The Submissive's Last Word (The Power to Please #4) (13 page)

Chapter 12

That night, Gibson slept at the cottage then slipped away
early in the morning without waking me. I was disappointed not to see him
before he left for work, but I appreciated his thoughtfulness in letting me
sleep. I was growing seriously sleep deprived, and was in awe at how well
Gibson managed it.

I stumbled into the kitchen late in the morning and found a
note on the counter. Gibson wrote: “I sacrificed breakfast with you, but I’ll
require a lunch in return. Be ready at eleven. I’ll send the car for you.” He
signed it simply “G.”

Now this was something to look forward to, lunch in the city
with Gibson. I glanced at the clock. Yikes. Ten a.m. I made a pot of coffee
then headed off to the bathroom to get ready.

The rushing was for nothing. Gibson called me at ten-thirty,
cancelling our lunch date. He said something important had come up and he had
to leave the country for a few days. I heard the disappointment in his voice,
and his concern for me, so I assured him I understood, that this sort of thing
was bound to happen.

He repeated that he wouldn’t leave right now if it weren’t
extremely important, and once again I assured him that I understood. I asked if
he needed me to pack some clothes for him, but he said Xavier had already done
so and was sending them to the office as we spoke.

He told me he’d call every day, keep me updated on when he’d
be home.

The last thing he said to me was, “I’m going to miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” I replied, a thoroughly inadequate
response if ever there was one. We seemed to be forever declaration-weak in our
relationship.

I looked out over the estate and wondered how I’d spend my
time for the next few days without Gibson around. I felt at loose ends,
restless. Here I was, all ready to go somewhere, and instead I wasn’t going anywhere.

I didn’t ask myself how I’d dealt with the empty time for
the weeks before I reconnected with Gibson. That part of my life already seemed
like a distant memory.

I called Elaine Hoyte and invited her out for lunch. She
accepted. I drove into the city and met her near her office building at a
quaint sandwich shop, a departure from Elaine’s usual dive bar favoritism.

I no sooner sat down and said hi before she pounced on me
about Gibson. Somehow, she saw it in my face. Maybe it was happiness she saw there.
I knew I hadn’t worn that particular expression in a long time.

I told her that Gibson and I were together again, that we
were working things out and it was going well. Her pleasure was effusive.

I also told her about my job offer, and like Xavier, she
suggested I give it careful thought before accepting.

“This is your chance to do what you want to do. The whole
world is open to you now,” she said.

It was strange to me how people assumed my being with Gibson
automatically conferred his wealth onto me. I wasn’t married to the man, and I
still had my own way to make. I couldn’t understand the assumption that I
suddenly had a silver spoon in my mouth.

I confessed those feelings to Elaine, and with her usual
down-home candor, she told me I wasn’t looking at the situation correctly.

“I’m not saying you should be his kept mistress or somethin’
like that, honey,” she said, “but there’s nothing stopping you benefitting from
the circumstances you’re in now. If it means you can take your time and pick
and choose the career you want, then I don’t see anything wrong with you doin’
that. Gibson would want you to.”

Maybe she was right, and I needed to shift my thinking,
learn how to be less practical and more idealistic. After so many years of
struggling to get by, this wouldn’t be an easy task. My habits were soul deep
and purely pragmatic.

Not wholly focused on myself, I shifted the topic and made a
few allusions to Paulina, all of which Elaine brushed aside. I angled for
information about whether she and Ron had only stayed the night because they
drank too much, but Elaine didn’t give up the goods on that angle either. She
never even admitted that they did stay the night.

The only thing she would say was that they enjoyed the
picnic and thought the Martins were excellent hosts. Not exactly information
overload there.

I mentally sighed and decided not to press it. When she was
ready, she’d talk about it. In the meanwhile, I’d have to tamp down my
curiosity.

After I parted from Elaine, I had an urge to visit my old apartment,
to take stock of the place. I turned my car in the direction of my former home.

