Just Pretending: Chapter 8

The setting sun caressed Harleigh with its golden glow. She stared at nothing, lost in thought. I wasn’t her father when it came to wives. I was not interested in the flavor of the month, I had romantic ideals. I wanted to get married once and be with that woman forever. But it looked like I was going to be saddled with a starter wife. A pretty one. Everyone would think I had turned into the old man, starting with a trophy wife.

“Why are you sitting there in the dark?” I picked my way over furniture still scattered about. “The whole house was dark when I pulled up.”

“I guess I didn’t notice,” she said as she crossed the room to the switch. She flicked it back and forth a few times. Nothing changed.

“Maybe Tina threw a breaker when she was doing all of this.” Harleigh waved at the mess.

Harleigh crossed through the kitchen to the butler’s pantry, where the entry to the cellar was located. The circuit breaker box was on the wall just inside the cellar door.

A moment later she called my name. There was a hint of panic in her tone. “It’s pitch black back here. I can’t see a thing. Do you have a flashlight?”

I fished my phone from my pocket and turned on the flashlight.

“Don’t you?” I asked as I pointed the light at her.

She cringed as the beam of light hit her in the face.

“I do, but I left the phone over there.” She waved, indicating back in the kitchen. “Point that thing over here, and not in my eyes please.”

I shined the light in the direction of the cellar. She opened the door, and I followed, pointing the light in front of her. With the practice of someone who had flipped the circuit breakers for this old house before, Harleigh pushed over all four breakers for the kitchen and service areas at once.

“Anything?”

I looked over my shoulder. “Still dark,” I reported.

She flipped the switches back and forth one more time.

“Still dark. Hold on,” I said as I stepped away. Through the butler pantry was the formal dining room, and from there I should have been able to see into another room, and the entry hall at the very least. Everything was shrouded in black. There was no light anywhere.

“Devin,” she had a plea in her tone.

“I’m back. The entire house is out.” I held out my hand to her to help her in the dark.

“There should be some candles in the butler’s pantry, and on the dining room table,” she said.

Having the flashlight helped in our search. We found candles and candle holders.

While she lit candles in the kitchen, I went into the dining room and grabbed one of the formal candelabras from the long table. Once all of the candles were lit, we no longer needed the flashlight to illuminate the room.

“I have no idea how long the power’s been out,” she confessed. “When I got home, I was so overwhelmed by everything. Oh God”— Harleigh ran her hands over her face with a groan— “Tina ransacked everything. The Picasso is gone. I think there might be some other pieces missing. I didn’t think to look for them.”

“Well, we can’t do anything about it tonight in the dark. Are you sure it was Tina, and not a home invasion?” I cocked my head to the side.

“Yeah, her bedroom and bathroom looked like they were hit by a tornado. My room was left untouched.”

She stopped talking and stared at the refrigerator doors.

“I guess we should cook something before everything goes bad. I had some ice cream in there. I wonder if it’s still frozen?”

“The stove is gas, if we can get it to light, I see no reason why we can’t,” I said. Not that I was opposed to ice cream for dinner.

She opened the fridge and began calling out our different options. “Hannah had been cooking and leaving things for me to reheat. I don’t know when she was doing it, or if she was cooking at home and sneaking in. I haven’t seen her for days, but there’s been food.”

She placed a selection of vegetables and a large butcher paper-wrapped package on the counter.

“I think this is meat,” she said as she unwrapped the paper.

I pulled down a cast iron skillet from the hooks over the stove and made sure I could get the range to light with the electric pilot out. It took some finagling, but I got it fired up.

“Steaks!” Harleigh declared as if she had won a prize.

She found a wide flat dish to place the steaks in and began rooting through the pantry. She looked like an illustration from a children’s book with her hair back in a loose braid and holding a candle up for light.

“I’m going to call the power company, see if I can find out what’s going on,” I called out as I stepped into the stygian darkness of the hallway.

I started to lean against the wainscoting before remembering it was covered in sticky paint. I jerked to a fully upright position before I ruined my clothes. I looked up the number for the power company and hit the dial. The automated voice told me there were no outages in the area. I hit zero to speak to a customer representative. After long minutes of being on hold, I finally spoke with a human.

“It looks like we do have a small localized outage in the area,” the customer service voice said after I told them what was going on. “Apparently a truck hit a pole.”

