The House He Never Built

Human nature is a fickle, terrifying thing.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I genuinely believed Wesley and I would spend the rest of our lives locked in a blood-drawn, scorched-earth war. I thought we would fight until one of us was entirely consumed.

But then death stepped into the room, and suddenly, the idea of tangling with him just felt profoundly exhausting.

On the day we buried Cassidy, I went back to her parents house to help box up her life. By the time I returned to the home Wesley and I shared, his first love had already moved in.

As it turned out, on the exact day Cassidys heart gave out, the ghost of Wesleys golden youth had flown back from Europe. A paparazzi photo of their tearful reunion at the arrivals terminal had been trending online all afternoon.

The truth is, Wesley was terrified of me.

He was terrified that the feral, unhinged version of his wife would rear her head and tear his precious girl to shreds. So, he had taken precautions. Two private security contractors in dark suits were stationed in our foyer, ready to tackle me to the hardwood the second I snapped.

When I walked through the door, Wesley and Gemma were sitting at the long mahogany dining table, eating dinner.

Gemma was just as I remembered. Effortlessly beautiful, bathed in this soft, untouchable grace. She offered me a slight nod and a tentative, apologetic smile.

"Megan. It's been a long time."

My gaze slid right past her face, landing heavily on Wesleys hand. He was using his own fork to place a piece of glazed salmon onto her plate.

He was so quiet. Quietly chewing, quietly serving her, quietly refusing to look in my direction.

I blinked, severing the visual tie, and took a step forward.

Instantly, the two men in suits shifted. They stepped directly in front of Gemma, forming a human barricade between her and me.

I paused, a dry chuckle catching in my throat. Ah. Theyre here for me.

I glanced around the room. The heavy crystal vases that usually sat on the console tables were gone. I realized then that if I marched into the kitchen, I probably wouldnt find a single chefs knife left in the blocks.

Wesley really had thought of everything.

I couldnt even blame him. Given my track record, grabbing a kitchen knife or smashing a vase over someones skull wasnt entirely out of the realm of possibility. If Cassidy were still alive, Gemma wouldn't have made it through the front door without losing half a limb.

But Cassidy was dead.

Just the thought of her name made my lungs seize, a thousand microscopic needles piercing my chest with every inhale.

I didn't have the energy to waste on them. I bypassed the human shield and headed straight for the stairs.

Wesley froze. I didn't have to look back to know his brow was furrowed, his jaw locked as he watched my retreating back. No matter how nonchalant he tried to act, I knew his muscles had been coiled wire since the second the front door opened.

He was waiting for the explosion. The screaming, the shattered glass, the hysteria. He had probably rehearsed a dozen cold, cutting monologues in his head, ready to put me in my place.

But he got nothing.

Not a single violent gesture. Not a single word.

And somehow, I knew that didn't bring him relief. Instead, it sat in his chest like a damp clump of cottonsuffocating, immovable, impossible to swallow.

I packed a single suitcase and carried it down the stairs.

Wesley and Gemma had migrated to the living room. As I approached, the security guards stiffened, adjusting their stances.

I stopped a few feet away.

"I'm going away for a few days," I said, my voice flat, scraped hollow. "You can use the time to have your lawyers draft the divorce papers. I'll sign them when I get back."

Wesley sat frozen on the leather sofa. He turned his head slowly, his dark eyes heavy, staring at me as if I were speaking a foreign language.

"What did you just say?"

I tipped my chin toward Gemma.

"A divorce. You moved her in. Isn't that the endgame here?"

Gemma scrambled to her feet, her hands waving in a frantic, delicate panic.

"Megan, please, you misunderstand! I'm only staying here temporarily. Just until my new apartment is renovated, I swear I'll move out."

Gemmas greatest weapon had always been her weaponized innocence.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, and opened my messages.

"Im coming back because I want to fight for myself this time, Megan. You can't force love. You know that better than anyone. I hope you can find it in your heart to step aside for Wesley and me."

I looked up, meeting Gemmas wide, trembling eyes.

"You sent me this two days ago."

All the color drained from Gemmas face. She swayed slightly on her feet, a masterclass in fragility.

"Wesley, I..."

Wesley stood up abruptly, positioning his body in front of hers, shielding her. He glared at me, his face an ice-cold mask of hostility.

"What exactly are you trying to prove?"

I pressed two fingers to my throbbing temples.

"Just that since were on the same page about the divorce, I'd appreciate it if you expedited the paperwork."

Gemma was Wesleys first love.

The first person you give your heart to when you're young and invincible is always the hardest ghost to shake.

We were all in high school back then. I remember walking past the abandoned annex behind the gymnasium and seeing Gemma backed against the brick wall, wrapped in Wesleys arms, up on her tiptoes, kissing him.

I saw them. And when Wesley opened his eyes, he saw me.

Wesley and I belonged to two completely different stratospheres. We never should have intersected.

But he had saved me once.

A group of girls had cornered me by the dumpsters, dragging me by my backpack, threatening to strip my clothes off. Wesley had appeared out of nowhere, his fists doing the talking, scattering them like roaches.

