Page 23 of Worth Every Moment (Hawkston Billionaires #4)

ERICA

I am a glutton for punishment. Either that or I’m completely spineless, because I’m in the waiting room of the Harley Street plastic surgeon’s room sitting next to my mother. Sometimes it feels like her influence is a vine wrapping its tendrils around me. Inescapable .

Where would I be if I truly cut myself loose? The thought raises the hairs on the back of my neck. We’re energetically enmeshed, and as much as I’d like to sever our connection, I don’t know where I would be— who I would be —without her.

A glance around the waiting room tells me I’m not alone in this codependence; there are an alarming number of young girls in here, sitting with their mothers.

Am I really going to let her force surgery on me? Isn’t that a step too far?

Nerves crawl in my stomach like insects disturbed from under a dark log. I remind myself that Mum is doing this to help me. She only wants to help. Doesn’t she?

People keep looking at me. Sometimes, I really wish I wasn’t famous.

I’m wearing a short summer dress, but my hair is tucked up in a baseball cap.

A huge pair of sunglasses are perched on the bridge of my nose, even though we’re indoors.

I must look crazy, but Mum insisted. Because how awful would it be if someone recognised me and told people I was considering surgery?

“Miss Thomas?” calls a nurse.

I don’t react, but Mum grabs me. “That’s us. I had to use a fake name.”

Us.

My body revolts over that one word, but when Mum hauls me out of my chair, I don’t resist. We follow the nurse, who leads us to a fancy consultation room on the first floor with a wide bay window that looks down over Harley Street.

The surgeon, a man in his fifties with salt and pepper hair, sits behind a desk.

He stands and gestures to the seats opposite his desk. “Miss Thomas?”

Mum shakes his hand, and I sit. I remove my cap and my glasses, and let my hair fall. The surgeon does a double-take, blinks, and clears his throat.

“Erm…”

I stand and grab his hand. “Erica.” He still looks confused. “Lefroy,” I clarify.

“Oh. Yes,” he stammers. “I thought I recognised you. I’m Mr Williams.”

“You understand,” Mum purrs from her seat. “We have to be discreet.”

“Quite.” He sits and checks his notes, then looks up at me. “Breast enhancement?” I say nothing. I don’t want this.

“Yes,” Mum replies. “Maybe a couple of cup sizes bigger? Erica’s always been rather modest in that department. Unwomanly. Extremely unfeminine, actually.”

What the fuck?

The surgeon looks awkwardly down at his papers. “I wouldn’t say that. Any kind of surgery requires careful consideration and psychological preparation. Do you want this, Miss Lefroy?”

He stares me right in the eye. I’m pretty sure he can tell that I don’t want this. It might as well be scrawled over my forehead that I’m here under duress.

“Of course she does,” Mum replies.

The surgeon’s eyes flicker. “Miss Lefroy?”

Mum’s intention pulses against my left side like her thoughts are creating a force field. There is only one answer here.

“Yes,” I say, but the self-betrayal makes me want to scream.

Beside me, Mum lets out a relieved sigh. “Yes, and while we’re here, can we ask about that bump on her nose?”

I flinch.

The surgeon frowns. “Rhinoplasties are not my specialty—”

“But could we get it shaved off? Can’t you do it with laser now, so her nose wouldn’t need to be broken?

She wouldn’t get black eyes and have to miss work?

Reduced swelling?” Mum leans across and grabs my chin, tilting my head to a certain angle so the surgeon can see what she means.

“Right here.” She taps a spot on the bridge of my nose.

“If we could get rid of it, she’d be absolutely perfect from every angle, and I could stop having to remind her to keep her head tilted west-southwest in public.

That would lighten my mental load tremendously. ”

I trace the bridge of my nose with my index finger.

There’s nothing wrong with the shape of it.

Intellectually, I know that. But Mum is fixated on ironing out perceived imperfections, and apparently, I have a lot of them.

It feels like shit to have my features dissected this way, as though I’m not even here, and by the person who’s supposed to love and protect me.

“Perhaps you have a colleague who could deal with it?” Mum says.

The surgeon’s face hardens. “I wouldn’t recommend anyone touch Miss Lefroy’s nose. We have plenty of clients who come in requesting the Lefroy nose. This is what people aspire to—”

“Ha! They can’t have seen her close up,” Mum barks.

I stare at the floor, a lump rising in my throat.

For years, I’ve accepted everything Mum has said as though it was the gospel truth.