“How soon before it gets fixed,” I demanded.

“I appreciate your frustration, but I don’t have that information at this time.”

I displayed great restraint and did not throw the phone. I stumbled over stuff left on the floor I didn’t see in the darkness as I returned to the kitchen.

“We’re out of luck, no power until they can get a pole fixed,” I said as I pushed back into the kitchen. I tried to keep my tone light, I didn’t want to upset Harleigh anymore today.

“Good, you’re back. Why don’t you go find a decent wine? The steak is almost done. I hope you like it medium-rare.”

“The rarer the better,” I said.

I sat next to her. Candles being our only source of light. The pan-seared steak and sauteed vegetables cooked to near perfection.

“I’m impressed with your skills. All this time I thought you would starve without Hannah.” I reached out with a finger and touched her hand as she held her wine glass.

“I’ve been cooking for myself for over a year now. I’m quite capable of many things.” She emptied her glass and refilled it. She tipped the bottle and refilled mine, even though my glass wasn’t empty.

Candlelight suited her. It played with her softness, making her look even more vulnerable than she had earlier in the day. It touched her features in ways I shouldn’t be thinking of. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Maybe readings of the will did things to my libido, the way the funeral affected Tina.

Now and then, the light would catch her features just so, and I could swear I was looking at her mother. Britney had been the last one of the old man’s wives I liked. I may have even had a crush on her. In the end, she had made a mess of her life. But when I looked at Harleigh I didn’t see her mother, I typically saw all of Harleigh’s flaws.

“We need to talk about today,” I said with a heavy breath. Flawed or not, I had to marry her if I wanted what was rightfully mine.

Harleigh leaned back in her chair and covered her face with her hands. “Do we have to?”

“I’m afraid so. The board already has instructions regarding liquidating the company if we aren’t married at the start of the next fiscal quarter.”

“What does that even mean?”

I let out a heavy breath. I didn’t want to have to spell out every business term for her, but if I needed to break out the crayons and explain it to her like she was in kindergarten I would.

“Businesses run their finances on a quarterly system, every three months.”

“I know what a fiscal quarter is Devin. I’m stressed, I’m overwhelmed, I’m not dumb.”

“It means we have from now until the beginning of the next quarter to get married. And if we aren’t married, the lawyers, the accountants, and the board of directors start shutting it all down and selling it all off,” I explained.

Harleigh sat up and drained her glass. “I had dreams of falling in love and getting married, but did Daddy ask me what those were? I thought for a second there, just before he died, that he recognized me as his daughter, and not some burden that needed a DNA test to prove I was worth caring for. He was almost human there at the end. Seemed to care.”

A tear ran down her cheek. I wiped it away with a brush of my thumb. She shivered.

“How much time does that give us?”

“Just over two weeks. We have to figure it out and make a decision. I have investments, I can easily get a position in another company. I don’t want you to worry if you decide you don’t want to go through with it.” Hopefully, she bought my nonchalance act. If we weren’t married within fourteen days, I would have to watch my life’s work dismantled and sold off.

“You can live off your mother’s inheritance. I’m sure you could finish school and do whatever you wanted.”

Harleigh poured out the rest of the wine and began to gulp down the contents of her glass.

“How long do we have to be married to each other?” she asked.

“Terms of the will are one year and one day.”

“That’s it? Three hundred and sixty-six days? We can fake being married for a year, can’t we? And by fake it, I mean we live in this house, and we are not seen dating other people.”

I reached out to take the wine from her. She wobbled in her chair.

“I think you’ve had way too much to drink tonight.”

I stood and put my hands under her arms to help her up. She wrapped her arms around my neck and held on to me. Any other time I would have been repulsed by the embrace. The one time my body responded to hers, she was drunk. Not that I would have let anything happen anyway.

She tasted like wine when she pressed her mouth to mine. “We could pretend to be married, pretend to have sex. But I won’t sleep with you for real until we’re married. I’m not like my mother. I’m not. You won’t ever need a paternity test to trust me. I’m legitimate. My babies will be legitimate, cause I won’t sleep with you until we’re married.”

I managed to get her safely to one of the couches. I wasn’t going to attempt the stairs in her condition. I found a blanket to cover her and put out all the candles. Her drunken confession caught me off guard. In the dark, I had to wonder, had I understood what she had told me?