Percy was fourteen, just fourteen when he was shown that putting image first could destroy everything. His father, Duke Zachariah Hunter of Winchester valued image above everything, above family, above happiness, above love. He had taught Percy the hard lesson that image shouldn’t be the most important thing in life, something that stuck with Percy even twenty-eight year later. It was something he’d never forget, and he shouldn’t forget how his father’s image destroyed his home, his family forever.
The lesson came at fourteen, but the reason behind the lesson started years before. He was eleven, when his father started cheating on his mother, but he hid it from them well. His mother never suspected, for two years his father carried on his affair and his mother never suspected. It broke her, the illusion of the perfect family shattered. He tried to say it was a mistake, but how do you make the same mistake for two years. The affair wasn’t the scandal he was afraid of, no Cordonia was fine with having a mistress.
The scandal that scared Zachariah Hunter was something that he felt was way worse, the dissolution of his marriage. He was a proud man who refused Percy’s mother the one thing that could have saved their house, Percy’s childhood.
His father had scoffed at her for months whenever she suggested a divorce, stating ‘no man in my family has ever had a divorce and no man ever will. You are in this marriage till death.’ Till death, those words still rang in Percy’s mind. Till death.
His mother sank into a deep depression, she just wanted to be free from this tainted marriage, but her overbearing husband thought image was more important than anything else, image became more important than his family, or what was left of it. It was a hard lesson for Percy to learn, maybe that’s why it stuck with him all these years.
If his father had given her the divorce she wanted he could have been saved a much bigger scandal. His stubbornness still cost him his image, something he would never admit even on his death bed thirteen years later. He would always be too proud to admit his refusal, his words had driven his wife, his son’s mother to an early grave.
Sandra Hunter had been a woman who always wore a smile until her husband broke her by falling in love with another woman. She begged and pleaded for him to let her go, but he refused at every turn.
Her smile and happy demeanor went first, she no longer had the sparkle in her eye, she no longer laughed, but still she begged to be free of this sham her marriage had become.
After her spark, her smile, her laughter faded she turned to alcohol, looking for something to dull the pain of being stuck in a marriage she no longer wanted.
By the time she hit rock bottom and never left the estate, rarely left her room, stuck deep in depression that even her son couldn’t reach through to see her smile, she had stopped asking to be free. She knew he would never give her what she wanted, Zachariah was a proud, stubborn bullheaded man and he was never easily swayed.
Sandra was lost and seeking any way out of the unhappy life she now lived, she took her life, a month before her son’s fifteenth birthday, she knew it was the only way she would ever be free of Zachariah.
She had cried herself to sleep for days before she finally took her life, heartbroken at the thought of leaving her son, but not seeing any other solution to her problem.
Zachariah’s words had pushed her to it, till death, she knew that was the only way out and she took it. Percy had been the one to find his mother, empty bottle of pills beside her on the bathroom floor. He had screamed in fury, and cried as he clutched as his mother’s limp form. There had been another way, but his father was too proud. His father’s pride cost him his mother and taught him a painful lesson, that image shouldn’t be before all. He hated his father for what he had done to his mother, he could have saved them all so much pain if he wasn’t so damn proud.
But in the end, Sandra Hunter had still cost him his precious image, because nothing is worse than your wife taking her life to be free of you.
