Even so, we’d come up here come rain or shine. After Madeline started her final year in high school, I’d started feeling like a free man. Not that she’d been a burden or anything, far from it. Madeline had been a very self-sufficient and, like I said, brilliant child.
For the first year or so she’d been with me, she’d gone out of her way to show her independence. It’s only later that I learned she’d done it out of fear of being abandoned by me. She’d push her little self so much during the day that at night I’d sit by her bedside holding her hand after one of her nightmares until she drifted off to sleep again.
One thing about our trips out to the desert. Every time we flew over the strip in my private jet, she’d look down at the lights and promise to spend her twenty-first birthday there. It was a constant with her, and she never missed telling me that once, since I was supposed to be there with her, me, not her million and one girlfriends.
Anyway, after she started looking for colleges, I started looking around for real companionship. Not the one-offs I’d stuck to while raising a child. I was never without female companionship for too long, but in the beginning, I had Madeline to look after, and then there was the business that took up most of my time, so my trysts were more of the weekend kind, no long-term commitment.
It hadn’t taken me long to find someone. Someone who was okay with my family dynamics. Any woman who came into my life would have to be okay with Madeline being in it; there was no exception. Rene had claimed to be such a woman. We’d hit it off amazingly well, weekends out of town here and there since Madeline was old enough to stay alone in the house with the housekeeping staff.
Intimate dinners at least once a week and long sessions in bed, either mine or hers, but mostly hers because I had an impressionable teenager at home. She was my age and very well educated as well and was on the fast track to making partner at one of the most prestigious law firms in the city. The first time she met Madeline, they seemed to hit it off, and that was all I cared about, so I went ahead and got invested,
By the time I got Madeline settled into her second-choice university Rene and I were a thing, and my life was doing well. I missed my girl, though, and would go spend weekends with her sometimes, renting a hotel room close by since she lived in the dorms. I’d wanted to buy her a condo there, but she wanted to live in the dorms said she wanted the whole college experience.
That only lasted a year, after which we spent that first summer at the end of her first year looking for a place. Since then, my weekends going to her became more frequent, and Rene even came with me once or twice. Thankfully she was hard at work trying to make partner, so most of her weekends were busy anyway.
Then last week happened. It had been three years since Rene and I were seeing each other, and we were at that point where it was either going to be marriage or a breakup. Since there was nothing inherently wrong between us and we were compatible, we were leaning towards marriage.
In those three years, she’d asked twice about coming with me about coming to the cabin with us, but I automatically said no. I’m not sure why, but I just always thought of it as our thing, Madeline’s and mine, and didn’t want anyone else intruding.
She’d pouted those times, but this time, just a week ago, she’d tried putting her foot down. Against my better judgment but trying to see her side, since she was now going to be a part of my family, I’d asked Madeline if she’s mind. Even though her lips said yes, that sad look of betrayal I saw in her eyes made up my mind.
I told Rene no, and since she didn’t know that I had asked Madeline, she thought it was still me saying no. She’d said some very questionable things that I’d laughed off at the time as preposterous, but if she could see me now, she’d swear this has been going on since Madeline came of age. But nothing could be further from the truth. And what’s more, I think she only has herself to blame for things ending up this way.
After I’d told Rene no, things had been a bit frosty between us, but I didn’t have time to ponder. It was Madeline’s twenty-first, and I had to plan. I never once forgot her Vegas dreams, not that she’s let me. She didn’t even know that we didn’t have to come this way or that I’d told the pilot to always take this circuitous route just to please her.