“What does the bank have anything to do with it?” I asked, confused by where her focus was geared.
“Shhhh,” she hissed immediately. “Let’s keep our voices down, shall we?”
“Okay,” I whispered. “But Mom, seriously, this is not what it must look like.”
“I love you Aria, and I really appreciate all the things you have done in order to help me out. It’s just…I feel like I let you stoop too low for my sake, and right now I can’t help feel like I’ve done an altogether terrible job of being a mother by letting you do this for me. Your boss has been paying my medical bills! I can’t imagine the kind of requests he must have in return. He is so much older than you too, and you’re so young and naïve.”
“I’m not stupid,” I snapped, starting to get annoyed. “Yes, I am younger than him but I am not an idiot, Mom. And I will admit that yes, this whole thing kind of started in a manner that might seem less than classy. He made me sign a contract that said he would make monthly payments to your bills for as long as I dated him. That was it though, just dating! There was nothing crude on there. I can show you the contract!”
She sighed. “I believe you, sweetheart. But obviously, it seems that this has gone beyond the contract now, has it?”
“I love him, Mom,” I said earnestly, hoping she would understand. “It started out as all games and tricks, but we just grew to really care for one another. Everything you have seen tonight between me and Zayden, it was all real. He is my boyfriend. Yes, he is older and he is also my boss, but I have honestly never felt this way about anybody in my life before, and that’s not something you ought to be ashamed of!”
I was quite surprised with the eloquence I had just employed in a situation where I was almost too afraid to function. My mom’s reaction, however, wasn’t quite what I expected. She looked neither mad nor happy nor pleased. She looked horrified.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“Oh Aria, I am sorry,” she said covering her face in both her hands.
“What are you sorry about? You have nothing to apologize for!” The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gotten bizarre, as though I had walked in on the middle of a very dramatic scene in a soap opera. “What’s going on, Mom? Why are you so upset?” She was crying, trying hard to hush her sniffs - so that Zayden wouldn’t hear, I presumed - leaving me completely perplexed. I walked over to her uncertainly and placed a hand on her right shoulder. “Mom, talk to me, is everything okay? Is it the house? You know you can always come live with me.”
“No, Aria,” she said, finally looking up. Her face was red and blotchy, her eyes swollen to almost twice their size. “Are you sure you love this guy?” she asked in even softer tones than before.
“Yes,” I said without even considering it for a second.
“Then I really do owe you an apology. You know when your dad filed for bankruptcy?”
“How could I ever forget?” I shrugged.
“Well, before he filed that, he was obviously in a lot of debt. He owed huge sums of money to a lot of different people, but most of all, he owed 500,000 dollars to a particular bank.”
My heart started shaking again as I was beginning to understand where my mom was going with this. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t possibly be that my father—
“The bank was South National Bank,” my mom finished.
I threw my body onto her bed in shock.
“So, you’re telling me,” I said very slowly so that there would be absolutely no confusion on this matter. “That this man is paying 60,000 dollars to help out our family, after our family robbed his company of eight times that amount already?”
“Don’t put it like that, sweetheart!” my mom gasped. “You couldn’t have known now, could you? When you first took a job there, I felt a little uncomfortable given our shaky history with the company, but I didn’t want to say anything because it was just a job. What could go wrong? As I learned in the span of the past hour, apparently a whole lot.”
I covered my whole face with a pillow and tried to let this sink in. I had to think straight here. There was no way Zayden would ever find out about this connection, was there? Unless I told him, of course. And while a voice in my head was egging at me to do so, I did feel that it was not necessary for him to know everything about my family history.
However, I knew what the right thing to do was, and it was to tell him. If he ever found out any other way and knew that I had known all along, it would be much harder for him to forgive me.
Would he really take it so badly? After all, I had no idea my dad was responsible for such a big loss to him, and if I came clean and told him as much, he was bound to believe me. What my dad did was not my fault, and I knew Zayden; he was better than to hold it against me. After everything we had been through together, he wasn’t going to use a fact from a distant past as a weapon against a relationship we had worked so hard to build.
“Honey, are you okay?” my mom asked, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry. Perhaps tonight wasn’t the best time to tell you about this. I was just so shocked when you told me who he really was. At first I was just mad that you were selling yourself to your boss, but then when you told me how you felt, I just could not bear the guilt.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said, sitting up. “It’s all okay. I am glad you told me because I am going to go out there and tell him all of this myself. That’s the only way to have a healthy relationship.”
My mom’s eyes were still teary, but she extended the palms of her hands to my face and rubbed m
y cheek. “You’ll do the right thing, Aria,” she said endearingly. “You always do.”
Chapter Five
Zayden