“All right. What did you do while you sat in his lap?” I cringed inwardly, knowing what horrors might come tumbling out of her mouth.

“He read me fairy tales.”

“Oh? And did you like those stories?”

“I did…until…”

“Until when?”

“Until I no longer believed in happily ever after.”

 

“Stop it!” Gina, who had been standing as usual, fell to the floor and rolled into a fetal position, her hands covering her ears. “It hurts me, Tio! Stop! I’d rather die!”

I stood and rushed toward her, wrapping my arms around her. Gina was far from the first patient to break down in my office, but this episode nearly cut my heart right out of my chest. She had finally told me about the first time her uncle raped her.

She was eight years old.

 

I jolted upright, my skin clammy with cold perspiration.

Gina.

My God.

I’d rather die.

She’d been flashing back to her abuse, her first rape, and I thought she’d been saying those words to her uncle. She might have been.

But she’d also been saying them to me.

Had she been crying for help? Showing me she was suicidal? And I’d missed it?

I lay back down on the bed, shaking.

Chapter Thirty–Five

Jonah

“The truth.” Wendy stroked her cheek with her index finger and then took another drink of her scotch. “I had been under the impression that I was telling you boys the truth.”

“You know what we mean, Wendy,” Talon said. “What are the things that you could only reveal to me?”

“I suppose Jade told you that your father and I were…involved.”

My nerves jumped a bit, as they did every time I thought about my father being unfaithful. Yes, Jade had told us what she knew, how Wendy claimed to be our father’s true love. I was only fifteen when my mother passed away, but I was old enough to remember the looks my parents had shared between them. I had a hard time believing my father had been unfaithful.

“She did,” Talon said.

Wendy sighed. “I’m sorry if that was hard for you to hear.”

Talon visibly tensed and clutched the arm of the sofa. “Not especially.”

He was lying, but I knew why he did it—so Wendy would feel she could talk freely.

“Brad and I were soul mates,” she said. “We would’ve been together if it weren’t for your mother.”

“Yes, we’ve heard the story. Mom got pregnant with Joe.”

“As far as I know,” Wendy said, “they met at a party. It was during one of the ‘off’ times in our relationship. We were both seeing other people at the time. I was seeing a journalism major. Your father was dating some homecoming-queen type, blond and blue-eyed. Why he hooked up with Daphne that night, I’ll never know.”

“Well, we’re kind of glad he did, or the two of us wouldn’t be here,” I said.

She smiled. “True enough, and the two of you are dead ringers for him.” She nodded to me. “Especially you.”

“So you’ve told me.” I drank some coffee, trying not to think about how she was looking at me.

“Anyway, Daphne got pregnant, but of course Brad didn’t know that for a little while yet. After that night, he and I got back together and decided to try to make it work between us, even though we were separated and attending different colleges. So all was going fine and well, and then about a month later, your mother showed up saying she was pregnant and it was Brad’s child.”

“If Dad was the love of your life and you were his, why didn’t he just take care of Daphne and the baby but stay with you?” I asked. “He certainly had the money.”

“Believe me, that’s what I wanted him to do,” Wendy said. “But your father was nothing if not an honorable man. He didn’t want a child of his growing up without his name. So he decided to marry Daphne, but he and I continued to see each other.”

“That doesn’t sound very honorable,” I said. And I also wasn’t buying it.

“No,” Wendy agreed. “But you have to understand the passion and desire we had between us. This may be hard for you to hear, but we couldn’t stay away from each other. God knows, we both tried it more than one time. But we always failed. We were in love.” She looked to Talon. “Jade has been very frank with me about what you two feel for each other. Trust me when I say your father and I had that same thing. I would’ve done anything for him, and he would’ve done the same for me.”

“Which is why you helped him cover up my abduction,” Talon said.

Wendy nodded somberly. “Please believe me. I tried to talk him out of that, Talon. I knew it would do no good to bury it. I knew you needed help dealing with it, and so did Brad and Daphne.” She looked to me. “You and your brother too, probably. The whole family could have benefitted from counseling, but Brad would have none of it.”

“Why?” I asked. “That’s the thing that puzzles us the most. Why did Dad allow this to happen?”

Wendy downed the rest of her scotch and set the glass on the coffee table, loudly this time. She looked at both of us intently. “What I told Jade was the truth. A lot of it was because of Daphne. She was so unstable, and she had just had the premature baby. Brad didn’t think she could handle the pressure.”

“So you’re saying my father forsook me for my mother?” Talon said.

“In a way, I suppose he did. But he did love you, Talon. Please believe that. He loved all you kids. The four of you were the reason he and I never got together.”

“What do you mean?”

“He refused to disrupt your lives. He wouldn’t divorce your mother. I also think your father didn’t understand the magnitude of what had happened to you. He refused to contemplate it, even acknowledge it. Male-on-male rape, especially on a child, is a hard thing for most men to deal with.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Talon said.

“I know I don’t. I’m so glad you finally got the help you needed. You and Jade will have a great life together. She’s a wonderful girl.”

“That she is.”