You Chose Her, So I Called Off Our Wedding Chapter 07
Meanwhile, Charles was having a bad time of it.
Mutual friends mentioned it more than once. His temper was short, two of his projects had died, and his face in meetings frightened people.
Lucy was not making it easier.
Her ex kept showing up outside her office, making a scene.
Her pregnancy was rough on her; her moods were everywhere, and she called Charles every other day.
If this had been before, I probably would’ve thought he must be exhausted.
Now, all I thought was that he had chosen it.
An adult who made a choice carried what came with it.
What surprised me was that the thing that finally broke Charles was not the lawsuit, or the money, or how cold I had gone.
It was the truth.
The day of the pre–trial mediation came.
Charles finally showed up.
He was in a dark gray shirt, and he had lost a great deal of weight. When he sat down, his hand went for a cigarette pack out of habit and stopped halfway there.
The mediator asked both sides to state their claims.
I laid mine out calmly.
I wanted the down payment on the apartment, the renovation costs, the wedding losses, and the shared funds he had moved without asking me.
Charles watched me the whole way through.
He looked at me the way a person looks at a stranger.
It had probably never crossed his mind that the same Evelyn who used to cook for him after his late nights, who sat up with him through every bad stretch of his business.
And the woman who left a light on after every broken promise would one day sit across a table from him and go through every dollar of it in order.
When I finished, the mediator turned to him.
He sat there a long time before he spoke. “The down payment and the renovation, I accept. The wedding losses too.”
I was honestly surprised.
I thought he’d still put up a fight.
But he looked like all the fight had just drained out of him.
The mediator asked, “So, do you accept the settlement terms?”
He swallowed hard, then looked at me. “If I admit to
everything, will you drop the lawsuit?”
Before I could say anything, Max spoke up.
“No,” he said.
His tone was calm, with a slight smile in his voice.
“Because we have doubts about your honesty now,”
he added.
Charles’s expression flickered.
Max slid a freshly printed bank statement across the table.
“We pulled more before the hearing. Between last October and this March you sent Lucy twelve transfers totaling 62 thousand dollars, and 25 thousand of that came out of the renovation reserve Evelyn put into your account.”
My heart dropped.
I had no idea about all these transfers until now.
I’d only found out about the fifty thousand.
So there was even more.
Charles froze, too, and the color left him.
“I…” he stammered.
“You can explain,” Max said. “Whether you knew. Whether you told Evelyn. What the money was for. Go ahead.”
Charles held that statement until his knuckles went white.
It took him a long time to get it out. “She said she needed bed rest, and a place to live, and somebody to look after her…”
His voice kept getting quieter.
As if even he could hear how absurd it sounded.
sat there with my chest tight and strangely calm at the same time.
So it had not been one impulse.
It wasn’t just that one day at the wedding.
Long before any of that, he had been using our money to cover another woman’s mess and keep her looking whole.
And I had been the fool who never knew, and who went around explaining him to other people.
The mediation didn’t work out.
As I walked out, Charles caught up to me.
“Evelyn, listen to me. I honestly didn’t know she’d spent that much. I thought…”
“You thought what?” I stopped and turned around. That I wouldn’t find out? Or that I’d swallow it if I did?”
He looked utterly defeated, his face drained of all color.
“I swear, I didn’t do it on purpose,” Charles pleaded.
“But that doesn’t make a difference,” Evelyn shot back.
And with that, I turned and walked away without looking back.
That night, Charles went to see Lucy.
A mutual friend told me about it afterward.
He said Charles had gone to ask her about the
transfers, and outside her door, he heard her on the phone with a friend.
“Of course he’ll come,” Lucy said.
“Forget the prenatal checkup. Even if I just complain about a headache, he’ll ditch Evelyn and rush over to me.
“He just thinks I’m some damsel in distress.
“I was never trying to take him. I only wanted to see who actually mattered to him, that fiancée who puts up with everything, or me.
“And look at that. He walked out of his own wedding.
“Men are all the same. They talk about who they love, and in the end, they go to whoever plays helpless best.”
My friend said Charles stood outside that door for a long time.
Long enough that Lucy opened it, saw his face, and panicked on the spot.
I had no idea what they said after that.
And I did not want to know.
What surprised me was that when Charles came to see me the next day, his eyes were red.
It wasn’t the kind of red you get from pulling an all- nighter.
It was the kind of red you see when someone’s soul has been ripped to shreds.
He was standing outside my office, his voice rough and strained.
“Evelyn, I know now,” he said.
I had just gotten back from a client meeting, still holding the proposal in my hand.
“Know what?” I asked.
“Lucy…” Even the name seemed hard for him to get out. “She was using me the whole time.”