“Oh. That’s sad.” She stuffed more pastry into her mouth.
“I would feel sorry for myself, but it’s entirely my fault,” Peyton said. “I did it all. I made every wrong decision at every opportunity. I was an evil asshole, and I hurt her a lot.”
“Did you cheat on her?” Raji sounded more aghast than she had meant to. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t ever going to see Peyton Cabot again. If he was a cheating asshole, it wasn’t her problem unless she was the woman he had just cheated with.
Ew.
Maybe Raji did need a shower.
Peyton said, “Everything but cheating, I think. But no, I don’t think I’m the cheating type.”
“Did you hit her?” Raji asked, trying to figure out what was so bad.
“Of course not. All right, everything except cheating and physical abuse.”
“Addiction?”
“Not that, either. Wow, you have some terrible ideas about men in relationships.”
Yeah, she did.
So that left— “Emotional abuse?”
Peyton sighed as he drove. “Yeah, you could put it like that. I am the biggest asshole in the world, and I fucked her over. I ruined her life.”
Raji squinted at the car’s gray ceiling to think about that one. “Georgie Johnson is the keyboard player for a major rock band, probably earning millions of dollars, and married to the lead singer in what appears to be an exceedingly happy marriage, if you can judge by the way those two were wrapped around each other like blood vessels around a tumor all night. If you were trying to ruin her life, you suck at it.”
“If there is any good that came out of it, it’s that she got rid of me and found Xan. Those two are soulmates. They have sacrificed impossible things to be together.”
“So it all worked out for the best,” Raji said brightly, looking at the other cars on the parkway as they raced through the traffic.
“I cannot think of it that way, ever. What I did was reprehensible. There is no silver lining or meant-to-be or any of that shit. I own it. I am the evil asshole who fucked up the life of the woman I loved until there was no going back. If she turned it around, it was no thanks to me.”
Raji had flinched the whole way through his speech. “That’s pretty harsh, Peys. If a friend of mine said that about themselves, I’d try to talk them down.”
“It’s better that I remember. I try to make up for it every day, to do anything I can to make her happy, to try to make the world a better place, and to never, ever treat anyone like that again. If that’s my natural personality, I need to not be that person.”
“Well, I don’t know what you did, but it sounds like you’re making up for it. I mean, we are our choices, right? Maybe you screwed up, but now you’ve chosen a different path.”
“You don’t know what I did.”
“And I’m not sure I want to,” Raji mumbled.
Peyton said, “You need to know.”
“I don’t think I do.” But she looked over at him and waited.
Peyton sucked in a deep, fortifying breath. “When we were sixteen, it was revealed that her father swindled a lot of people, including my parents and a lot of our friends’ parents, out of a great deal of money. We had plenty. We weren’t poor afterward, by any means. Indeed, we were still one of the wealthiest families in the country. But it was a lot of money. At school and in our community, a dark energy swept through everyone—an anger, a livid rage at our own willing ignorance that had led to our parents being swindled. Her father was arrested and whisked away to prison, where he killed himself within a week. Her mother hid in their compound and then ran to a house they had in a remote area of France. Her older brother was under investigation but hadn’t been charged yet, but he was staying in the city under their lawyers’ lock and key. Georgie was the only one available to attack. Georgie was at school the next day and every day. A housekeeper was staying with her because she hadn’t wanted to go to France, or maybe she couldn’t, legally. I don’t know. All that self-hating rage turned on her, and everyone attacked her.”
“Oh, no.” Raji could figure this out.
“Including me,” Peyton said. “It was vicious because everyone, absolutely everyone, should have known better, years before. They should have known that her father was swindling them, but they hadn’t wanted to know.”
“It sounds like a bad situation,” Raji said, trying not to agree with him too much.
“I listened to what everyone else was saying, what my parents were saying, what all of my friends and their parents’ were sniping about behind her back. Everyone thought she was in on it. They thought she had known that he was a con artist, but she hadn’t. She was as ignorant and shocked and innocent as the rest of us. He left her with nothing, too. No college fund. No inheritance. No graduation money to buy a plane ticket to get to a university.”