Chapter 73
Roman felt numb as he stood at the bottom of the stairs.
He was still standing there when Evelyn came back down a few minutes later with her handbag. It was like watching his life fall apart in slow motion. Tears were still falling down her cheeks and she looked... destroyed. He’d destroyed her. He had done this.
She stopped a little distance away from him as if she couldn’t bear to come any closer. She didn’t even look at him.
“Where are the car keys?” Evelyn asked.
She was leaving him. He knew that this was it, that she would never come near him again. He’d fucked up.
“Evelyn, I’m so sorry,” he said hoarsely.
“The keys, Roman.”
He’d thought he’d been wrecked the last time she’d left but this felt worse. So much worse.
“On the sideboard,” he answered.
Evelyn walked past him without another word. He didn’t turn around to watch her walk out on him because he was sure it would break him. But he heard her pick up the keys and then heard the door softly open.
Evelyn hadn’t shouted and screamed. She hadn’t thrown things or slammed doors. She’d left with her dignity intact while his was in tatters. And when the door closed behind her, as soft as it was, the sound felt like being hit by a monster truck.
She was gone.
For good.
She would never marry him. She would never have his children. She would move on with her life and do all those things with someone else.
He pulled the little box from his pocket. His hands were shaking when he opened it to look at the small diamond ring nestled inside it. Evelyn would have preferred it this way. She wouldn’t want a huge, obscene diamond on her finger even though he could afford to give her the world.
But it was too late now.
This little box was all he had left, a symbol of everything he could have had.
Everything he had lost.
The numbness disappeared to be replaced by a stabbing pain in his chest. The box dropped from his fingers and he walked to the drink cabinet as if on autopilot. Like a zombie that had had his life sucked out of him.
There was nothing left now.
He took a bottle of whiskey upstairs and the sadistic demon inside him made him open the playroom door. The bed was still unmade from that afternoon. His mind played tricks on him, he could still hear her cries ringing out through the room.
All he had done was bring more ghosts into the house.
Without thinking, he walked over to the first table and shoved everything into the floor. But that wasn't enough to take the pain away. He emptied every drawer and ripped things from the walls. He knocked over benches and threw chairs across the room. And when everything was destroyed it still wasn’t enough to chase the pain away.
He knew nothing would ever be enough.
He picked the whiskey bottle up from the floor and walked through the ruins of the room. It was the perfect picture of what his life would be like now.
The master bedroom was worse. He could still smell her scent from when she had showered. Before she had found out that he was truly no good for her. That she could do a lot better for herself.
She was right. Brendan was a better man than he could ever be.
He drank a few gulps of the whiskey straight from the bottle before he walked over to the bed and ripped the bedding off it. And when he finally lay down on the bare mattress with nothing but silence all around him, the pain became unbearable.
He couldn’t fucking breathe.
She was gone.
And he deserved everything he was feeling.
He didn’t know if he slept but the sun had already risen when he turned his head to look outside the window. He got up only long enough to get another bottle and lay down again. And all of a sudden the sun was gone again. He lost track of how many times it did this. Sunrise. Sunset. As if the world hadn’t fucking ended.
But he knew that no matter how much he wished he had done things differently, the sun would never rise again in his life. His life would be lived in perpetual darkness.
From the corner of his eye, he saw movement. Hope flared in his chest.
Was she back? Had she also realised that she couldn’t live without him?
But when he turned his head, he saw Phillip picking the bedding up from the floor and wadding through empty alcohol bottles.
“They all think you’re dead,” Phillip said.
His voice cut through the silence and sliced through his head. He turned away gingerly to look out the window again.
“Are we really doing this shit again?” Phillip asked.
This was nothing like the last time. But he didn’t have the energy to explain.
“I fucked up,” he said.
“You did. Spectacularly,” Phillip said as he dropped some empty bottles in a corner.
They clanked together so loudly that he winced and closed his eyes.
“You need to go and shower. Come on, you look like shit,” Phillip said.
“I’ve nowhere to be.”
He’d have to get up eventually. Like last time. But last time it had been his decision to get Evelyn back that had motivated him.
Fuck.
How did one little woman fuck his life up so completely? He felt like a huge chunk of himself had walked out of the door with her. This wasn’t right. Love wasn’t right.
Or at least it wasn’t right for him. He didn’t know the first thing about it. He should never have tried.
“You have a lot of things to do that you’ve neglected for months,” Phillip said. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way you’d hoped but you need to get it together. People have noticed.”
Meaning his business was suffering.
He sighed and looked at Phillip again.
“You don’t seem surprised that she left.”
“I’m not,” Phillip answered. “I’ll go and wait for you downstairs.”
He didn’t know how long it took to finally move from the bed and how long it took to stand under the shower, but when he went downstairs he followed the smell of food to the kitchen.
“Eat first then I’ll take you to work,” Phillip said as he put something greasy on the kitchen table and a glass of water and painkillers.
“Where did she go?” he asked quietly.
“To her parents’ house, the one we moved them from. She hasn’t told her parents she’s back.”
His first thought was that he needed to go to her. To beg her to take him back. But the look on her face had haunted him since she’d left. She wouldn’t want him.
It was better he stayed away and concentrated on his business. That was the only thing he did right.
“Finalise the transfer of that house to her parents’ names. And then sell this one.”
Sell the house where he had discovered all the delights of Evelyn’s body. The house where she had smiled and laughed with him. The house where he had known what love felt like for the first time in his life.
He had to let Evelyn Bright go. For good this time.