Chapter 46: I Don’t Know You

“Hey, you’re home early. I thought you wanted me to pick you up? What’s the deal with the big, black limo outside? My car is not good enough for you anymore, Miss Lady?” Arthur asked from their bedroom, where he had laid his study materials across their bed and was working on making outlines for different subjects that would be on the bar exams.

Rachel was shaking.

“There, there. Seriously, what’s wrong?” Arthur persisted. “What the...who is that man in our home? Rachel, RACHEL, talk to me,” he said shaking her, momentarily forgetting the presence of the large man in their living room and focusing all of his attention on her. “Tell me what’s going on!”

“Arthur,” she said, breathing harder and faster once she spoke his name, “my father is a billionaire. He’s outside in the car. The man in here is his driver and body guard. He has come for me to return to the states and go through with an arranged marriage for business reasons. I’m sorry I had to hurt you this way. I am leaving immediately.”

“What?” Arthur blinked, trying to make sense of what he had just heard.

“I wanted to try to make it right before I went away and promised your grandma that I would tell you the whole truth. I can understand if you hate me right now...”

“‘You can understand if I hate you right now’? No, I don’t think you can understand one iota of what I am going through right now. You have no idea about my feelings, period, you ice queen. If you did, you would not have lied to me!” His feelings for her suddenly changed from love and fear of losing her to anger and disappointment.

Processing beyond the twin emotions of shock and surprise, he somehow found the strength to continue questioning her, becoming more and more aware with each rhetorical question he asked her that the foundation of their relationship was built on her falsification and quickly slipping away.

He probed further in vain to get a better sense of the depth of Rachel’s betrayal, “Have you been lying all the time? About us or...loving me? How stupid of me! How can I trust or believe anything you say from here on out? You lied. You LIED to me. I’m done with you! Get your stuff and get out! I don’t even know YOU. Go back to where you came from and leave me the h*ll alone.”

He paced nervously back and forth for a while overcome with profound disappointment, then angrily opened drawers in the bureau and the door to the walk-in bedroom closet and began tossing all of her clothes and underwear at her, leaving her stuff to hit the floor. She started trying to pick it up, but failed in her efforts to keep up with him, a man possessed with hurt and upset over being duped by the woman he loved.

“Miss Rachel. Do you need any help?” the body guard called after her.

Rachel was silent and worn down after telling Arthur the whole truth. The atmosphere was tense. Aware that the body guard was letting her know he was still there for her and she was running out of time, she gave up trying to take her things acquired in Clovelly and only recently moved to the cottage she and Arthur shared. She chose to just leave after uttering two last words to him, “I’m sorry.”

She left Arthur sitting on the paper- and clothes-covered bed, his head buried in his hands, crying, a broken man in an unimaginable situation. He had just started to get vulnerable enough to trust anyone in a relationship context. Now he felt betrayed and used.


She wanted closure, and she got it. She thought about reaching out to hug him one last time, but knew he probably would have rejected her and pushed her away or maybe even worse. Instead, she turned and left him to begin to purge himself of his pain.

Rachel realized that she had it all and lost it twice. One time was stateside and another was in the U.K. She had access to wealth in America; but in Clovelly, she discovered her soul’s potential. With her father, she had money and position. With Arthur, however, she had love.

Clovelly would become a bittersweet experience and, who knows, maybe in a few years that memory might become a pleasant afterthought: an American girl’s pre-marital, last adventure, before settling down to stable, lifelong married life in the world of the privileged and super rich.

When she had her children someday, she would share with them her fondest memories of Clovelly as her mother had done with her. She would redact the private pieces of her close relationships that she left behind, but would always keep close to her heart.

As raw and as fresh as the wound was now, she could not imagine ever being able to edit out her longing for what might have been with Arthur. No matter how he was reacting right now, she wished she could hold him one last time and show him her feelings for him were never counterfeit, even when they were a fake couple.

Heartbreak did not begin to describe it as she left the cottage for the last time and climbed into the limo. She put on a pair of sunglasses on an overcast day, closed her eyes, and slipped away into depression as she and her father rode off in silence. She knew enough to know that she had neither the permission or the privacy to shed a single tear in front of her father.

The quieter he was, the more afraid she became inside. In the end, she did not have to worry about his retribution for her having left. He was totally lost in his work without a concern for how she might be feeling. It was enough for him that she was in the car right now, just another task to check off as complete on his daily to do list.