The Road to Revenge
1132 Words
Roberta's POV
He leaned forward in his chair and looked at me.
"If you want to make them pay for what they did, I'd like to help." he said.
I looked at him.
"I mean it." His voice was quiet but certain.
"I didn't ask—"
"I know." He cut me off. Not harsh. Just firm. "But I'm offering anyway. Let me help you."
I looked at him. The firelight made shadows under his eyes. Made his jaw look sharper.
"How exactly are you going to help me?"
"For starters, come work for me." He said it simply like it was already decided, and he was just informing me. "I run Temples Group. Architecture and development. "I'll give you a position. An apartment and a car, both yours. You start as soon as you're ready."
I opened my mouth.
"Before you say no—" he said.
"I wasn't going to say no."
He stopped.
"I was going to say—" I pressed my hands together. "Nobody knows me. Eight years of marriage and nobody knows my face or my name. I'm not even a rumour. I'm nothing."
"That's exactly the point." He leaned forward slightly. "Right now, your invisibility is a problem. But it can become a weapon. The moment you step into the light — with the right position, the right platform, the right visibility — everything changes. People will see who you are. And then they'll start asking why no one saw you before. And that question alone starts unravelling everything Jace built."
I sat with that.
He was right. I knew he was right.
"Do you have proof?" he said. "Of anything. The abuse. The surgery. Any of it."
"Yes." I said it without hesitation. "About a year ago, I decided I was done. I started keeping records. Photos of the bruises. Dates. One time he—" I stopped. Reset. "I have photographs. Hard copies at the house. And some things on Ziva's iPad."
Brett's expression didn't change, but something in it tightened.
"The iPad I can't find," I said. "But the ones at the house — they're in a box in my room. He never went in there. He didn't care what I did in that room."
"Then we go get them," he said. "Tomorrow morning. I'll take you."
"I need to divorce him, too."
"Yes," Brett said. "You do."
The word divorce moved through me and dragged something with it.
I hadn't let myself think about the wedding in a long time. I kept it in a box in my mind with a lid on it — the same way I kept other things that were too heavy to carry every day but too important to throw away.
We had signed the papers in a registrar's office, not a church, not anywhere that could be photographed. Jace had wanted to keep it small. Intimate, he'd said.
Irene had stood to one side in a pink coat with her arms folded and her face arranged into the specific expression she reserved for situations she had agreed to tolerate but wanted everyone to know she was tolerating. She had looked at me when the registrar asked if anyone had objections — and the look she gave me was its own kind of objection, delivered in silence.
Afterwards, in the car, she had spoken to Jace like I wasn't there.
Keep it private. No announcements. No photographs. She has no background worth associating publicly with the Riggs name. If people ask, she prefers her privacy.
She prefers her privacy.
Eight years I had been those words. Three of them, used like a lid to keep me in a box.
A tear moved down my face before I realised it was coming.
Then a hand — warm, unhurried — reached across and caught it. Brett's thumb against my cheek. One brief, careful motion.
He pulled his hand back.
"Sorry," he said quietly.
"Don't be." I blinked. "I was just — remembering."
"You don't have to explain it."
"I know." I looked at him. "She never wanted him to marry me. Irene. His mother. I wasn't good enough. No family. No name." I paused. "She made him agree to keep the marriage secret as a condition of accepting it at all. I thought at the time that she would come around. That eventually she'd accept me." I let out a breath. "She was hiding Nolan from me the whole time. That's why I could never visit. That's why the house was always off limits."
Brett said nothing. He just listened, which was its own kind of gift — the listening that doesn't try to fix or redirect.
"I gave him eight years," I said. "I gave him everything. And he kept me like something in a drawer."
"He's going to wish he'd treated you differently," Brett said.
Not a comfort. A statement of fact.
"I have to ask you something about this road you want to go down." His voice shifted slightly. More serious.
"Ask."
"Revenge—" He stopped. Chose his words. "Real revenge, the kind that actually lands, it costs something. It takes time. There will be moments where you have to be patient when everything in you wants to move. There will be moments where you have to be in the same room as people who make you want to burn everything down. You'll have to be strategic when you're grieving. You'll have to be sharp when you're exhausted." He looked at me steadily. "And there's always a risk that in going after them, you expose yourself to things that hurt you further. Legal things. Personal things." He paused. "I'm not trying to talk you out of it. I just want you to go in with your eyes open."
I held his gaze.
"My daughter," I said, "was seven years old. She saved a boy she barely knew because someone convinced her it was the right thing to do. She asked me before she went under, if she would feel it." My voice was very steady. "She asked if her daddy would be proud of her." I let that sit for a second. "She never got the answer. She never got anything from any of them except resentment and eventually death."
Brett held my eyes.
"Roberta, revenge has a cost. It will consume you if you let it. You'll lose sleep. You'll lose friends. You'll lose parts of yourself." He paused. "Are you sure you want to go down this road?"
I didn't hesitate.
"Yes." I said. "I've already lost everything."
Brett didn't move.
"I'm going down that road," I said. "There's no version of my life where I don't."
A long moment passed.
"Alright," he said. "Then I'm going all the way with you."
- Writer
