Page 111 of One Last Shot

“Not when we signed it, no. I found out later that night.” Her eyes snap to mine, anger flashing in them, and now it’s my turn to look away.

“You told me ... what, like two months ago, sitting in Tom’s office ... that you didn’t know what we were signing back then. You told me that you thought it was just paperwork for your father to give my father the money for my boarding school.”

“That wasn’t a lie, Petra. Ididn’tknow what we were signing when we signed it.” I explain how I found out later that night in my dad’s office.

“Wait, so the money for my schooling was actually fromyou?” She’s sounding angrier by the second.

“That’swhat you’re focused on here?”

“That’s the first thing, yes. You had no right to sign over part of your trust to me like that, without asking me first.”

“You needed to go to that school, and I would have done anything to see you happy. I still would.”

She purses her red lips. “You knew I wouldn’t take the money from you if you offered it, so you had your dad lie to me?”

It sounds worse than it was when she says it like that.

“I did what I had to do to make sure you had the opportunities you deserved.” There’s a finality in my voice because she can’t argue with that point.

“Okay, second then. You found out about the marriage license and contract that night, after we signed them?”

I nod.

“And again, you didn’t tell me?” It’s a rhetorical question.

“I made sure he wouldn’t file them, so there was no need to tell you. Or so I thought.”

“So, given the choice of either marrying me, or walking away forever, you took the latter option.” There’s no life in her voice. It’s just flat. Dead.

“You weresixteen years old. You were not ready to be married. And neither was I, not even at nineteen. And there was no way I was beginning forever with you as my ‘reward’ for paying for your schooling. I wasn’t going tobuyyou, Petra. And I didn’t want you to know that your dad had agreed to that plan. I just wanted you to have every opportunity you deserved.”

“But you stayed away forfourteenyears,” she reminds me. “You could have come back at any time. You could have told me about your father. You could have told me when I still had a chance to talk to my dad”—her voice cracks—“and find out why he agreed to this plan.”

“I didn’t think you’d forgive me for leaving in the first place,” I tell her.

“I would have,” she says, and the use of the past tense doesn’t escape my notice. “I would have if you’d just told me the truth. Instead, you continued to lie to me. You knew all this stuff about my past, about my family, and you didn’t tell me. You made it seem like you found out about the marriage contract when your dad died, not later the night we signed it.” She gasps in a breath like she needs the fortitude to keep going. “You made decisions about my life without including me in the decision-making process. You patronized me without me even knowing it.”

“Petra, it wasn’t like that.”

She schools her face into a steely expression, perfect and porcelain-like. “Like hell it wasn’t. I don’t even know you at all.”

“You’re theonlyone who knows me!” My voice is raised and I’m glad no one else is still up here with us—they’d have heard that even inside. Though at some point we’ve switched to yelling at each other in Russian, so it’s not like they’d understand. “You’re the only one I can be open and honest with, the only one who knows my past, the only one I want to spend my future with.”

“How sad is that?” she says with a sad laugh as she hops off the side of her chair. “I’m the only one who knows you, and I can’t even know you because you can’t be honest with me.”

“I keptone thingfrom you,” I emphasize, but even I realize it’s a paltry defense.

“Even if it had only been one thing—hiding what you knew about our parents’ relationship, or what you knew about my mom and Viktor’s death, or that you’d been the one to give me the money for school, or that you’d cut me out of your life to ‘save’ me from a marriage to you—evenoneof those would have been too much to lie about. But instead, the lies just built on each other.” She pauses as she bends down and sweeps up her heels from where I left them on the ground at the base of our chairs. “I don’tknowyou.” The emphasis on the wordknowhurts even more because Petra is the only person who actually knows me. “And you don’t know me at all if you think keeping everything from me was something I could ever be okay with.”

She takes her shoes and storms into the loft. I watch as she grabs her purse and calls back to me, “You need to leave so I can lock this place up.”

I rush into the loft, desperation quickening my steps. I cannot lose her like this. “Petra, please be reasonable. We can work through this.”

Her laugh is acerbic. “You’re delusional. Take the stairs down so I can lock that door behind you.”

“I’ll wait for you in the lobby,” I tell her and she lets out a cruel little laugh.

“Sure, you do that,” she says as she pushes me out the door into the stairwell and locks it behind me.

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