They still thought the person who'd been kidnapped was my birth mother, a woman who'd lived her whole life in the countryside and had never once set foot near the Henson family's front door.
Chester's voice cut back in, suddenly vicious.
"Ella. I'm asking you one last time. Are you coming or not?"
"No need."
My voice was flat. Not a ripple.
"I'm not coming."
"You've got nerve now, haven't you? For the sake of your pathetic little pride, you'd let your own mother die?"
Chester sneered through the screen.
"I always knew you were cold-blooded. Back then, you'd have done anything to crawl into my bed. You didn't care about dignity then. So what's with the act now?"
"What happened to all that self-respect when you stripped down and threw yourself at me? Did the dogs eat it?"
The memories crashed over me like a flood.
Three years.
He never stopped throwing that night in my face. It was his favorite weapon, the blade he twisted every time he wanted to humiliate me.
But only I knew what really happened.
That night, I wasn't the one who made a move.
He was the one who'd been blind drunk. He was the one who grabbed my wrist so hard I couldn't pull free.
He was the one who stared at me with bloodshot eyes and said my name, over and over, and swore he was going to marry me.
I thought my secret crush had finally, impossibly, come true. I thought the alcohol had loosened the truth from his lips.
I asked him if he knew who I was.
He said my name. Clear as day.
But the morning after the wedding, he was a different person.
"Ella, a marriage you schemed your way into. Did you really think there'd be love?"
After that, he told the world he gave me five million a month.
The truth was that card had a fifty-dollar limit, and anything over required an eight-hundred-word written request.
For me, he wouldn't approve thirty dollars' worth of cold medicine.
And him? He lavished everything on his obsession.
Thirty million dollars to make her smile, without so much as a blink.
My life, my family's lives, weren't worth fifty dollars in his eyes.
"Chester Henson, you have the nerve to bring up that night?"
"Let me make something clear. You were the one who grabbed onto me. You were the one who called my name, said you wanted to marry me. I never begged you for anything!"
"I must have been blind to believe a single word out of your mouth! I was a fool to endure three years in the cage you built for me!"