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Not that anything would bring my mother back.
They hadn’t told me for three weeks, until I was out of the hospital and settled. John and Dale had moved all my stuff, my clothes and art supplies, into Dale’s room. I’d asked about my mother—she hadn’t come to see me, and when I’d asked, John mentioned something about a women’s shelter, but when I got home, Dale sat me down on his bed and had finally told me the truth.
I wanted to go see the apartment, even though it was still a crime scene and we weren’t supposed to. I still had a key and I told him I would go myself if he didn’t come with me, so Dale had walked me down the stairs. There was yellow crime tape over the door. Inside, everything was still the same. It smelled like stale cigarettes and beer and the heavy, coppery odor of blood.
The bathroom door still hung off its hinges. My door was open, but theirs was closed. I didn’t open it—she had used my stepfather’s nine millimeter Glock, the one he had held to my head the first time he raped me when I was just fifteen. I don’t know when she discovered it, but she knew, long before I told her. And she pretended not to know, pretended it wasn’t happening, even after that.
I stood in the middle of my room, looking around at the images of Tyler Vincent still papering my walls. It was all that was left, aside from the furniture. I sat on the bed, tears streaming down my face, looking at the blood-stained carpet in the hallway where I had nearly bled to death after my stepfather had stabbed me with the handiest weapon he could find, determined to silence me once and for all.
“I’m so sorry, Sara.” Dale came over to me, brushing my tears from my cheeks as I looked up at him. He had been there. He had heard everything. He knew what my stepfather had done to me—and I had told him everything once I could talk again, while he sat beside my hospital bed and held my hand, in short, hitching whispers.
I had trusted him with it all.
I even told him about getting pregnant last year, how I had dropped out of school to have the baby. And how, unlike Holly, who had given birth to hers only to have to give it up—I had carried mine for just six months before the stepbeast had beaten me within an inch of my life and my little girl had died inside of me. She’d been dead a week before he took me to the hospital. Long enough for the bruises to heal.
“What is the secret of this belt?” I mused, smiling as I tugged on it, pulling him close enough so I could put my arms around his waist, the studs digging into my bruised cheek, but I didn’t care. “Is it magical? Did you trade your soul for it? Does it give you your amazing voice?”
Dale stroked my hair and I heard the click in his throat as he swallowed. “You’ve told me so much truth in the past couple weeks. I guess it’s time I told you mine.”
I blinked up at him, bemused. “It really is magic?”
“No.” He smiled, sitting next to me on the bed, taking my hand in his. “It’s my father’s.”
“John’s?”
“No. Not my dad. My father. My biological father.” He met my eyes, waiting for me to connect the dots. It took me longer than it should have.
“Well if it’s not John’s…” I paused, my gaze distracted by a photograph on the wall, the one I had painted—Tyler and Chloe, father and daughter, the picture I had transformed into my symbolic wish fulfillment.
And I remembered how he had said her name that day he saw my painting, like he knew her, and of course, he had. His mother had been having an affair with Tyler for… years.
“Tyler?” I guessed.
“She told me the day she left. I suspected, after what I saw, but she admitted it was true.”
“And John doesn’t know,” I whispered, my heart breaking for him, for both of them. “Does Tyler know?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“And your sister?”
“Tyler’s. Chrissy knows. She chose to stay with my mother.”
“You’re both his?” I blinked at him, stunned by his revelation. “And John… he never knew? How could he not know?”
“How did your mother not know your father was…” His face hardened, eyes pained.
“But she did,” I whispered. “I even told her, eventually. And still she didn’t want to believe.”
“Sometimes the truth is too hard for any of us to face.”
I rested my cheek against his chest, running my fingertips over the studs on his belt. “So why do you wear it, if it was his?”
“To remind me…” His put his hand over mine at his waist. “Every day I put it on to remind me what not to be… what are you doing?”
I had opened the locket around my neck with my fingernail and was prying out the picture of Tyler, the one Dale had cut into a heart shape and put inside.
“I don’t need this anymore.” I looked at the image of the man I had admired, the one I had created in my mind, built up and put on an impossibly high pedestal. It put it down on the bed, closing the locket with only Dale’s picture left inside—he was all I needed, all I had ever needed.
