Teaching Aleck (The Last Hangman MC #2)(18)



“When I turned sixteen, I found out that my parents only married for the money. Both families were quite wealthy, and together, they would be the richest family in the state. I had no idea what to do with this newfound information, it was f*cking awful. They weren’t the only ones who were together for the money; my entire family was like that. Not a single one of them were together because of love. My aunts and uncles might act like they are madly in love, but behind closed doors they hate each other and barely talk to each other. It became harder to deal with when I was on my own with them: my sister wasn’t living at home anymore. She moved in with her boyfriend when she was twenty and I never told her about the dynamics of our family.

“There was nothing I could do to fix this mess, so I just tried to live my life. I tried to leave and move in with Cassie, but they wouldn’t let me. The only opportunity I got to move out of the house was to go to college, but then again that didn’t go as planned. They picked what I would study and where. I didn’t have any say in it at all.

“A couple of months later, I was off to College to study law. I hated it from the second I walked into the lecture hall. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. Granted I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but becoming a lawyer definitely wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t meant to be stuck in an office for hours on end every single day.

“My life went from bad to worse not long after my sister’s wedding. Naturally, the parents didn’t come, either they were immune to it or they were just too busy being their social self to care. It shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. Her husband wasn’t from a family who had a lot of money, so because it wasn’t beneficial to them they didn’t bother. Things were okay for a while, my sister was really happy with her husband and they had just found out that they were pregnant. I was so happy for them. We were spending a lot of time together and all of a sudden my sister stopped calling, and her husband wouldn’t let me know what had happened.

“One day after classes, I’d had enough, I was tired of no one telling me the truth, what was happening to my sister, why wouldn’t she talk to me anymore. I went to her place and learned that she’d lost the baby. She was having a really hard time and not coping at all as the doctors had told her she probably wouldn’t be able to carry a kid again. They couldn’t exactly give her any explanation why she was unable to have more kids, and that crushed her even more, she was mourning not just the loss of her baby, but her future babies. She started to become a shell of herself and her husband was having a hard time to cope both with the loss of his kid and my sister. Or so I thought.

“A couple of weeks after I went to see her, I got a call from the cops. They told me that my sister had killed herself and that her husband requested I move every single bit of her stuff out of their place. He didn’t want to see her stuff lying around the place, it was too difficult for him.” I take in a shuddering breath. This is really hard for me, the only two people who know the entire story are Ant and Cabe. Telling Charline why I’m so damaged is harder than I thought.

“I was f*cking pissed at him. He had a beautiful and amazing wife, I thought he loved and cared about her, but he cast her and her stuff aside so easily. He couldn’t even f*cking do it himself! I did it, I had to, I couldn’t let him get rid of it all, they were the only things I had left of her. I went through everything, sorting what I wanted to keep and what I could donate. I found a letter in one of her keepsake boxes and it just broke my heart.” I wipe away a tear, I can’t talk about Cassie without crying. I take my wallet out of my back pocket and take out a worn out envelope and hand it to Charline. “Read this,” I say softly.

“Are you sure? This is rather personal,” she says as softly, shock written all over her face.

“Yes, I’m sure, Gorgeous.”

“Okay.” She takes the letter and opens it carefully.

My sweet Aleck,

We’ve been to hell and back with our parents, not that they were treating us badly, they just didn’t love us. I wish I had stayed home instead of moving in with Marc. Things were good in the beginning, we were happy and in love, or so I thought. He was very adamant about us getting married and having a child together. At first, I didn’t think much of it. I was still in my happy place, I had found the perfect man who wanted a family and the same life I wanted. I was loved and was beyond happy, but my happiness was short lived.

After the wedding, he started to become distant, he would come back from work later and later every night and some nights not at all. I tried to revive our flame and for a while, it did work and then I got pregnant. We were over the moon to be having a baby and it really did bring us closer. He wasn’t coming home late anymore and he was very loving and sweet to me. It was such a nice change. We tried to tell the parents, but again, they didn’t care because Marc was a regular guy and had a regular job. They could never accept it, or him.

Things were fine with Marc until one day. He was at work and I was cleaning the house, nothing out of the ordinary, but then I started to feel really dizzy and contractions started. I freaked out because I was only three months gone, I couldn’t possibly be in so much pain this early in the pregnancy. I called Marc to come back home and take me to the hospital, that something was wrong with the baby. He was annoyed, but did come home to help me.

I was so scared when we got there. I was still in incredible pain and I had started to bleed, not much, but enough to worry everybody. The news I didn’t want came not long after. I had miscarried and they told me I never would be able to have a kid naturally. It crushed me. It affected Marc too, but I have no idea how since he wouldn’t talk to me anymore.

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