“Of course.”
“And that you will never use it against me, no matter how angry you are at me?” His tone is deeply serious, and I start wondering how bad it can be.
“Yes, I promise,” I answer.
He looks me in the eyes, his lips in a straight line. “Petra, I’ll be extremely disappointed if you talk to anyone about this.”
I swallow thickly at the seriousness in his tone. “I know.”
He breaks eye contact, glancing around as he thinks something through. I begin rubbing my thumb and pointer finger together to soothe the quietness of the moment, anticipating what his next words may be. “Okay, well…” Then, he takes a deep breath, exhaling louder than usual. “It was twenty years ago, and I was, um, kinda of drunk and fucked up, and…” He runs a hand through his hair, while another gush of air rolls off his lips, but he doesn’t finish his sentence. Yet I keep my eyes pinned on his face as I see him struggling to tell me the rest. “And I killed someone.” My eyes widen, but I keep my mouth shut waiting for him to dig in. “It was an accident. But um…” Wow. I’ve never seen Alex struggling so much to open up before. “Your dad was with me, and he tried to check on her, but it was too late… she was dead.” He turns, looking at me, but his expression remains just as serious as his voice. “She was the daughter of someone very close to my family.” He looks down at his lap, breaking his eye contact almost as quickly as he’d initiated it. "So we decided to bury the body and keep it to ourselves.”
“An accident?” I ask again. “Like in a car accident?”
“Yes, a car accident.” He smiles briefly at me, before proceeding. “Your mom knows who the girl was, and if she says the truth to her family…” he lets his words trail off, thinking something through. “That family has always been a strong ally and client of ours, Petra. We can’t create friction with them.”
“Who are they?” I ask him.
“Do you really—”
“Yes,” I cut him off. “I need to know. Who are they?”
“The De Vries.” He looks pensively to the sky, before lowering his gaze back at me. “She was Jan’s daughter.”
“Who’s Jan?” I ask, even more confused.
“He’s like a brother to me,” Alex explains. “Sebastian, Jan and I were very close when we were younger. Jan is the oldest, followed by Sebastian, and I’m the youngest out of our bunch. Our families have always had a very strong bond. And by strong I mean, centuries of alliances and loyalty.” So he buried the body of his friend’s daughter? Wow. It’s incredible how far he would go to protect such alliances. “He’s going through a very nasty divorce at the moment, but you’ll meet him and his family at the wedding.”
“So you killed the daughter of a close friend of yours and buried her body?” I repeat to make sure I heard him properly and it’s not me making this whole thing up. Alex nods, and my jaw drops, not knowing what to say. I let out a quiet, “Oh, wow…” That’s all I can manage while I continue processing everything he just told me. “Well, now I kinda understand why you don’t want Mom to put it out there.” My leg bounces up and down in the sand as I come to terms with what he has just told me. Yet, wondering how that would actually turn out, I ask, “What if Jan learns the truth, though? What can he do to you?”
“I don’t even want to think about it.”
“But what if he does?” I ask again, forcing him to face the potential realities of the situation. “Won’t Jan forgive you? After all, you said it was an accident.”
He shakes his head, staring away. “He won’t forgive me, no,” he answers just as fast. “That I’m certain of.”
“Even after all these years?” I keep asking.
“It doesn’t matter. Blood over friends.”
I frown in confusion. “What?”
“Blood over friends,” he repeats, this time looking at me. “It’s one of the principles you grow up with. Family is always above friendship. And Jan is a firm believer of that.”
“That sounds ridiculous,” I snap. “I would rather chose you over my family any day for the rest of our lives.”
“I’m not saying it makes sense. But that’s how we grew up.”
I might not know much about Jan, but I can’t imagine a grown-up man seeking revenge for an accident that happened twenty years ago. It sounds a bit far-fetched to me. “I’m sure if he’s a close friend of yours, he’ll forgive you. It has been so many years now.”
“Not everything is forgivable, Petra,” he replies, keeping his tone grave. While I do understand not everything is forgivable, I doubt his friend will seek out deadly revenge. It’s not like he did it on purpose.
“We buried her body and lied to him when he asked us if we had seen her.” I can see the uneasiness in his gaze by the way he keeps looking around to see if someone is listening and feel the shame his words carry. “They searched for her for years… If Jan found out we lied to him and his family about his daughter, I don’t want to imagine what he’d do to us.”
“What is he capable of?”
Alex chuckles at my insatiable curiosity. “Anything.”
He says that word with so much conviction that my skin prickles with the shiver I fought off. I don’t know Jan, but he does. And now that I understand what my mom has against him, all I can say is, “Thank you for trusting me with this.” I lean into him, my head resting on his shoulder. “You have no idea how much it means to me.”
Alex doesn’t reply, instead he puts an arm around me and presses his lips to my forehead. As we remain silent, reveling in each other’s company amid an empty beach and a blanket of stars, I know perfectly well it took everything in him to share such a dark part of his life with me. And I know he did it only and solely because he cares about us more than anything else.
Chapter 4
Bermuda, October 24, 2020
Alexander Van Dieren
I’d never told that secret to any woman before. Actually, I hadn’t told it to anyone on my own terms, except for my attorney. Telling Petra what happened twenty years ago was either the most stupid decision of my life or the most courageous one. Probably a bit of both. Either way, my relationship with her depended on it. The threats she threw out at me when I refused to tell her anything about my past were not something I could easily dismiss. As I come to think of it, she’s by far the most stubborn person I have ever met. Heck, she gets so aggressive and violent when she doesn’t get her way. It is actually quite disturbing the more that I think about it. That’s a side of her I didn’t expect. Or maybe I should have, given the fact she already showed me this side of her at my estate in the Netherlands. Jeez, Ms. Van Gatt can be such a mystery sometimes.
“Is everything alright?” Petra asks as she looks up at me from the other side of the table, her big blue eyes peering up at me. “You have been so quiet the whole lunch…”
It’s fascinating how behind her cute, little face and her angelic smile, there’s someone who can become so hot-tempered so quickly. Since there’s no one on the terrace but us, I put down my iPad, take a sip on my coffee, and say, “I was just thinking about yesterday…”