I had never been a lovable girl.

My mother died when I was young, and my father married a woman who made it her lifes mission to break me. She stole my lunch money, spoke to me exclusively in venom, and hit me when she thought no one was looking.

Growing up in a house thick with that kind of poison, I developed an armor made of pure defiance. I was cynical, gloomy, and mean.

I hated everyone equally. I pushed everyone away equally.

So even after Wesley saved me, I didn't offer him a shred of gratitude.

I remember him stepping forward, his designer sneaker coming down hard on my fingers as I tried to push myself off the asphalt. He smiled, a cold, empty thing.

"You don't have the teeth to bite, yet you still bare them at me?" he murmured. "Smile. Or I'll break your hand."

Wesley treated me the way someone might treat a rabid stray dog they found in an alley.

When he was in a good mood, hed pull me into his inner circle, a vicious kind of protection. When he was in a bad mood, we could pass each other in the hallway and hed look right through me like I was made of glass.

He was volatile, moody, and entirely heartless.

So, knowing all that... when I eventually cornered him into a position where his only option was to marry me, just imagine how much he must have hated me.

By the time I walked out of the house, my assistant was already idling in the driveway.

My skull felt like it was fracturing. I climbed into the backseat and immediately squeezed my eyes shut. The compounding debt of weeks without sleep was finally cashing in.

My assistant unscrewed a bottle of water and handed it to me along with two painkillers.

"Are you okay, Ms. Kimberley?"

"I'm fine. Just drive to the airport."

Cassidy was a beautiful lunatic.

A few years ago, she went backpacking and bought a dilapidated piece of land in the absolute middle of nowhere.

She used to rave about it. A standalone plot, surrounded by water on all four sides. Just one winding dirt road in and out. It's so quiet, Megan. It's the perfect place to disappear.

"Once I make enough money at the firm," shed say, her eyes practically glowing, "Im going to build a proper cabin out there. Stock the pond with fish. Plant a vegetable garden. Build a wooden gazebo, lay down a cobblestone path... and Megan, when it's done, you're going to live there with me. Okay?"

But corporate law never sleeps, and there was never enough money.

Six months ago, Cassidy was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.

She shaved her head before the chemo could take it, wearing a bright yellow beanie, sighing with this heartbreaking disappointment.

"If I had known, I would have just built the damn house first."

"Megan, I left the deed to you. Go look at it for me."

She used to tell me I carried the stench of the grave on me. That for a girl in her twenties, I seemed more dead than she did, and she was the one actively dying.

She made me promise to get out. To walk around and realize the world was so much bigger than the cold walls of Chicago.

"Once you get out there," she had whispered, her grip on my hand terrifyingly weak, "you'll realize Wesley is nothing but a speck of dust."

Cassidy was a lawyer to her bones; she tied up every loose end. She transferred the deed before she passed, and even hired a local guide to help me navigate the rural county.

I called the guide before boarding my flight. He promised to be at the arrivals gate.

When I emerged from the terminal, I spotted a man standing way in the back, holding up a piece of printer paper with MEGAN KIMBERLY scrawled on it in black marker.

I stared at him for a long moment before approaching.

"Hi. I'm Megan."

The man was mid-yawn. Hearing my voice, he snapped his jaw shut, his eyes watering from the suppressed reflex. He looked at me, then looked down at my large, hardshell suitcase.

"Right. Let's go."

It wasn't until we walked out to the parking garage that I understood his look of pity regarding my luggage.

His car was essentially a glorified golf cart with doors. If my suitcase had been a fraction of an inch wider, it wouldn't have fit.

The suspension was a myth. Every pothole felt like a spine adjustment. Within ten minutes, the nausea hit me like a tidal wave.

The man driving looked utterly exhausted, his face an emotionless mask. Without taking his eyes off the road, he blindly reached into the center console and tossed a brown paper bag of oranges onto my lap.

"Smell the peels if you're gonna puke. Eat one if that doesn't work. If you're still dying, I have some Ambien in the glovebox. Pop one and sleep it off."

What phenomenal hospitality.

I forced a tight, rigid smile. "I'm fine. Thank you."

The metal tin can rattled for thirty minutes, taking us from the sprawling highway out into the rural suburbs, and then onto a two-lane blacktop that wound its way into the mountains.

With every turn, the trees grew denser, the road narrower. Just as I was calculating the odds of this being an elaborate kidnapping, we finally pulled into a gravel lot.

A grinning man jogged up and yanked the passenger door open.

"Ms. Kimberley! So nice to meet you. I'm Toby, your actual guide."

I stared at him, then pointed a numb finger at the driver. "Then who is he?"

Toby blinked, looking confused. "Did he not say? That's my buddy. I had a family emergency this morning, so I dragged him out of bed to do the airport run."

Toby glared at the driver. "Dude, what is wrong with you? You couldn't have introduced yourself?"

The man turned his head. He looked murderous.

