Chapter 3 - The Anatomy of a Parasite
The quiet of Admiral Reddick’s private suite on the top floor of the hotel was an antidote to the poison in the ballroom. We didn't talk about contracts, shipyards, or defense budgets. We talked about Paul.
The Admiral showed me pictures of Paul’s two daughters—girls who would not exist on this earth if I hadn't crawled into the dark beneath forty tons of burning steel. We drank black coffee, shared quiet memories of ships we had both known, and for two hours, I didn't feel like a broken artifact. I felt like a naval officer.
When the Admiral’s driver dropped me off at the luxury high-rise condominium in the marina district at midnight, the reality of my domestic life came rushing back to meet me.
The penthouse was silent, but the lights were blazing.
I unlocked the door. Derek was sitting on the leather sofa in the living room, his tuxedo jacket tossed onto the floor, his bow tie undone and dangling around his neck. An empty tumbler of scotch sat on the glass coffee table, alongside a half-drained bottle of Macallan.
The moment the lock clicked shut, he snapped his head around. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and wild with fury.
“Do you have any idea what you did to me tonight?” he demanded, rising to his feet so violently that the glass table rattled.
I didn't answer. I set my keys in the silver dish by the entryway, bent down unhurriedly to unstrap my left heel, and slipped out of it. Walking in a single shoe is awkward, so I simply unfastened the quick-release pin on my prosthetic socket, lifted the titanium limb off my residual limb, and set it against the wall. I leaned against the credenza, balanced on my good leg, looking at him with cold detachment.
“I asked you a question, Mara!” he shouted, storming toward me. “You humiliated me in front of the entire eastern defense corridor! Julian Vance fired me in the lobby! In the damn lobby, in front of the coat check!”
“Julian didn't fire you because of me, Derek,” I said evenly. “He fired you because you showed a four-star admiral that you are a reckless, undisciplined liability.”
“Because of you!” Derek roared, jabbing a finger inches from my face. “You played the silent, wounded saint! You let Reddick corner me! You let him parade your tragic war story around the room like you were Joan of Arc!”
He paced back and forth across the hardwood, running his hands through his hair, his voice vibrating with frantic, narcissistic panic.
“Why the hell didn't you tell me you had a Navy Cross? Why didn't you tell me you knew Thomas Reddick? Do you know what I could have done with that? Do you know the doors that would have opened for Halston Marine if I had been able to introduce you properly? ‘*Meet my fiancée, the decorated war hero who saved Admiral Reddick’s son.*’ We could have owned that entire room! We could have had the Pacific fleet maintenance contract locked up by midnight!”
I stared at him, and for the first time in three years, I felt genuine disgust—not just at him, but at myself for ever mistaking this hollow shell for a partner.
“You wanted to use my trauma as a business card,” I said softly.
“It’s called leverage, Mara! It’s called playing the game!” he screamed, turning back to me, his chest heaving. “Everyone uses what they have! But no, you kept it in your little lockbox of secrets because you wanted to feel superior to me! You wanted to be the mysterious, brooding technical consultant while I worked twelve hours a day trying to build a life for us!”
“Build a life for *us*?” I let out a dry, humorless laugh. “Derek, look around this room. Who paid the deposit on this lease? I did. Who pays seventy percent of the rent because your ‘commission-based’ salary is constantly tied up in pending deals? I do. Who rewrites your technical briefs at two in the morning so you don't look completely incompetent during shipyard reviews? I do.”
Derek froze. His jaw worked, trying to find words to dispute facts he knew were indisputable.
“You’re an ungrateful, broken woman,” he hissed, his voice dropping into a vicious, deliberate register. “You think that old man kneeling for you changes what you are? You’re thirty-seven years old. You’re missing half a leg. You spend your weekends running stress calculations on hull plates because you have no real friends and no life outside of spreadsheets. Nobody else is going to look at you, Mara. Nobody else is going to put up with your scars, your phantom pains, and your damn metal leg in the corner of their bedroom!”
He stepped closer, trying to loom over me, trying to re-establish the small, creeping dominance he had practiced for years.
“You call Admiral Reddick right now,” Derek ordered, his voice shaking with desperate venom. “You call him, you tell him I was joking, you tell him we had a lovers' quarrel, and you tell him to call Julian Vance and fix this. If you don't, I swear to God, I am walking out that door and leaving you with nothing.”
I looked down at the engagement ring on my left hand. A two-carat diamond. He had made a grand show of proposing at a high-end steakhouse in front of twenty of his business associates. He had told everyone it was a flawless diamond. Later, when I took it to be insured, the jeweler told me it was a lab-grown stone with visible inclusions—valued at barely a fifth of what Derek claimed to have paid.
I had never mentioned it to him. I had loved him enough to spare his ego.
What a pathetic waste of grace.
Slowly, deliberately, I slid the ring off my finger.
I didn't throw it. I didn't shout. I simply held it between my thumb and forefinger, reached out, and dropped it into the half-empty glass of scotch on the coffee table. It hit the ice with a small, sharp *clink* and sank to the bottom.
“The lease is in my name, Derek,” I said quietly. “The furniture belongs to me. The security code changes at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Pack your suits, call an Uber, and get out of my home.”
Derek’s eyes flared with violent rage. “You’re kicking me out? After everything I sacrificed for you? You think you can just discard me?”
“You discarded yourself when you opened your mouth at that table,” I said, looking him dead in the eye with the steady, unblinking gaze I used to give fires in the lower decks. “You have thirty minutes before I call building security to have you removed for trespassing. And Derek?”
He stopped, his hand clutching his suitcase handle in the hallway.
“If you ever speak to me again, or if you ever come within fifty feet of my office, I won't call the police. I’ll call the Navy Inspector General and hand over the unredacted metallurgical audits you asked me to alter last month for your patrol boat proposal.”
Derek’s face drained of every drop of blood. He stumbled backward, grabbed his coat, and bolted out the door without looking back.
The heavy oak door clicked shut.
May you like
I hopped over to the sofa, sat down on the soft fabric, and closed my eyes. The apartment was completely, beautifully silent. For the first time in ten years, the phantom pain in my missing leg was gone.
***
