinking it was all you. When you died, I didn’t fall apart because it was never you.”
Anger surged in my chest and my shoes hit the floor. The blade was cold in my palm.
“It was never you,” I said, louder this time. “I saved myself for my son and now I’m doing it all over again for your daughter. You were nothing to me when it came down to it, nothing but slow poison. A weak man who put a gun to an innocent girl’s head because you were too broken to love her.”
My feet took me across the floor, back and forth.
“I did what you never could,” I whispered. “I love her.”
My lashes were wet as I paused, several steps back from the painting. My eyes connected with Edwin’s.
“If you could see her now…she’s so fucking happy,” I managed. “But you wouldn’t care because…because you weren’t a good man. And you were a goddamn awful excuse for a father and a friend.”
That felt good. It hurt, but it hurt like pulling a splinter out.
“You weren’t my friend. That was a lie,” I said. “And it’s time for me to let you go.”
Impulsively, I lifted the knife and flicked it. Sending it across the room and into the painting, right into Edwin’s heart. The sound ignited a dull roar in my chest and I strode forward and yanked the painting to the ground.
It fell at my feet with a huge crash. Not hesitating, I dragged it down the hall and out the back door. Throwing it into the firepit and stepping into the center to break it in two.
That felt so fucking good, so freeing.
