A Love Built On Scorn Chapter 07
It seemed no one remembered. There was a time when I, too, lowered my proud head and humbly begged for a chance to see him. I was probably stupid back then. I kept thinking that if we could just meet one more time, we could finally talk things through.
But what would meeting accomplish? One person in tears, the other unmoved.
Before the last screaming fight I ever had with Sebastian, someone gleefully let it slip to me that the Vernon Group was on the verge of bankruptcy. With the bigger picture hanging over everything, I had no choice but to swallow my anger and hurt and send Sebastian a message asking for peace. “Sebastian, let’s meet and talk.”
He agreed without hesitation.
That day, I cooked the meal myself, spending three full hours in the kitchen. When I was done, I put on the perfume Sebastian once told me he liked. I changed into the pale yellow dress he had once loved seeing me wear and sat at the dining table waiting for him.
I waited the entire night.
The dishes on the table went cold, then were reheated. The roses I had carefully arranged began to wilt. But all my waiting and all my concessions brought me nothing. Sebastian never came.
Right up until the moment my family announced its collapse, I was still at home adjusting the flowers on the table and fussing over the plating of every dish, still foolishly hoping to please Sebastian, hoping he would continue investing in our crumbling family.
Later, Sebastian came home. I grabbed a vase and hurled it at him. It split the skin at his temple at once, and blood ran down along his brow. I screamed curses at him, my face drenched in tears, using every vicious word I knew to damn him to hell, to curse him to a miserable death.
And him? He only watched me in silence while I fell apart. Not until my throat had gone dry and my body was exhausted did he finally let out a cold laugh and toss me a single sentence. “What a psycho.”
The day we divorced, I took the decree with my swollen, tear-burned eyes and asked him a question that still feels humiliatingly foolish when I think about it now.
“That day—why didn’t you come?”
He froze for a second, as if it took him a long time to even remember what I was talking about. Then he shrugged and answered lightly, “Because she wanted me to be with her.”
That was all. A reason so simple it could not have been simpler.
And now it was the same. I wouldn’t see him because I did not want to see him.
I carried the BBQ brisket home, only to find that familiar black Maybach parked outside the little house.
“Caitlin.”
The moment our eyes met, Sebastian’s eyes slowly reddened. In just a few short months, he had become almost unrecognizable. He had lost so much weight that he looked gaunt, and the coat that had once fit him perfectly now hung loose off his body.
His voice thickened as he stepped toward me and opened his arms, trying to pull me into an embrace. “Caitlin, I’ve missed you so much…”
His sudden appearance did not surprise me at all. The moment Nathaniel showed up, I already knew it could not possibly have been a coincidence. Sebastian had sent him to sound me out.
“Caitlin, don’t you have anything to say to me? I’d rather you hit me, curse me, anything—just don’t look at me this way, so cold…”
When I looked at Sebastian, my gaze was as still as dead water, cold and distant.
Unwilling to give up, he took out an emerald bracelet rimmed in gold and held it out to me.
“And the emerald bracelet. It was broken, but I got it back for you. I had someone repair it with gold to mend the break. Look…”
I clutched the bracelet tightly in my hand, not daring to loosen my grip in the slightest. “The bracelet was broken, and yet Mr. Wofford still went to so much trouble to repair it?”
“Caitlin, I was wrong. I really was wrong. I had no idea Kayla would be this bold. The reason the emerald bracelet wasn’t bought at the auction was entirely that she interfered… Caitlin, I’ve changed. If you come back with me, I swear I’ll never make the same mistakes again. Can’t we be the way we used to be…”
As tears of remorse spilled from his eyes, all I felt was irony.
The way we used to be?
I remembered that once, I had said those exact words too. At the time, one of the women by his side humiliated me without restraint.
“The way you used to be? Who gets to live in the past forever, ma’am? Back then, Mr. Wofford loved you, so he looked at you a few extra times. Now he’s sick of you, so deal with it.”
Those words had delighted Sebastian. On the spot, he pulled a card from his wallet and tossed it to her. “Well said. You’ve got a sharp tongue. There’s 200,000 dollars on that card. Spend whatever you want.”
I didn’t know whether, when he said those words to me now, he remembered that once, I had begged him in just the same lowly way.
My voice carried a cutting mockery. “Finished?”
Sebastian looked at me as the last trace of light in his eyes dimmed little by little.
“I’ll keep the bracelet. It’s the only thing my mom left me. Go ahead and arrange the divorce. Once it’s done, we don’t need to see each other again. And I hope that from now on, neither you nor your friends will interfere in my life again.”
I took my eyes off him and turned to go inside. Sebastian’s choked sobs were shut out by the front door.
In my ears came Denise’s cheerful chatter. “What took you so long… BBQ brisket! My favorite BBQ brisket. Boss, I love you!”
The next day, Sebastian appeared outside the little house again. I was just about to tell him to leave when he spoke first, his voice so hoarse it was almost broken. “I agree to the divorce.”
The day I received the final divorce papers, the weather in Tahoe City had finally cleared.
Standing outside the courthouse, Sebastian spoke slowly. “That day, I truly didn’t know you were in danger. If I had known, I would have risked my life to save you. Caitlin, do you still believe me?”
I believed that the Sebastian I knew at 18 would have risked his life to protect Caitlin.
But I would never believe that Sebastian at 25 would.
So I smiled and told him, “I don’t.”
Pain and guilt flickered through Sebastian’s eyes.
I turned away with a satisfied smile.
Did he expect me to wish each other well? I couldn’t do that. I could not bring myself, at parting, to wish him peace.
I wanted Sebastian’s whole life from this point forward to be miserable. Then more miserable still.
Only then would the suffering I had endured feel, for even a moment, a little lighter.
The end.
