Poison

“For the bigger picture!” she insisted, but my hands were up to my temples.

I couldn’t hold back the roar. “THERE WAS NO BIGGER FUCKING PICTURE!”

She shook her head. “There was! The bigger picture was Millie! You can’t take away that the bigger picture was Millie, Lucas. We had Millie!”

I stepped up close and leaned right into her. My voice was nothing more than a hiss, filled with rage and hurt and hate. “Don’t you ever, ever fucking use Millie against me again, you vile fucking bitch. I owe you fucking nothing.”

Her tears blubbed over then. “We had a good life all mapped out for us, Lucas. If you’d have just let yourself love me, we’d still be having one now.”

My voice was low and cold, without a scrap of sympathy left inside me to dull the blade.

“I held you while you sobbed over a miscarriage that never fucking happened, Maya. I tried to give myself over to you because of guilt. Because of trying to be a decent fucking man. But I didn’t need to be, did I? I didn’t need to be shit to you. Not then, not ever.”

“I thought I’d be pregnant by then!” she countered. “Honestly, Lucas, I thought I’d be pregnant for real by the time it came to it. I wanted to be.”

“So you faked the loss? And faked the pain seriously enough that I wanted to make it work between us? You’re a sick bitch, you fucking know that?”

But she didn’t know that. She was still victim-eyed and delusional.

“I thought it was short-term betrayal for long-term destiny. I didn’t realise you’d be such a selfish prick to live with and that you’d never get over Anna fucking Blackwell, did I? I THOUGHT WE’D MAKE IT!”

Even hearing Anna’s name from her mouth was enough to send me reeling. I stormed out to the front door and lit up a cigarette and puffed in deep drags while I heard Maya sobbing inside.

This time, for once in my life, I didn’t go in after her.

She could sob until the end of time and I still wouldn’t go in after her.

She was dead to me.

Yasmin’s screenshot had been enough to shine the light on the bullshit I’d been fed by Maya and her stupid fucking circle, but it was still so much harder hearing it for real.

I’d seen the message from Maya to Yasmin asking her to forget whatever she’d heard from Hannah Ames about borrowing her positive pregnancy test to show to me in the pub that one sad little day, and how we were so very happy, and sometimes people have to do bad things for the greater good, don’t they? Don’t they, Yasmin, hey?

The message was from a long time ago, but the implication was still fucking timeless. She was a vile bitch, who’d played on my drunken night and stupid mistake to snare me for the rest of my life. If there had even been one stupid mistake on that one drunken night.

If I really had been able to get my dick up that night in her bed.

But I couldn’t go there…

Even I couldn’t bring myself to challenge that much of a cuntish pack of lies and come out the other side being civil enough to handle the logistics of our daughter together.

I smoked my cigarette and went back in, and she was still blubbing on the sofa, her usual switch from being the self-righteous bitch ruling the world to the poor little princess who was being treated so bad.

I’d bought into it for so long.

I’d believed it for so fucking long.

“You do know that Anna got epilepsy when you fucked me out of her life, don’t you?” I said, managing to keep my voice calm enough to speak. “You do know that I’ve spent the past decade hating myself for what I did to her?”

“We made Millie!” she snapped. “My God, Lucas! We made Millie! That’s all that matters here!”

But it wasn’t all that mattered.

All that mattered was that she was a piece of shit who deserved nothing from me, not even the slimmest little scrap of respect.

I cleared my throat before I sat down beside her, and I was bristling so fierce she didn’t even try to worm her way up close.

I was very calm, and very clear, and every scrap the man I should have been a thousand times over across the years.

The man I truly was, with the spine that I should have made sure was damned fucking solid all the way through.

I told her that she wouldn’t be moving to Hampshire, she’d be staying right here, and Millie would be splitting her time just fine between us.

I told her that she’d have to accept that she was a lying bitch who’d twisted me around her warped fucking wishes for too fucking long, and now was the time she’d be letting me go.