Page 40 of Swallow Your Sorries

“I didn’t—”

“Why did you have it? Why was that video on your phone? Why were you recording me having…”

“Let me explain—”

She shakes her head, tears falling down her cheeks as we run through a red light. “It doesn’t matter now. Your father.”

She doesn’t have to explain. We both know and we both don’t know.

It’s worse than bad. My father’s fury has no limits and whatever he plans to do to us, yes us, for humiliating him, will be utterly unfathomable.

I want to comfort her and I want to scream at her all at once. Why would she have an affair at all, but why would she do it in a public place knowing who Bart Auclair is?

I’d kept a copy of the video to confront her when she ultimately denied it. I knew she would. I needed the evidence to pin her. To scold her like the child I sometimes feel she still is. Then I’d destroy the tape after shaking the fear of God into her. After bringing her to her senses.

But I never got the chance because that little bitch beat me to it.

Her phone vibrates and rattles against the dash before falling off and disappearing somewhere by the petals she’s still mashing to the floor.

Time ticks on with my thundering heartbeat, but she still doesn’t talk.

“What are we going to do?” I ask finally, because one of us has to speak. One of us has to formulate a plan.

What is the plan? Or are we driving aimlessly?

Is there a we at all seeing as she was ready to abandon me in the car park?

No response.

The car banks a curb too sharply, and my temple knocks into her bony shoulder so hard my eyes water.

Still, she doesn’t speak. Not even a hiss of pain.

A half second passes and finally, she speaks, she screeches my name with a blood-curling pitch.

“Gant!”

Her terrified eyes fly from the rearview mirror to me, then her head as she’s propelled partially onto my seat as the car jerks left.

A flash of black darts past her window and it takes me another half second to realise the rear corner of the overtaking vehicle had run into our fender. Had thrown us off the road entirely as the tyres hit the curb again, before banking over it.

The car spins and the world spins with it. Glass shatters, raining down on me like a thousand razors. Blinding, unimaginable pain explodes behind my eyelids as something stops our horizontal momentum.

Minutes tick by and no other thought comes to me other than pain, excruciating pain that throbs through every microscopic part of my body.

And then, nothing.

Suddenly, there’s just nothingness, because when I open my eyes again, I see my mother’s soul fleeing with my bodily agony.

It’s as if my brain shut off the nerve endings because this pain, this new pain, this new nothingness, is too much for me to bear.

The problem is, my body never turned the fibres back on, and numbness is my new normal.

Until now.

Until Elle.

The scene from the auditorium replays in my mind like a fucking movie, but not with the air of satisfying revenge I’d craved. No, it comes with a dose of manic eroticism.

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