His loving wife held a press conference asking for privacy during the family’s time of grief. There was a slow sweep of the camera over the family, but I cut off the television dead before I could glimpse any of the Montgomery faces that once filled my heart with pure happiness.
Now they could all go fuck themselves.
A little more than a week later my mother committed suicide because the love of her life, another woman’s husband, she could not possibly live without. I guess she forgot again she had a daughter to stick around for.
“You need to forgive her, Claire, or everything in your life will be shadowed by your bitterness. You’ll never find happiness for yourself.”
Ah, no.
“My mother abandoned me for the man in that picture. Twice.” My phone beeps again in my pocket and I cringe. I can’t take it out and look at it in front of Ms. Lowell. She’ll know something is wrong and what’s going on in my life is none of her business. I’ll deal with whatever it is, I don’t need anyone pretending they could help me with their fake worry. Not when they never showed concern for me or my welfare before. I wasn’t part of the Montgomery family—wasn’t even a thought to any of them, and that became blatantly clear when I was fifteen years old.
I avoid looking in her eyes and try to bring her attention to the big bay windows with my best expression of complete and utter horror, plus some excessively dramatic finger pointing. “Wow, that snow is really coming down now.” I wasn’t lying either; a few inches had accumulated since I arrived here an hour ago and I can’t have Ms. Lowell stuck here at the cabin with me. Not when I had my own secrets to deal with here. I need her to leave and I need her to leave soon.
We both stand up from the couch at the same time, me shifting away, her moving toward me. “Let me fix you up a bit first,” she mumbles, pulling a tissue out from her apron pocket and dabbing my cheek with it. “Would you like some eyedrops for your eyes? They look so raw.”
She’s worried about how red my eyes look from crying? That must be something she’s used to working for the high-maintenance elite, because I wouldn’t care if my eyes turned purple with tears, it’s not like I’d be posting any selfies from here at the tainted Montgomery love shack.
“No,” I mutter, pulling myself away. “I’m just worried about you driving down the mountain in all this snow.” I hammer the idea in by grabbing her coat off the coat rack and helping her into it. “The weather reports were saying we could get over a foot here.”
She pulls up her front zipper before I can and looks at me with some kind of weird longing that makes me feel awkward and uncomfortable. “Will you stay then? The car you drove here in doesn’t look like it could handle—” I lose interest in listening to what she has to say. In another life I would have asked after her son Matteo and what became of him. But in real life, I smile tightly and shove her gently out the door.
“I’m just grabbing whatever I can of hers and leaving in a few minutes.” I wave as she climbs over a snow drift. Ms. Lowell’s right, though, my 1995 rust box isn’t going to be able to drive through snow like this. I slam the front door closed. I don’t even wait to see if she got to her car safely. This is the first moment I’ve been alone in the Infidelity Fuck Palace and I have shit I have to deal with. I have no time for anyone’s bullshit sympathy.
I pull my phone out with shaky hands. There are ten unread texts to add to the ones I’ve received over the past few days. Each from the same insane number. My mother’s.
All of them trying to blackmail me.
The first text came the day I found out my mother was gone. There was no message, just a picture. A picture of me in someone’s bed posing topless. Then every hour after the first picture was sent, another came through. Each image worse than the one sent before. Me in lingerie. Me masturbating. Me masturbating with strange objects. Me in extremely explicit situations with shadow-blurred-out men.
After twelve hours of incoming photographs a message was sent telling me what I needed to do if I wanted all the pictures to be destroyed.
Find the offshore accounts Silas Montgomery set up for my mother and transfer them over. If I refused, the pictures would be sent to the entire parent-teacher-diocese email list of St. Maria’s. I’m not so sure the diocese would be as forgiving as Saint Maria herself after seeing some of those images.
There’s no doubt in my mind I would lose my job. I don’t have tenure and I’m still trying to get my credentials to become state certified. If these pictures got out, I would never be able to work as an elementary school teacher again. Everything I worked for over the last few years would have been all for nothing. I can barely pay my bills now with what little I make as an uncertified private school teacher and I owe a ton on my student loans.
No matter what I do with my life, everything always comes back to what my mother and Silas chose to do, and I’m the one who always has to pay the price for their sins.
Another text pinged on my phone.
Mom: I’d hate for all these to go viral.
Yeah, me too, asshole. I don’t bother opening the image on my phone. It’ll just be some other sick, twisted picture I don’t want to see. I look around the house wondering where to start. Where would my mother keep all her personal documents?
This floor has an open design plan, a kitchen and dining area impeccably clean, and a grand living room that looks like it came straight from some luxury home goods catalog. I rummage through all the kitchen drawers and cabinets to find nothing but expensive gadgets and bullshit novelty items. Every picture I find of her and Silas I break with my fist. This woman had a wine station and an enormous rotisserie oven built into her fucking wall while I donated my own eggs at the age of eighteen to help pay for rent and my first few college credits.
I never knew she lived like this. The last time we spoke she told me she was working in a small office bringing home a meager salary, just enough to get by on. She wished me well in my college endeavors, but she wanted no part of her past. Nothing to remind her of where she came from and who she was. How long did she live this way, while I worried about my next meal? How long was their affair going on? Was it the entire ten years since I’d been exiled for her sins? Or did she and Silas meet again, years later, and reignite the flame that died between them the night Vaughn and I walked in on them?
I tear through the drawers in her dining cabinets. Nothing.
I rip through her bedroom drawers and closets (she had two enormous walk-ins), only to find an obscene amount of sex toys and other questionable paraphernalia, but still no bank papers.
I walk back into the living room and slump down on the couch in tears. How am I ever going to get through this? What’s going to happen when I don’t find anything? What if there isn’t even an offshore account, or what if there is and it’s not enough for this person? And how would they know any of this? Who is it? Why can’t they just leave me out of it? What the hell am I going to do when I lose my career over this before it truly even starts?
Going to the headmaster is the only thing I can think of doing—the headmaster or right to the diocese to explain my situation. I’ll make my entire case on the fact that I work in St. Maria’s, she’s the patron saint of forgiveness for fuck’s sake, they would need to hear me out. If Saint Maria Goretti could forgive her attempted rapist and killer, they should be able to forgive me for a handful of pornographic pictures I don’t ever remember taking. I type out a quick email to the headmaster of St. Maria’s and ask to meet with him as soon as I return from my bereavement leave.