"I pulled an all-nighter, Toby. I went to bed at two in the afternoon, and you dragged me out of it at four. I've had exactly three hours of sleep. Push me, and I will actually run you over."

Toby shrank back, quickly grabbing my suitcase from the trunk.

"Okay, okay, moving on! Let's go, Ms. Kimberley, the man's got waking nightmares."

The sun was dipping below the tree line by the time Toby dropped me off at the only inn the town had to offer.

"You can crash here for the next few days, Ms. Kimberley. I'll swing by tomorrow morning and we can head up the mountain to see the property."

"Do you want me to help you check in?"

I shook my head and stepped out of the car.

Toby meant well, but he talked too much. On the ride over, he had given me an unsolicited oral history of the county's logging industry and a Yelp-style review of every diner within a twenty-mile radius. My migraine was now screaming.

I walked into the inn and let the receptionist show me to my room.

I couldn't do it.

The room was cramped, the air smelled heavily of mildew and damp carpet, and the bedsheets felt clammy to the touch.

Wesley used to mock me for it. He couldn't comprehend how someone who grew up eating government cheese and sleeping on a deflated air mattress could develop germaphobia.

No matter where I traveled, I brought my own silk bedsheets. No matter where I ate, I obsessively wiped down the table and requested boiling water to scald my silverware.

Was it OCD?

Cassidy said it wasn't.

"You just feel entirely unsafe in environments you can't control," she had told me. "And so what if you do? Why does he have to make you feel broken for wanting clean sheets?"

I walked out of the inn, standing on the edge of the cracked sidewalk, scrolling blindly through my phone, looking for another hotel that didn't exist.

Logically, I should have called Toby.

But I physically did not have the energy to form sentences anymore.

I stood there for a few minutes until my legs gave out. I crouched down. A few minutes after that, I tipped my suitcase onto its side and just sat on it.

A black SUV drove past me, its taillights flaring red.

A few seconds later, it threw it in reverse and backed up to where I was sitting. The passenger window rolled down.

"Ms. Kimberley?"

It was Toby.

And sitting in the driver's seat, now wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, was the man from the airport.

I squinted at them through the glare of the streetlamp.

And then, the world went completely black.

The year Wesleys father died, Wesley wasnt even eighteen. He wasn't legally or practically equipped to take over the family empire, so his uncle staged a boardroom coup and took everything.

His mother suffered a total psychological break and was locked away in a private psychiatric facility.

Wesley was essentially exiledshipped off to a university in London to keep him out of the way.

But he had one demand before he got on the plane: he was taking me with him.

He was completely isolated. Everyone in his social circle dropped him overnight like a bad habit. Even Gemmas wealthy parents forced her to break up with him immediately, severing all ties.

He lost everything. But he demanded me.

Why?

His uncle didn't care why. To his uncle, Megan was a nobody. A girl from the trailer park with a dead mom and a deadbeat dad. I had zero pedigree, zero influence. I was a stray ant he could step on if he needed to.

But I cared.

I asked Wesley why.

He told me he would pay for my tuition, my living expenses, give me the best resources, and guarantee me a high-paying corporate job the second I graduated.

"But why me?" I had pressed.

"Because you know how to starve," he said coldly. "You have no baggage, no family that cares about you, no attachments. And you're ruthless."

I was ruthless. My grades were flawless; even Wesley couldn't beat me academically. And I held grudges with a biblical vengeance. I was the reason my deadbeat dad got fired. I was the reason my stepmother ended up with a fractured skull, and why her precious golden-child son got expelled.

Wesley said I was a useful weapon.

And similarly, he was useful to me.

It was a transactional exchange. Nothing more.

For three years in London, we were each other's entire world.

He was plotting his return, building his own capital to crush his uncle. The rich are a fascinating breed; even in "exile," Wesley never truly knew what it was to be poor.

But to me, as long as I didn't have to worry about the electric bill or where my next meal was coming from, I was living in paradise.

I became his attack dog. Wherever he pointed, I bit. I never hesitated, never flinched.

Ironically, it was Wesley who frequently had to pull me back by the collar, telling me to stop being so recklessly cutthroat.

Then came the winter he got sick. A severe viral infection. His fever spiked dangerously high, leaving him delirious.

I had tucked the blankets around him and turned to leave the bedroom to get ice, but his hand suddenly shot out, gripping my wrist like a vice.

"Don't go," he whispered, his eyes unfocused.

I stood by the bed, staring at him for a long, long time.

Then I sat down on the edge of the mattress. I sat there from dusk until the sun came up.

When I woke up the next morning, slumped against the nightstand, Wesley was already gone.

We never spoke of it. We pretended the moment didn't exist.

But I knew the truth. I wanted him.

I was an anomaly. Bizarre, abrasive, totally isolated. I had no friends, no family, no lovers.

But I was still human.

And there isn't a human being on earth who doesn't secretly fear the dark, who doesn't crave the warmth of another heartbeat.

I was no different.

Wesley was the one who reached into the dark and pulled me out.

And because of that, I decided I was going to chain him to me. I was going to tie him to my life, permanently, no matter the cost.