Entangled To The CEO

Jake’s [POV]

I stared down at Noah, watching his eyelids flutter slightly in sleep. He had been a handful all day, mostly because he wanted to spend time with Kristen and I had to keep making excuses.

“I want to make cookies with Krissy,” he had insisted.

“You made cookies with Grandma yesterday,” I had pointed out, feeling a headache coming on.

“Krissy makes them different,” Noah persisted. “They taste better.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Yes, they do.”

“No, they don’t,” I said, aware that I was arguing with a four-year-old that I couldn’t possibly win. I had heard Noah keep this up for a steady fifteen minutes before, and I usually burned out after two minutes.

“Yes, they do.”

I sighed tiredly and held my head for a moment. “Krissy is busy, kid,” I said. “She’s not going to be around for a while.”

At which point Noah had thrown a full-blown temper tantrum. I had tried everything to calm him down, but nothing worked. In the end, he had simply tired himself out. Then he huffed into his room and stayed there until he had fallen asleep. Which is exactly how I’d found him when I’d walked in two minutes ago.

I sighed and kissed his forehead, wondering how on earth I was going to explain Kristen’s continuing absence. I was having a hard enough time explaining it to myself.

Right after Kristen had left, I stormed off to my room, leaving Noah with Isabelle. When I’d finally emerged, Isabelle had insisted on talking to me, but I hadn’t been in the mood.

Now I wished I had. Now that my mind had had time to process the news, I had questions. I knew what Kristen had told me about her parents and the affair her father had continued with her mother for decades, but I knew very little else.

I remembered her mentioning a half-sister to me, but it hadn’t even crossed my mind that it might be Daphne. Those kinds of coincidences didn’t happen in real life. Except it wasn’t a coincidence at all… Kristen had planned this somehow. I didn’t know her purpose, but now I wanted to.

I couldn’t believe I had been so blind. She looked so much like Daphne that now I felt stupid for not having seen it sooner. I looked back on the past few months and thought about everything Kristen and I had shared. I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t told me. It was a pretty big secret to keep, and she hadn’t even given me a clue.

I walked out of Noah’s room and headed to mine. I was sitting on the edge of my bed as I dialed Isabelle’s number and waited for her to answer.

“Jake?” she answered almost immediately.

“Tell me what happened,” I said bluntly.

“Jake… I think perhaps you should talk to Kristen.”© 2024 Nôv/el/Dram/a.Org.

“She’d probably just lie to me.”

Isabelle sighed. “You seem to care about her very much.”

“Not anymore.”

“That sounds like a lie you’re telling yourself at the moment.”

“Isabelle,” I said impatiently. “Please, just tell me what happened… Did Daphne even know about Kristen?”

“She did,” Isabelle told me. “They had a relationship for a short while.”

“They did?” I said, in disbelief.

“After we found out that Ted had another child and…a mistress…it took a while to process that, but once we did, Daphne was curious. So when Kristen contacted her”

“Kristen contacted her?”

“Yes,” Isabelle replied. “She wanted to meet.”

“Daphne agreed?”

“She didn’t at first, but I think her curiosity won out,” Isabelle said. “Their first meeting was rocky. Daphne came home upset and angry, but she wasn’t angry with Kristen just the situation and her father.”

“Why did Kristen want to meet Daphne?”

“That is a question you’ll have to ask Kristen, Jake,” Isabelle said gently. “I can’t answer that for you. I can tell you that Daphne liked Kristen very much and for a while there, she felt she had a sister.”

“But something changed,” I pointed out. “Because she never mentioned Kristen to me-ever.”

“No…” Isabelle sighed. “Discovering her father’s betrayal hurt her far more than it hurt me. She changed slightly with time, and she became…harder somehow. Her desire to join the military was a split-second decision that she made on a whim. I think for her it was a form of escapism. She just wanted to leave behind that part of her life and start anew somewhere else.”

I gulped back my hurt as I realized I had never asked her why she had enlisted, and she had never volunteered the story. Was it possible that my whole marriage had been a lie, too? If Daphne had not told me this huge chunk of her life, what else had she kept from me? Was I just another form of escapism? Was she just trying to replace the family she had lost with me?

“She loved you, Jake,” Isabelle said, as though she knew what I was thinking. “She loved you so much.”

“Just not enough to tell me the truth about her life.”

“You knew she had nothing more to do with her father.”

“But not that he had another woman and child secreted away somewhere… Why wouldn’t she tell me that?” I demanded.

“Because she wanted to put that behind her. She didn’t want to have to talk about it all the time,” Isabelle said. “That’s not an excuse, and I happen to believe it was the wrong decision. But she decided to make it, and I had no choice but to go along with it. I was just happy she had found someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.”

