MY HUSBAND'S TRAP CHAPTER 2

At last, Geoffrey raised his gaze from his mobile phone. His gaze skimmed over Lottie as if she was the piece of furniture that needed replacement. “Yes, you are right,” Geoffrey murmured. “You have shown yourself to be... useful. But that does not mean that you should be here.”

He seemed to have hit her hard.

She could sense herself losing all color on her face. “Geoffrey..”

“No scenes, please,” he cut in hastily, shifting his attention back to his gadget. “Not now and definitely not in front of the staff members.”

Priscilla leaned forward, her voice becoming soft and confidential. “Now tell me, Lottie. When you look in the mirror, is it the image of his wife or of what everyone knows... that you are just an unfortunate lucky case of charity.”

Lottie’s nails dug into her palms hard enough to leave crescent marks. She could feel the old rage rising, the one she had buried under years of soft answers and lowered eyes. For a single heartbeat she imagined standing up, tipping the entire bottle of champagne over Eleanor’s perfect white dress, watching the silk turn gold and ruined. She imagined saying the name she had sworn never to speak again. Rice. She imagined watching their faces change when they realized the nobody they had spent ten years grinding under their heels had once been the girl who could have bought and sold them all.

But the heartbeat passed.

She lowered her eyes.

"I apologize if I've let you down," she said.

"Ah, my dear. You haven't let us down. You've just never been important enough to do that. You've always been nothing more than what we expected."

The remainder of the dinner passed by in an endless cloud of nasty gossip and frigid silences. Lottie brought the drinks. She cleared the dishes when the servants took too long. She greeted Geoffrey's mother with a smile when she found fault with the hard meat, blaming Lottie for ruining it in the kitchen with her eyes. She tolerated Priscilla's continuous shower of glittering comments about how some women weren't capable of leading the kind of life the Smiths led.

Geoffrey barely uttered a word during the whole thing.

But when everyone had left and the noise subsided, Lottie was alone in the empty kitchen, washing the champagne glasses in the cold stream of water. Her reflection in the dark mirror on the other side of the sink appeared to be pale and frail.

The sound of the footsteps.

There stood Geoffrey behind her. "You've embarrassed me tonight." "N...No...I poured champagne perfectly, I haven't even spilled a single drop..."

"You stared at me like I had kicked you every time someone spoke to you. You disgust me." And he was getting closer and closer, the light from the kitchen falling on his face. "I married you because of your shyness and because you always knew your place. But now you seem to be forgetting about that."

"I do not forget," she whispered, "I promise I never forget."

He took the glass out of her hands, putting it softly on the counter. His fingers tightened around her wrist, pressing it hard enough for her to feel pain but not leaving any marks. "That's good, because next time you forget your place, I won't be so forgiving. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Do it right."

"Yes, Geoffrey."

He released her. "Go to bed. I'll join you when I finish."

Her legs felt like they weren't part of her body while climbing the stairs.

Going back to her room, she sat down at the side of the bed, staring at her hands. The marks left on her hands by Geoffrey's fingers were slowly fading away. She poked her fingers on those marks, trying to imprint them on her skin. Trying to remind herself that those marks would somehow lessen the reality of what happened tonight.

The silence that filled the house, apart from the faint sounds of the crystals being moved downstairs. The voice of Eleanor could be heard upstairs, carrying a slight tone of amusement.

"She is useful right now, but don't forget, usefulness has a limited period. Geoffrey."

The voice of Priscilla could be heard laughing mockingly along with Eleanor.

"Ten years, and she is still scared of her mother yelling at her. That is cute. Just like that broken doll that didn't learn anything."

She closed her eyes. She had heard worse than that before and experienced worse than that too. She should not be wounded by such words. Those words ought to slide right off her skin like water sliding off a pane of glass. But they pierced right through her heart and made themselves at home around her rib cage.

Lottie lay at the farther end of the bed, dressed, looking straight up at the ceiling until she could no longer see the chandelier due to the tears in her eyes. Lottie was trying to get some sleep when all she could hear keeping her awake was the tick-tocking of the clock beside her bed.

At 11:47 p.m., the telephone rang.

Lottie knew the precise time as she was going to think about those numbers for many years to come, handling them the same way one handles a stone in his hand.

It wasn’t afraid Geoffrey. No, he was never afraid of anything. But he was tight, and controlled in a way that made her feel sick with fear.

"Lottie. I need you at the penthouse. Right now. No questions. Come."

And so ten years taught her.

Lottie clenched the steering wheel as she navigated along the empty road where her windshield had been drenched with the reflection of the city lights as though they were paint splatters. The elevator went up too fast as its doors opened to reveal Geoffrey standing at the full-length window drinking his glass of scotch, his reflection blurred by the glittering skyline behind him.

He never looked back.

“An accident occurred,” Geoffrey said. “A woman is dead. Hit and run.”

It felt like Lottie’s stomach had turned to ice. “Geoffrey… Did you…?”

“What’s happened no longer matters.” Finally, he faced her. His eyes were no longer his; they were someone else’s eyes. “What matters now is what happens next. The police will be asking for a driver and a name. A story that won’t turn into a scandal that will ruin everything that I’ve worked for.”

“Everything that we’ve worked for,” she said softly.

He didn’t correct her.

“You need to tell them that you were the one driving,” Geoffrey said.

There was only silence outside the room.

“What?”

“Lottie, you weren’t even supposed to be inside the vehicle, Lottie. No one will give a damn about you…You don’t exist; you’re no one with a history behind you. No one can find out about your past and get back at us through the media. Should any trouble arise, Smith Holdings will collapse alongside me, my family’s company, everyone we hire. Lottie, don’t you understand what all that I can take with me?”

“I didn’t even know about this thing, Geoffrey. I wasn’t the driver...I wasn’t even in that car.”

“I know.” The gentleness returned into his voice just as it always did whenever he was being gentle before. He approached her and took her face into his hands. Just a moment but it was enough for her to see him again – the man she once loved and who would whisper to her like the starlight. “You must do it because I cannot trust anyone else. No one else loves me enough to do it.”