“Sir.”
“And I don’t want fucking tea.”
“Ronan,” he says sharply.
“What?” I snap, finally looking up at him.
He holds out a folded piece of cream-coloured paper.
“I don’t know where my father is. Sorry — his lordship.”
“He went out for an early-morning meeting.” Lars thrusts the letter in my face. “This came for you.”
For me? Who the fuck sends letters anymore?
“Who is it from?” I ask.
“Miss Teal.” Lars raises an eyebrow. “She left with his lordship.”
Teal sent me a letter then went somewhere with Dad? Why would she do that?
Ah, fuck.
She’s not thinking about ending the engagement, is she?
I open the letter, and my heart nearly stops beating.
31
Teal
Ronan,
I’ve never written a letter in my life, but you broke my patterns for everything, so what does adding writing a letter to the mix matter? Right?
I’m trying to throw a joke in there, but that probably didn’t come through. As you know, I’m kind of socially awkward.
You said in your text you wished I trusted you enough to let you see my pain. It’s not that I don’t trust you, because I do. It’s weird, but if you stood at the bottom of a cliff, I would fall over with my eyes closed. Do you know why? Because I know you’d catch me.
I know you’d never let me hit the ground or rock bottom or any of that.
The reason I couldn’t come forward as you did isn’t that I don’t trust you; it’s that I don’t trust myself.
I’m a fraud, Ronan. I didn’t get engaged to you because of Dad’s company, although that did play a part. I got engaged to you for other reasons, and all of them have to do with the pain I refuse to let others see.
Pain is weakness, and I hate thinking about or reliving the last time I was weak.
But now, I will, because I hope by the time you finish reading this letter, you’ll be able to understand that not all people deal with pain the same way.
You came out. I hid.
For me, the pain started when I was born as a prostitute’s daughter. Knox and I begged to go to school, but she barely let us. All our mum cared
about was drugs and money to get those drugs.
She opened her legs for anyone as long as she got her next shot of heroin. She didn’t care that we heard everything or that we hid so we never got in the way of the men who left her room.
Over time, she got clients who weren’t interested in her cunt, but in seeing her children naked.