Heaven [Book 3]

[7.] I Wanted To Be Perfect For Her But It Wasn't Perfect For Me

MY FATHER LIKED people who agreed with him.

Perhaps that is why I never, and probably would never, get alone with him as well as Ludmila. She adored him and would never not see eye-to-eye with him. She couldn't bear not sharing the same views as him. The only reason that ever changed was because of me.

The one thing Ludmila seemed to care about more than our father's opinion was my happiness. She told me that I would always come first. He was not there for her when she had nightmares, he was not the one who told her stories to calm her rapidly beating heart and he was not the shoulder she cried on.

It was another one of those moments that made me realise how thankful I was that Ludmila was in my life. Before these last few years, I never acknowledged the impact we had on each other's lives. Yes, Francesca was there through it all but in the end, Ludmila and I were in our room together. We were whispering secrets in the dark using only a torch, we were helping each other sneak into the kitchen to get more dessert and we were together when everything else seemed to go wrong.

I could never have gotten so far in life it were not for her.

And when we told Anthony all of this, the look he gave us was filled with so much frost that it seemed as if he were not our father in that moment.

Because that was another thing he abhorred. Being humiliated. To him, when one is humiliated, your power begins to slip through your fingers, it begins to unravel like thread. When you are humiliated you can no longer be in control because nobody can look up to you anymore.

That same applies when you are wrong. If you were incorrect then it makes you incapable of leadership. How can anybody trust somebody who makes the wrong decisions? Somebody who doesn't know what's best for the business. One mistake can cost you everything. And this happened when Mr Lopez left the company for dead.

It felt as if Anthony would never truly be able to love me the way he did when he could lift me up onto his shoulders. I was now his son who only disagreed with him, humiliated him and proved him wrong. After all, to him, it was my fault that the Lopez family abandoned the company. I was the one who did not suitably woo Gery. And because our side of the deal was not kept, they did not keep theirs.