Poison

I told her that we were getting a divorce, and if she had so much as a sliver of sense in that calculating brain of hers, she’d see it’d be in her interest to sign on the line and keep her games to herself from here on in.

I told her I loved Anna.

I told her I’d always loved Anna.

I told her she’d never be coming between me and Anna Blackwell again for as long as I lived.

And fuck, I meant it.

I’d have signed that declaration in blood.

She cried.

She wailed.

She told me it had never been like that, and she’d loved me, and the road was the road, and we had Millie and yada yada fucking yada.

I asked her if we should let people make their own call on that and bring them into the story of how much of a twisted lying bitch she’d been when it mattered, and she paled before my eyes.

If there was ever anything more important to Maya than getting what she wanted, it was that the world saw her as Mrs fucking Perfect with her perfect fucking smile.

So, I used it. I told her I’d be very happy to keep the deviant truths of her bullshit lies to myself, just so long as she didn’t stand in my way of living my life with the woman I loved – and allowing my little girl to be a part of that.

Hell, she blubbed some more, but it didn’t matter. I’d have eaten my own shit before I compromised for one single second with that scheming bitch.

I told her it was my way or no way, and I’d destroy her in every way I could, in every court in the land if she didn’t swallow down her cuntish ways and draw a line in the sand for a new life. A separate life. A life where we were never going to be together again.

And then I left.

I didn’t wait for a response, I got up from the sofa with her wailing in her seat and I left.

Fuck her.

Fuck her lies.

I lit up another cigarette on my way down the path, and my heart was thumping, and I felt sick from the confrontation, but I left with a greater feeling of freedom than I’d had in years.

I was free of Maya.

I was free of being the asshole who was never good enough.

I stubbed my cigarette out in the truck ashtray and set off back to my house. I walked the dogs and logged into work from home, and checked out what was in the freezer for dinner.

And then I did what I should’ve done a decade ago.

I went to pick up Anna and tell her exactly what I’d just done with Maya fucking Brooks.Chapter Forty-OneAnnaWork was surreal.

Stacey and Lucia had spent photocopy breaks through the morning telling me all about their weekends, and I’d listened and smiled and said nothing about mine. There was a comfort in the familiarity of my daytime routine. Meeting rooms, and coffee breaks, and people’s shoes making the same familiar sounds across the carpet when they passed by my desk.

But still, my whole soul was spinning.

Spinning with Lucas, spinning with hope, and fear, and dreams.

Spinning with the possibility that Maya Brooks could have ever told those lies and torn our world apart.

Spinning with the possibility that her friends could have ever supported that. Because how could you? How could you ever watch someone lie to tear other people’s dreams to the ground?

It was only when I grabbed my handbag from my desk and stepped out onto the street to find Lucas waiting there that evening that I realised none of it really mattered.

You can’t ever change the past, no matter how much you want to, so why give it any more of your future than you have to?

I was damn well determined not to give either Sebastian Maitland or Maya Brooks any more of ours.

Lucas was smiling bright as I climbed up into the passenger seat of the truck with him, reaching straight over to squeeze my fingers in his just as soon as he’d pulled away.

He asked how my day had been and I told him. I gave him the small talk little catch up with a grin and gossip, but it was there, and we both knew it – a whole topic was brewing right under the surface.

“Tell me about Maya,” I said to him. “I know you must’ve been to see her.”

He looked vaguely surprised that I knew that, but of course I did. I knew him.

We were back onto the Lydney lanes when he took a breath and started the rundown of his morning. He told me how Maya was every bit the spiteful scheming bitch Yasmin had painted her as, and she was right when she said we owed her nothing.