Marrying Her Older Billionaire

Chapter 12

By the time Angie got home, she was so soaked that she could barely breathe. She started to think about all of the things that she had enjoyed in this home. Would it ever be the same way for her? Would it ever be the same thing that it had once been? She thought about it and it was probably not going to be that way ever again. She had changed things. Together with Richard she had made it so that this happy home had just got a little bit sadder.

She went in and entered her room. She took off her clothes, dried herself and put on some dry clothes. She went to her father’s room and knocked. There was no response. She knocked again but there was still no response. She pressed her ear to the door and heard someone moving inside. She knew, in that moment, that her father was indeed in the room, and that he was sad. She heard sniffling, she had a feeling that her father was crying.

She entered the room without knocking. It hadn’t been locked. Her father had clearly not expected her to come home that night.

“Dad,” said Angie, rushing in and hugging him. He was not crying. Rather, he was stony faced. The sound that she had misinterpreted as sniffling had actually been him pouring whiskey into a glass. He sighed and hugged her back. He then went to his bed and sat on it, taking a sip from his whiskey glass.

Angie went and sat on the edge of the bed. They did not talk for a very long time. It was like they did not know what to say. It was like they had forgotten how to talk to one another. She did not think that she could deal with this moment right now. She had come home fearing this would happen and when it had not happened she had been completely and utterly relieved. Now, however, she couldn’t help but feel that what was happening was the inevitable. It was what she had feared for so long. It was what she had wanted to avoid for so long. And now it was happening and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

She decided to be the one to talk. She decided to be the one to volunteer information to her dad. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted him to feel like she was the one that was taking the initiative right now.

“I’m not going through with it,” said Angie. “I’m not going to marry Richard. I’m going to… just… I mean I didn’t think that…”

Her dad remained non responsive. Angie was starting to get desperate. She had wanted him to be happy, but this news had not really done anything for him. He just took yet another pensive sip from his whiskey glass.

“Dad?” asked Angie. “I’m not marrying Richard. I’m not going to do it. Can you please talk to me?”

“Why are you not marrying him?” he asked her.

“Because you don’t want me to,” said Angie. She was very surprised by the question. She didn’t think that he would have to ask her that. After all, wasn’t it obvious to him that the thing that mattered to her more than anything else was his happiness? Didn’t he realize that all she wanted for him was for him to be happy? Didn’t he realize that the only thing she wanted him to feel was joy, and that she was ready to sacrifice anything, no, everything for him to feel that way?

“Why are you doing that?” asked Matthew. “Just…” he sighed and pressed the glass of whiskey to his forehead. He looked completely and utterly dejected. Angie wondered if Richard had looked the same way as she had walked away from him. She pushed the thought from her head. There was no use thinking about stuff like that. There was no use because her father’s happiness had to take precedent over absolutely everything else. How could she possibly be happy if her father was unhappy? How could she possibly feel anything except for misery when that was what her father was facing?

She looked at her dad and held his hand. “What’s wrong, dad?”

“I just feel like you are doing something that you are not supposed to do,” said Matthew.

Angie did not know what to think. Not all that long ago, he had been the one that had been shouting at her and Richard and he had been the one that had fired Richard and removed him as the manager of the law firm simply because he had discovered that he and his daughter had been in a relationship with each other.

“Do you really love him?” asked Matthew.

“I… I do…” said Angie. “But that doesn’t matter. I just want you to be happy, Dad. I want you to be able to enjoy your retirement. Just let Richard handle the law firm, you go and enjoy yourself, travel and see the world. Why are you spoiling everything? I’m not marrying him now, Dad, you can… you can be happy now.”

“If you really love him,” said Matthew, “you have something really special. You have always taken romantic love extremely serious. The very concept of it has been so utterly romanticized by you that you were so unwilling to have a boyfriend that last longer than a year. You were afraid that you might not be able to find someone that was worth staying with. If you said yes to Richard… that means that you saw that in him. That means that you saw in him the life partner that you had been searching for for so long. I can’t take that away from you.

“I am sorry that I reacted this way. I am so sorry that I made you feel like you had to forsake your own happiness for mine. I think the fact that the two of you kept it from me made it a lot worse than it would have been otherwise, but all of that is in the past now. You don’t have to worry about that anymore. You don’t have to worry about me being unhappy. It’s my best friend and my daughter, it’s the two most important people in my life. If you two get married… well then I think that that would be very good indeed. I think that would be the best thing that could possibly happen, in fact. And I want you to do it.”

“Dad,” said Angie, “what made you change your mind?”

“I just came home and calmed down a bit,” said Matthew. “You two shouldn’t have taken me out like that. That really angered me too. It made me feel like I was being bribed. It made me feel like you guys had been trying to buy my blessing, and I really didn’t appreciate being made to feel that way.”