"This sounds like a soap opera," I told Kade after listening to him explain what his marriage to Charlotte had been like and what a horrible person her father was. "Or maybe a horror movie complete with a psycho killer."
"Try living it," he grumbled. "Then it becomes a fucking nightmare."
"Why would her father tell his daughter, who was clearly in need of psychiatric help, the real reason you married her?"
"She was getting more and more unstable and more and more erratic in her behavior. In other words, she was becoming more and more of a liability to his political aspirations. A child killed in an accident pulls on voters' heartstrings more than a child who's mentally ill. One gets the sympathy vote, the other gets your suitability as a parent called into question, never mind speculation as to whether it runs in the family. Image is more important than the welfare of your children."
"That's...that's..." Words to accurately describe Charlotte's father were failing me. I couldn't really fathom that real monsters existed, but they clearly did.
"Exactly," Kade agreed. "But you know what else it is? It's something I can't prove. I couldn't prove he did anything with malice. He, at worst, could say he simply felt his daughter needed to know the truth, and the truth is that her husband married her not for love, as she'd been led to believe, but because he needed the money. It doesn't matter why I needed money, and it doesn't matter that I had no clue she was mentally ill, it's the bottom line that matters. I'm sure that's the narrative he spun for himself."
"So if you felt that way about her, why did you maintain your house as a shrine to her for all those years after she died?"
Kade looked away for a minute. "I get worse and worse by the minute, the more I tell you. When Charlotte died, we'd been married three years. The company was doing really well, but nowhere near well enough that we could survive if her dad called in his loan. And that's what he threatened to do after she died unless I played along. He'd demand to be repaid, plunging the company almost back to where it was before I got the bailout loan. I'd paid back the men who threatened my mother and sister, but thousands of people would be affected if the company went under so I had to keep going along with his bullshit."
With a sigh, Kade shook his head, and I could see what carrying this all these years had done to him.
"So, if a beautiful, supposedly pregnant daughter tragically killed in her prime was pathetic, that daughter's grieving husband, the politician's son-in-law, living in a veritable shrine to his late wife would be equally as pathetic. He'd trot the press over to the house Charlotte and I had shared, a house that I had to keep the same, and we'd walk through it, reminiscing. Then he and his wife would get teary eyed over a picture of Charlotte, and I'd have to try not to look like I was going to get sick at their theatrics. He won the election, and when re-election time came, he brought the press right back over and we played the same, sick little game all over again. Even so, it seemed like a small price to pay compared to all of the shit I'd had to put up with when Charlotte was alive, and it saved the company and thousands of jobs."
"No one was in the house when I asked you about her things. You snapped at me and said I'm not going to erase reminders of her from my life, Abby. I can't."
It suddenly clicked into place for me as I thought about his words, now from a different angle, given what he'd been telling me.
"You meant that quite literally, didn't you? You couldn't get rid of the reminders and erase her from your life because of her father threatening to call in the loan."
"I couldn't explain everything to you then, so it was easier to let you think that it was due to sentimental reasons. And you stopped asking, but the upshot was you didn't want to be in my house very often, which was fine with me. I was much happier at your place."
