The Blackmail Bride

Chapter 57 Part 2

Tired author signing in, very tired author signing out. May no one ever find out the backstory for TBB.

Decided

In our world, divorce was frowned upon. A taboo that was carried to the present by the silver spoon families that survived through centuries, while maintaining the prestige of their names.

If you could not keep your family together, the basic unit of society, what assurance could be drawn that you could navigate and take hold of a complex organization that was your empire. It was a curiously extreme ideology that was not questioned.

But here was my mother.

My mother who was from these silver spoons. A person who came from the tight knit community of the upper five percent. She who grew up with the rigid, if not peculiar societal standards of the elite...

was openly suggesting divorce to her husband, who despite of his immense family wealth, was of rather bourgeois origins.

"What do you think, Isla? I wanted to have a sincere talk with daughter first before I pushed through with my plans."

The small kind smile that brightened my mother's blue eyes... was something I had not seen in a very long time.

It was easy to forget that my mother was an incredibly beautiful woman not even in her forties. And I stared at her as she looked at me. Two sets of blue eyes staring at the other from across the room.

What do you say to that?

My brain whirred in overtime but came up blank.

The silence was broken by my father's shaking voice, "What are you saying?"

My mother's small smile faded while she continued to look at me.

"What are you saying, Amelia?!" My father shouted. The three waiting maids behind him skittishly looked away.

"What the hell are you talking about?!"

Still no response. He turned to his mother, my grandmother. And for her part, Maria Porter picked up her teacup and took a sip, not even looking at her own son.

My heartrate picked up as I watched in abject horror as my father started to lose it. His face distorted. His brown eyes turned dark as his pupils dilated...

George Richard Porter looked at his mother then at his wife. And it was as if I was watching from the outside, looking in as a man's full existence crumbled before him. Until my father looked at me with those brown eyes.

"Isla," my father's face that earlier held irritation for me, held a look of terror. "Tell your mother she cannot do this to me."

It was as if my throat locked up. And even from across the table, the look he was giving me scared me.

"Isla!" a glass crashed to the floor.

"Don't talk to my child that way," my mother had already stood up and was stoically staring at my father.

This was the family I grew up in. For a long time, I had lived in a façade. The padded walls had crashed around me the day I found out about my father's affair.

The tears had welled up in my eyes even before I could help it. But I couldn't not watch the scene unfold in front of me.

My father clutched a handful of his blonde hair, messing up the neat strands. With the same hand, he tried to reach out to my mother.

"Amelia—"

My mother stood back, avoiding his touch.

I would remember for a very long time, the devastation on my father's ashen face.