If he didn't love her, why did he still wear it?
I didn't understand him. I never had.
"Ronald, perfect timing!"
"Tell me the truth. Have you and Marianne slept together?"
Ronald looked at the tear tracks on Marianne's face and said nothing. He simply walked over, pulled out a tissue, and wiped her cheeks.
Every movement gentle. His face soft as water.
That gentleness had once been mine. I'd thought he saved it only for me. It had never occurred to me he could give it to another woman.
Back then my mother had been driven to her death, because my father insisted on keeping Marianne's mother as a mistress on the side.
In those days Marianne wasn't a Henson at all. She was only a Locke.
I was small then. My parents fought, and the one who suffered was the child.
I'd hidden outside, too afraid to go in, the rain soaking me through until I shook with cold.
Ronald held an umbrella over my head. I couldn't tell if it was rain or tears running down my face, but it left me looking like a wreck.
He crouched down and wrapped me in his coat.
"Janie, don't be scared. Ronnie will always protect you."
Even our engagement was something he'd knelt before his elders to ask for. He'd said he would marry only one woman in this life.
The past was too much to look back on. I only waited now to hear what he would say, what he would do.
"Sir, it's true, Marianne and I have slept together. The night she turned eighteen, someone got her drunk and nearly assaulted her. I was the one who saved her."
"She'd been drugged. If I hadn't stepped in, she would have died..."
"But I don't regret saving her. Her kindness changed something in me."
Their hands stayed locked together, the picture of a love nothing could break.
With things as they were, my father asked him only one last question.
"Then who will you marry, Jane or Marianne?"
"Marianne!"
Marianne laughed and threw her arms around his neck, burying her face against his chest.
My father didn't hesitate for a second. "Then marry Marianne. I'll handle Jane."
"Honey, what if she makes a scene?"
"Hmph. She wouldn't dare. She'll carry the Henson daughter's name her whole life. Who would dare bully her?"
"Marianne is different. She's had nothing. I'll do everything I can to make up for the father's love she never had!"
Outside the door, my heart fell from hope all the way to the bottom.
Ever since the stepmother and her family showed up, who exactly owed whom?
My mother had been driven to death. My father had been taken.
Even the company and my fiancé had all ended up in Marianne's hands. What was she still missing?
Did my father really not see it?
An empty title with no real power only makes you a target for mockery and cruelty.
I couldn't understand why he favored her like this, when I was his own flesh and blood, his blood in my veins.
Yet he loved another woman's child, a child who shared no blood with him at all.
The grief in me now wasn't over their love. It was over the way they played favorites and lied.
I walked out of the hospital with heavy steps. At the door, my aunt called.
"My darling Janie, you got into that Ivy League school, didn't you?"
I gripped the phone, a knot of hurt lodged in my throat.
No one would ever know why I'd worked so hard to get into that school.
I only wanted my father to look at me a little more, to care about me a little more, and to make the Gilberts pleased with me as their daughter-in-law.
"Auntie!"
The sob wouldn't stay down. It broke straight up out of me.
"What is it?"
"Are you just overwhelmed, or is someone bullying you?"
I told her the whole story from beginning to end, and by the time I finished she was furious.
"That vile old man. He's got the nerve to crawl all over me and treat my niece like garbage he can wipe his boots on? Every last one of them had better watch what's coming."