“Only it turned out the rest of her life wasn’t going to be very long,” I snapped unnecessarily.

Isabelle fell silent, and I felt terrible instantly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was uncalled for.”

“You’re hurting right now,” she said gently. “I understand.”

“I wish I could say the same,” I said. “I’m just so…confused right now.”

“Talk to Kristen, Jake,” Isabelle advised me. “She’s the only one that can give you the closure you need.”

“She’s your husband’s love child,” I said. “How is it that you’re not pissed at her, too?”

Isabelle paused for a moment. “Because she was innocent in all this. It’s not fair to blame her for what her parents did. That was on them, not her. When she found out, she made it a point to track me down and tell me the truth.”

“She told you?” I asked incredulously.

“She did,” Isabelle said. “And, I appreciated that more than I can say. Because she told me the truth, I was finally able to end my marriage without ever looking back. In a way, she freed me. I met her once more after that with Daphne, and she was just a sad, lonely kid who had tried to do the right thing. She had a mother who had neglected her, a father who didn’t care about her, and no one else in her life. I felt her for…and I still do.”

I shook my head. “I just can’t get over what she did.”

“Ask her why she did it,” Isabelle suggested. “Because whether or not you get back together, you’ll want to know.”

“And you don’t care that I was with Daphne’s sister?”

“I want you to be happy,” Isabelle said. “I want Noah to be happy. And before you found out about all this, I saw that you and Noah were both in a good place. I had to believe that had something to do with Kristen.”

After I hung up with Isabelle, I scrolled down to Kristen’s name. With my finger poised over the call button, I wasn’t sure if I should hit it or not. In the end, my need for closure won out, and I waited for her to pick up.

“Jake?” Kristen’s voice sounded breathless.

“I have questions for you,” I managed to say.

“I’m so, so sorry”

“I don’t want to hear your apologies,” I said harshly. “I just called because I want to know why you did what you did and what happened between you and Daphne.”

She paused for a moment, and I could hear her breathing slowly. “Okay; ask me anything.”

“Why weren’t you at her funeral?”

“I didn’t find out she had died until after she’d been buried,” Kristen replied.

“Because you’d stopped talking to her at this point?”

“Well, it was more like she stopped talking to me.”

“Why?”

“Our relationship was fragile, to begin with,” Kristen explained softly. “I was her father’s illegitimate child. More importantly, I was the direct result of the affair he had had with my mother. After Isabelle divorced him, he moved in with my mother and me. It caused problems between Daphne and me. She started lashing out at me because she couldn’t lash out at her father.

“And then it got worse, and I realized how unhappy and dissatisfied she was. When she told me she was thinking about enlisting, I got upset. I told her she was just running away from her problems, instead of facing them. I told her she needed to stand up to Ted so that she could move on. Enlisting was just the coward’s way out. It wasn’t my finest moment, and I regret a lot of what I said to her that day… But it was the final straw for her, I suppose.

“She said things to me and then stormed off. After that, I didn’t hear from her again…until the letter.”

“The letter?” I repeated. “What letter?”

“I received a letter from Daphne some time back,” Kristen replied. “It was only when I called the number she had left that I found out she had died. She had sent the letter from Afghanistan, you see, and it had been delayed in reaching me. By the time I got it, she had already been buried a month.”

“What did the letter say?” I asked with bated breath.

“I… It’s personal”

Immediately, my temper flared up, and I bit back. “Personal?” I said. “I think we’re past that point now, don’t you, Kristen?”

“That’s not what I meant, Jake.”

“You know what?” I said. “I don’t care. I don’t want to see you ever again; do you hear me?”

“Jake”

“I’m giving you a two-month severance package,” I interrupted. “So you don’t have to show up to work on Monday.”

“What?” she gasped. “You’re firing me?”

“Just take the severance package.”

“You can’t buy me off,” she said as her voice turned into a fighting tone. “You can’t just ignore the months we spent together.”

“I’ll certainly try.”

“Jake, you can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?” I demanded.

“Throwing tantrums when things don’t go your way.”

“Excuse me?” I said, livid at her tone and self-righteousness. “But I believe you’re the one in the wrong here. So any tantrums I might throw are completely justified.”

“I know what I did was wrong”

“You don’t,” I cut in. “Now I suggest you take the package and get out of my life. And if you want to sue me for wrongful termination, then go ahead.”

With that, I hung up and threw my phone across the bed. When I heard it ring again a second later, I knew it was Kristen, but I was done talking. She had made a choice, and now I had made my decision.