I’ve done what she wanted. Obeyed all the rules.

I have no idea who I am without the framework she’s erected for my life, but listening to her talk to the surgeon really brings it home that she doesn’t actually care about me at all.

She’s not on my team, and whatever I want to do from this point on, I have to do it alone.

The surgeon’s jaw flexes. “Surgery is not a matter to be taken lightly. There are no guarantees—”

“We know all that,” Mum says. “But where there’s no pain, there’s no gain. Isn’t that right, Erica?”

Resentment simmers in my blood. Where is Mum’s pain? Who’s going under the knife here? Me or her? Or maybe it’s that ‘us’ she keeps talking about.

Fuck. This.

I stand and lean across the desk, holding out my hand. “Thank you for you time, Mr Williams. I won’t be taking this any further.”

He grips my hand, a slight smile warming his face. “Miss Lefroy. I wish you all the best.”

I thank him again as I stuff my hat and sunglasses into my bag and turn to leave, striding across the room and letting myself out.

“Erica,” Mum yelps. “Where are you going? Put your hat on! Someone will see you.” I keep moving and she calls, “We’re not finished.”

“I’m finished,” I respond as I trot down the wide staircase of what must have once been a glamorous London townhouse.

“Why you ungrateful little…” Mum’s footsteps rattle down the stairs behind me. “You do realise that without me, you wouldn’t be who you are now?”

“Yes. You’ve told me.” I open the door to the street and pass outside. The breeze is a welcome change from the stifling heat of the consulting rooms.

I keep walking, not knowing where I’m going, Mum running along behind me. The urge to turn and scream at her builds in my chest, bolstered by a fog of anger. I need to get away from her before I lose it.

“You should be grateful I’m taking such an interest in you,” she calls out.

I spin to her. “ I should be grateful that you took an interest in me? In your only child?” It comes out louder and harsher than I intend, with years of resentment and repressed rage bubbling up behind it.

But I no longer care that people might recognise me or hear what I’m saying.

Mum’s expression turns brittle, and an unpleasant tingling heat spreads out from my heart, but I force myself to speak despite how fast my pulse is racing.

“Do you even like me? Because it doesn’t feel like you do. ”

“Of course I like you.” Each word is simultaneously clipped and over-exaggerated, the implication that I’m being ridiculous all too clear. “I love you. I want the best for you.”

“Then why do you keep trying to change me?”

Mum rests a hand on her hip, stepping a little closer to me and glancing around like she’s checking who’s watching.

She’s still thinking about the fucking brand.

“You know what I’m seeing here, Erica?” Her voice is cool and level.

“I’m seeing judgment. Millions of women have breast implants.

Why do you think you’re better than they are? ”

“I don’t. You’re not listening. I don’t have a problem with breast implants.

If you want them, have at it. Get them as big as you want.

What I do have a problem with is not being able to choose.

It’s my body.” My voice breaks. “ My body ,” I repeat, and it sounds pathetic.

I loathe that she’s reduced me to this. “I want to choose. For once, I want to choose. Why is that not enough?”

“Settling is not a life choice. I want perfection for you. No one can hurt you if you’re perfect, Erica. No one. The more beautiful you are, the safer you are. I’m protecting you.”

This is so warped. Those creepers wind around me, dragging me under where I can’t understand what’s real or right, but I fight against it.

“I’m fine. I’m fine as I am.” I try to sound confident, but I don’t feel it.

Maybe I’m not fine . Maybe I need all the diets, the exercise, the salon appointments, the physical trainers. Maybe I need plastic surgery too.

“Fine isn’t good enough,” Mum says. “You didn’t get to be Erica Lefroy because I settled for ‘fine’ .”

I can’t make myself heard. Nothing will get through.

I shouldn’t have come to this stupid appointment because I was never going to go through with it, but I was too afraid to say no.

Nothing I think or feel matters, because to the outside world, it looks like I have everything, and to my mother, I’ll never be good enough.

A cruel longing rises in me as I stand in the street, staring at the woman who raised me.

Why couldn’t I have had a mother who loved me for me ?

Instead, I have one who critiques me and changes me and makes me into what she thinks the world wants to see, rejecting every aspect of me that doesn’t meet her exacting standards.

I don’t know who I am without all of that. I am so lost. And now I’m yelling at her in the street. In public . People are looking. People are looking because she turned me into Erica Lefroy and now I can’t walk outside without being recognised.