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I slumped beside him and grabbed the other half, taking a ravenous bite. The past thirty hours had been a blur. I couldn’t remember eating or drinking a single thing in that time.

“What’s going on is that your brother decided to ruin my life!” Marjory accused. She slammed things around in the open-plan sitting room.

Cal raised an eyebrow at me.

“She’s been caught cheating, and somehow, it’s all my fault.”

“Itisyour fault! You just had to stick your nose into someone else’s relationship!” Marjory continued.

Cal was still looking at me, his expression growing more amused.

I shrugged. “So, I had her followed, so what? If she’d not been cheating, then nothing would have happened.”

“And now, we’re getting a divorce, nice and quickly before we’ve been married too long,” Marjory went on as I finished the sandwich in three bites and stood. She passed by me and decided to stop and confront me face-to-face.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Or you just hate having a gold digger around so much, you don’t care that this will affect Selena and her little sister?”

“It won’t affect them,” I said. “Stop shouting at me, and you’ll find it doesn’t affect you either.”

Marjory scoffed. “Yeah, right. Your father is vindictive. He doesn’t like having his time wasted, or his money, or his reputation damaged.”

“Well, yes; did you just meet him? Surely you knew that,” I said dryly.

Her hand flew up and slapped me.

I took a deep breath. Fuck, she was annoying.

“You don’t understand the first thing about your father. You don’t understand what being married to a man like that is like… It’s so lonely,” she said, ending on a whisper.

I thought of my mother and her loneliness. How she’d needed to put the world between him and her just to move on. Yes, my father had succeeded in life in all the obvious ways, but there was one glaring weakness he had.

He would always be alone.

Unloved and unlovable. It sounded like a curse. And my father wanted that life for me.

“I get the loneliness, my mother suffered from it, too, but you don’t just start fucking someone else after being married for a few months. That’s not how it works.”

Marjory shook her head and dashed away tears with the back of her hand.

“You don’t know anything. You might be twenty-one, but you have no idea about the real world. I’m going to go and pack, before your father has me chucked out by the cops or something.” She turned on her heel.

“Leave Selena’s room,” I called to her firmly.

“What? Why?” Marjory asked.

“Because I said so,” I said. “Worry about yourself, I’ll worry about your daughter. You remember the one? Who was just terrorized and kidnapped and is lying hurt in the hospital right now? Don’t touch her things.”

She’s not going anywhere.

“What’s going on?” I asked my father later, when I finally managed to get him on the line.

“What do you mean? Mike came directly to me with the images he had of Marjory. I just can’t believe the woman. The audacity!”

Fucking Mike. Had he not listened when I told him to sit on the information? Arsehole.

I waited as he ranted and gradually got himself under control.

“Well, you need to take care of the fallout. Marjory is here and distraught over the prenup. Selena is in the hospital, we had some trouble?—”