Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 28

ISAREL

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Stretchers

The plan was to get home, dump these bags in my room, and hurry over to Elgin’s immediately. But nothing prepared me for what I walked into the moment I alighted from

the taxi.

There were men everywhere.

Four, five, six of them moving in and out of the front door, carrying things. Large things. The kind of things that don’t move unless someone decides they are going to move.

I stood at the gate and watched a man I didn’t recognize carry my father’s armchair through the front door, and I felt something happen in my chest that wasn’t healthy.

My father’s armchair.

The wide, dark brown one that had sat in the corner of the living room for as long as I could remember. It had a worn patch on the right armrest where he used to rest his hand when he was reading. I could still remember the small gouge in the wood on the left leg, which came from the time I had dragged it across the floor at age seven because I wanted to sit closer to the television, and my mother had scolded me for it while my father laughed and told her the chair had character now.

Where were they taking all those memories to?

I left my bags at the gate and walked quickly toward the house.

The living room was unrecognizable.

Men were moving around each other like people being paid by the hour, picking things up, carrying them out, and setting new things down in their place.

Freda stood in the middle of it all in a cream blouse and tailored trousers, pointing and directing them.

“The console goes against that wall,” she was saying to someone. “No

one gets the new cabinet when it arrives.”

“Freda.” My voice came shaking. “What is going on?”

that wall. The other

She turned and looked at me with the mild, slightly impatient expression she reserved for interruptions. “You’re back.”

“What is happening to the house?”

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Chapter 28

“I’m redecorating.” She turned back to the men. “That lamp goes in the back.”

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“Redecorating.” I looked around the room. I saw my mother’s painting the one that had hung above the fireplace since before I was born, the landscape one she had loved so much she used to stop in front of it sometimes just to look at it was leaning against the wall by the door, face out, waiting to be carried away with everything else. “Freda. That’s my mother’s painting.”

“I’m aware of whose painting it is.”

“Then why is it-”

“Because I am tired of looking at it.” She said simply. “I’m tired of the scenery in this house. It needed changing.”

Something rose in my throat that I swallowed back down. “You have other houses. Uncle Fred gave you a house for your birthday last year. You could have moved there if you wanted a change of scenery.” My voice was steady. I was keeping it steady. “You didn’t have to do this here. We just moved in here two years ago, and…”

“This is my home, Kisarel!” She turned around to face me fully, her red lipstick catching the new chandelier she just installed right above us.

“It was my parents‘ home first!” I retorted, and the silence that followed was so loud.

I kept my eyes on Freda and felt the steadiness in my voice beginning to cost me more than I had available to spend on it.

One of the men near the door bent down and picked up my mother’s painting.

“Wait-“I moved toward him instinctively. “Please, just wait a moment-

He looked at Freda.

She gave him a small nod, and he walked out with it.

–

”

I watched it go through the door, and something cracked open in me that I had been holding closed since I walked through the gate.

“What did they do to you?” My voice came out strange, thin, and shaking in a way I hadn’t intended. “My parents. What did they ever do to you and Uncle Fred that you have spent every year since they died making sure there is nothing left of them? What did they do?”

The room went very still.

And then, her palm connected with my face so hard that my head snapped sideways. The sound of it bounced off every wall in the room, and the men closest to us stopped moving for exactly one second before they decided, collectively, that they hadn’t seen anything.

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whuchers

The side of my face burned. I pressed my hand to it slowly and turned back to face her.

“You ungrateful little brat.” Her voice was low and controlled and all the more terrible for it. “You are lucky to still be standing in this house. Lucky to still be standing at all. Don’t you ever-” she stepped closer, “ever speak to me in that manner again.”

I said nothing.

Because what was there to say? What words existed that were large enough for this specific moment, for standing in my parents‘ house while it was being emptied around me, and the woman who had moved into it like she’d been waiting for them to die was looking at me like I was the problem?

–

a

In the corner of my eye, I saw two men lifting the last piece of furniture I recognized small side table my father had built himself – and carrying it toward the door with the rest.

“Please.” The word came out before I could stop it. “Please, just let me keep them somewhere. I’ll take them out of the house, I’ll put them in storage, you’ll never have to see them again. Just – please don’t throw them away.”

Freda looked at me for a moment.

Then she turned to the men. “If she touches anything from the discard pile,” she said, in the pleasant, conversational tone she used when she wanted to make sure everyone present understood she was serious, “you will answer for it personally. Am I clear?”

The men murmured their responses and went back to work.

I shut my door with a loud bang and dropped to the floor.

The tears came the moment my back hit the door. My hand was still pressed to the side of my face where Freda’s palm had landed, and the burning there had settled into a dull, constant throb that I barely felt anymore because there was something considerably larger happening in my chest that made the physical pain irrelevant.

Everything about my parents was gradually slipping out of my fingers, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I pressed my knees to my chest and put my face in my hands, and I cried in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to cry in a very long time. The ugly, airless kind. The kind that doesn’t care what it sounds like or what it costs you afterward. The kind that has been living in your ribcage for ten years, waiting for the moment your composure finally ran out of road.

God, I missed them.

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I sat on the floor of my room for a long time.

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Then I got up, went to the closet, and pulled out the safe from where I kept it hidden behind the folded blankets on the bottom shelf.

I put in the combination and opened the box.

I reached past the necklace, past the watch, past the knitted socks, and took out the photograph.

I pressed it to my chest with both hands, pulled my knees up, and held it there.

“I miss you so much, Mum, Dad. I wish you didn’t have to go.” I cried a little harder.

Suddenly, the door pushed open.

Shit. I forgot to lock it.

I scrambled. My hands closed around the photograph, the safe, everything -pulling it all against my chest before I had even fully registered who it was, every instinct firing at once because the safe was open and no one had ever seen it.

I lifted my gaze to see who it was.

Moonie.

She stood in the doorway looking at me.

The silence lasted exactly long enough for her to see everything. My face. The open safe. The photograph pressed flat against my chest with both hands. The necklace, which I’d been doing my best to hide from her mother. The watch… Everything.

She saw all of it.

And then she smiled.

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