Chapter 9
“Henri, have you talked to mom today?” Scott had a worried look on his face that Henri didn’t like the looks of. He waited for more, but Scott didn’t say anything else except that he thought he should go talk to Elna.
“What’s it about?”
“The business and Mary.” Scott already knew, but he wasn’t going to be the one that shattered his brother’s smile that he hadn’t seen before. He had liked Mary as well, the whole family did, but it seemed like she had been here for a reason that didn’t include seeing Henri. Scott wished that what he had just heard wasn’t true.
“Come on, just tell me.”
“I can’t. Mom is in the office. I think you should go talk to her.”
Henri agreed to, but he didn’t like the whole cloak and dagger routine. When he got into the office on the bottom floor, Elna looked up at her son and smiled slowly. “Henri. I was looking for you earlier. We need to talk.”
“Yeah, that is what Scott said. What is going on?”
She tossed a paper down on her desk as he sat down. “This is what is going on.”
On the front page was a picture of the ranch during the wedding, as well as a smaller picture of Mary and him walking back from the late night swim that night at the pond. As he sat down in the seat, he read all of the lies and conjunctions that had been printed. There was a picture inside that he recognized of him that Mary had taken. It was then that it sank in that she had sold the picture to the newspaper.
“Did you know about this? Did you know that she worked for the Herald?”
He shook his head that he did. “She is a freelance photographer mom. I knew that she did some work for the newspaper.”
“Did you know that she was going to do that story?”
Henri couldn’t speak. Again he just shook his head. Elna’s face changed as his did. It sunk in that her son had been duped and it was only when she saw the pain in his eyes that she realized how much her son had cared about Mary.
“How long did you know her? You never did tell me where the two of you met.”
“We met on the plane coming back home. It’s crazy that it was only a week ago. And then this…” Henri was a little heartbroken and it felt devastating, even as he realized that it had only been a few days since they had met. Even as he held the paper in his hand and read the words, it didn’t feel real to him. None of it did and Henri took that as his first clue that it hadn’t been real at all. Some of their conversation was in the lines of the magazine and it had all been screwed around and turned into something bad. The headline was that he was back in the country for a wife. His mother’s deathbed request was in there and then the ‘forced marriage’ of his sister to her current husband.
He leaned back further in the seat. “Has Gemma seen this?”
She shook her head and sat down then. “No and I don’t want her to, though I know she will figure it out. You can’t keep anything from her.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking to have said some of those things. You know that it wasn’t said like that.”
Elna smiled and waved him off. “Oh I know. It wouldn’t be the first time that we have been dragged through the mud. She really seemed like a sweet girl.” She was trying to soften the blow, but she knew that he cared about her. Henri was hardly ever home and he certainly had never brought a girl with him. “You know, it could all be a mistake. You should talk to her.”
Henri didn’t want to hear that. That was the last thing that he wanted to do and his head was answering before he could get a word out. “I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“I know you are hurt, but sometimes things are not as they seem.” Elna wanted more than anything to be right and she hoped that she was.
***
Henri didn’t call her and when he saw her number coming up on his phone, he just turned it off all together. It was his luck. Henri never had any luck with women and it seemed like the luck was going to continue as it had before. After several days of ignoring her calls, she stopped making them and Henri was even more upset than before. It felt like nothing he did was going to make it any better and he thought of what his mother had said. He should talk to her, get her side of the story, but his ego held him up.
Instead he planned his trip back to Venezuela. It was his plan all along and Henri started to feel better with a direction in mind. There was something settling with the idea that he had a plan, even if he wanted to do something else instead.
When his phone rang and it was her number that showed up, there was a temptation to answer. He sat there going back and forth about it for so long that the phone stopped ringing. After a few moments of looking at it, wanting it to call her, Henri instead stuck the phone back in his pocket and went into the ranch house. He had to tell his family that he was going back and it was not a conversation that he really wanted to have. Goodbyes in the Callahans were always hard and he dreaded it more than leaving Mar behind.
“Hey, glad to see you back. I was wondering where you went off to. I was hoping you would help me with some last minute touches on the far fence line on the west side of the property.”
Henri nodded that he would. It sounded better than having to deal with the goodbyes and the questions. Gemma had found out about the magazine and she had shrugged it off, claiming that she knew it wasn’t Mary that had done it. He felt a little perturbed that she was surer about it than he was. Henri was the one that had talked to her for hours, fallen in love with her and he had not an ounce of the assurance that Gemma had. She had only talked to her a few minutes. It made Henri wondered if everything he thought was true was wrong.