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I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to know why my daughter had needed those gestures to feel secure in herself, but I didn’t think Julie would be able to answer that question. I wanted to prompt her, to bring her back to the point, but I also felt like she needed to tell me in her own way. After a long moment, Julie grimaced and continued.
“Nina and I barely saw each other after high school. She had to work at the inn, and she had to study, and she had Simon, and she really didn’t have any time left for anything else.”
“Oh.” That hit me. Nina had complained, more than once, about having no time for a social life, but I hadn’t taken her seriously. It felt different hearing it from Julie. By making Nina work at the inn so much, I had narrowed her world. Julie picked up a piece of chicken and turned it in her hands. She kept her eyes down, not looking at me as she spoke.
“Nina never talked to you about Simon?” Julie said. “She never said they were having problems?”
I shook my head.
She moistened her lips, a nervous habit I remembered from when she was a girl. “I don’t know anything for sure. That female cop, Sarah Jane Reid, she came here on Tuesday morning, and I told her what I’m about to tell you. Sarah Jane made me promise not to tell anyone, including you. I shouldn’t have listened to her. I’m sorry about that.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. None of this is your fault.”
“I told Sarah Jane that the last time Nina and I saw each other, she asked me some questions that bothered me.” Julie looked away, across the bar, fixing her gaze in the distance. “My mom had a boyfriend, when I was a kid, who liked to hit when he got drunk. Nina knew about it because I told her. I told her how scared I was, for me and for my mom. Eventually my mom dumped him, and we all moved on. It’s ancient history. But a few weeks ago, Nina came to the bar. We had a couple of drinks together. When it got late she asked me about that guy. She wanted to know what kind of thing had set him off. I know it doesn’t sound like anything. But it was weird. We hadn’t talked about that guy in years, and it wasn’t like he came up naturally in conversation or anything. Also, Nina had bruises on her wrist.”
“What kind of bruises?”
Julie gave me a look. “Smudges. Four oval, blue-green smudges on her wrist. Three almost in a straight line and one on top. They were fingerprint marks. Someone had grabbed her and held her.”
An ache passed through my whole body. I closed my eyes.
“She never said it was Simon.”
“Did you ask her?”
“Of course I asked her. She was my friend. She is my friend.”
“What did she say?”
“She was very calm. She said everything was fine. I freaked out. I told her every battered woman in the history of time thought she could change her man, or that he would change by himself. I told her that guys who hit don’t stop once they start.”
“She didn’t listen?” I had a pain in my heart. That boy had hurt my girl, and she hadn’t loved herself enough to walk away. And she hadn’t trusted me enough to come to me.
“She hugged me and she said she was sorry she had brought the subject up, that it truly had just been a random thought and that she’d hurt her wrist climbing. She was so completely calm that, in the moment, I believed her. It was only afterward, when I had time to think, that I remembered all the bullshit excuses my mom came up with back in the day. She could be pretty calm too. Until it happened again.”
Under the table, I clenched my hands into fists. All I could see was Simon’s stupid, false sympathy at the search. His bullshit tears. Julie looked worried.
“We don’t know for sure that he did anything. And Nina never said that it was Simon who hurt her.”
“Of course it was Simon.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”
Someone turned the music in the bar up louder. I didn’t recognize the song, but some of the other customers did. They started singing along.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Sure.”
I hesitated, but in the end, there wasn’t much left to say, other than thank you. “Thanks, Julie. Thanks for everything.” I passed Nathan Lowery on my way to the door. He was collecting glasses. I nodded an absent hello and moved to pass by, but his lip curled as he looked down at me.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” he said.
I looked at him, completely uncomprehending.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s disgusting, what you’re doing.”
He walked away and went behind the bar. For a moment I didn’t know what to do. I turned and saw Julie standing and frowning in Nathan’s direction. I couldn’t deal with it, so I walked away. Whatever was going on with him was a problem for another day. The information that Julie had just given me about Simon was still reverberating in my head, bouncing around, getting louder and louder and making me feel like I might lose my mind. I walked out of the bar into the night air, turned to the side, and vomited. That earned me a mocking cheer from a group of guys on the other side of the parking lot. I wiped my mouth and kept walking to my car. I climbed in and rested my face on the steering wheel, and I wept. I thought that I might be broken in a way that would never, ever heal. I thought about Nina. About her face, her hair, her hands. The small freckle on her index finger that had appeared when she was four years old and was still there today. The birthmark on her left knee. Her brown eyes. She was all alone somewhere, and I needed to be with her. To hold her and let her know that she was loved, that even in death, if that was where she was, she was loved.