I felt wistful standing in my old living room. It was
half-ransacked from the hurried packing I’d done weeks before. The same was
true in the bedroom and kitchen. It looked like someone half-lived there. And I
supposed that appearance was correct.

After spending so much time at Gibson’s gorgeous estate, the
apartment seemed dingy and small. I remembered Gibson telling me I was too good
for this place, and how I felt insulted. Now, I could better comprehend what he
meant.

It wasn’t so much that the apartment was cheap and tiny,
which it was. It was more that it was dismal, colorless, without character of
any kind. Blank. Nothing in it said anything about who I was, who I wanted to
be.

Didn’t I deserve more than this? More than an expressionless
existence? I realized that was what Gibson meant, though probably even he
didn’t understand specifically what it was.

I got it though, standing there in that place, on that day.
Yeah, I was too good for this. And it was time for me to let it go.

I’d adapted enough to my new lifestyle that I took advantage
of the ease of requesting help. I placed a short call to Xavier, asking if he’d
send over a few men from the estate, and a truck, to help me pack up and carry
away whatever I decided was worth keeping.

Within an hour, Xavier himself arrived, with two young men
and two young women in tow, and together, we made quick work of the job. The
men mostly carried, while the women packed and cleaned until even the pickiest
of landlords couldn’t have complained about how we left the place.

I called the landlord and he offered a fair price for my
furniture, which made the whole affair simpler than it might have been
otherwise. He instructed me to leave my forwarding address in the apartment and
to drop off my keys with the building supervisor.

It was shocking that after so many days and weeks of
worrying over what to do with my apartment, the decision was finally made and
in the course of one afternoon, the deed was accomplished. I thanked my
helpers, Xavier in particular, for making such easy work of it.

After the last box was carried from the living room, and
Xavier and his helpers were headed back to the estate, I took one last look
around the place.

I could have thought about the day I arrived there, how it
was emptier then than it was on this day. Back then, I’d owned no furniture,
nothing but what I could shove into a pair of suitcases.

I could have recalled my mixed sensations of freedom and
fear of discovery. I wasn’t sure how my husband would respond to my departure,
wasn’t confident that he’d let me go without a fight, hoped he wouldn’t find me
for a while.

I could have remembered lying on the sofa, watching sitcoms
night after night, the laugh tracks and phony, happy families filling a void in
my life that I wouldn’t acknowledge.

I most assuredly could have recollected the discovery of a
silk tie in the bottom of my purse, and how I debated what it meant, and what
my next move should be. More loneliness? More nothing? Or something with an
enigmatic businessman?

I could have called up the memory of another time I stood
there in that doorway, ready to leave, thinking of Michael, his betrayal, what
he stole from me.

But I didn’t think of any of that on this day. I took my
final stroll around the apartment and I recognized it for providing shelter
when I needed it. If I didn’t make more of it, then the place wasn’t to blame.

It was time to move on.

The next day, I sorted through the packing boxes, sending
most of them to one of the storage buildings on the estate. Later in the
morning, Lilly called and asked me if wanted to go with her to visit her foster
mother, Rose.

I was surprised at the request, not that I didn’t wish to
meet Rose, but that Lilly chose me to accompany her. I accepted and later that
afternoon found myself in what had to be the nicest nursing home in the state,
if not the country.

It wasn’t only scrupulously clean, but also homey. It seemed
more like a comfortable, old-fashioned resort/hotel than a professional nursing
facility. It was charming in all ways and didn’t even have the give-away
antiseptic smell of a hospital. It smelled of potpourri and furniture wax.

Considering the connection between Lilly, Rose, and the
owner of the place, Gibson, it wasn’t unexpected that the staff was uncommonly
attentive to us when we arrived. They were friendly without being cloying.

One of the nurses accompanied us to Rose’s room, which as it
turned out, was more like a small suite. In the Victorian-style sitting room,
Rose was ensconced in an ornate and comfortable easy chair, leaning over a
carved walnut table and piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with another patient,
an elderly lady.

Rose was a pretty woman, in her late fifties, though she
appeared much older than her actual years. Her hair had already gone grey, but
it was beautifully styled and twisted into a knot at the back of her head. She
wore a cheerful, floral dress with simple lines. The only make-up on her face
was a hint of pink lipstick.

When she looked up and smiled to see Lilly, it was like a
flashback of Michael. Rose and Michael. Mother and son. They shared their
smiles. There was something about the shape of Rose’s eyes that reminded me of
Michael, too, but her eyes were green, unlike his pale blue wolf eyes.

After Lilly and Rose hugged, Lilly introduced me as Gibson’s
“special friend.” Rose appeared pleased, though I wasn’t sure she understood
what Lilly meant. Then the elderly friend in the room quickly excused herself,
saying she didn’t want to intrude on visiting time.

We settled around the table and since Rose resumed working
on the puzzle, we worked on it, too. Lilly chatted about simple things like the
weather and how the trees would soon be changing colors, how she met a new guy
who was handsome and funny. Rose listened and hummed, nodded, and patiently
tried to place one piece after another in a single hole, regardless of size and
shape of either.

A nurse arrived with a tray of tea and cakes and this
delighted Rose no end. She cheerfully filled our cups and loaded our dainty
plates with treats.

And so we passed our time with gentle, sweet Rose. I
couldn’t but wonder how different this meeting might have been had she never
been in that car accident, never suffered the brain damage that kept her in
this place.

Before we left, Lilly took her hand and said kindly, “Dear
Rose, come home with me today. I miss you. We all do. Come back to the estate
and be part of the family again.”

Rose sighed softly. “Pretty Lilly flower. You know I have to
wait for Lyle. He’s sure to come any day and then we can all go home together.”
She smiled a dreamy smile.

Lilly nodded sadly, gave her a hug, and we said our
goodbyes. We left her contentedly working on her puzzle.

Once we were outside and inside Lilly’s car, she turned to
me and spoke in a harsh voice I never heard from her before. “Of all the things
Michael did, that’s the worst. Every time I come, I hope she’ll have forgotten
his lie so she can come home and let me take care of her. I hate him for this
more than anything else he did.”

I blinked back the moisture gathering in the corners of my
eyes, thinking of the sweet lady and how her own son had told her a terrible
lie. Michael tricked her into staying in the rest home by telling her it was
the only way her dead husband would return to her. At the time, the facility
was a cheap hellhole, a place for Michael to dump his unwanted mother while he
went off to fritter away his inheritance.

Gibson had turned the nursing home into the palace that it
was now, rebuilding around his Aunt Rose, all done to make her as comfortable
and well-cared for as possible, to make the best of Michael’s wrong.

“At least she appears happy there,” I said. “That’s
something, isn’t it?”

“It is, but that’s all thanks to Gibson. I didn’t know that
until after I left Michael all those years later. He convinced me he lied to
Rose to make her happy, so she’d think Lyle wasn’t dead. And Michael said he
paid for the repairs to the place, but that he let Gibson take the credit
because he didn’t want publicity. Lies. All of it.”

No surprise there. Michael and lies were practically
synonymous. “Does she ever ask about him? Michael, I mean.”

Lilly considered the question for a moment. “Now that you
mention it, no, she doesn’t. He never visits her. I’ve heard her say before, to
others, that her son is an important businessman who is very busy.”

“Then she’s created her own reason for why he doesn’t visit.
It’s her way to make it okay. That’s good, don’t you think?”

“I suppose. I wish you could have known Rose before the
accident, though. She was wonderful, so caring and kind and sweet, funny too.
She was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t understand how her own
son treated her so badly.”

“I wish I had answers for you, Lilly, but I don’t.

“That’s okay, Nonnie. You listened.”

She gave me a funny little pat on my leg and then she
started the car. Together, we drove away from Rose’s home, from her
life-sentence in a prison created by her own son.