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“You’re gonna walk all the way across town without any shoes?”
“Looks like it.” I can practically hear her frown, but the car doesn’t stop creeping alongside me.
There’s a soft click, and then the creak of the car door as it’s pushed open; Caroline climbs out, one hand pressed to her belly, a coat zipped to her neck. She unwinds a red fleece scarf and drapes it around my bare shoulders, falling into step with me.
I didn’t realize how cold it was until this moment, and instead of instinctually rejecting the garment, I reach up and pull it tighter against me.
Linking her arm through mine, we continue down the desolate street, lit by occasional street lamps and Benito’s headlights. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
She sighs, slipping her hand into mine. “Selma and Carter dropped your purse off at the house, so at least your license and cash didn’t get lost.”
My eyes burn as I focus straight ahead, my body feeling wobbly and more empty than usual.
“Elia’s gonna find the other two men who attacked you.”
“I don’t want anyone getting hurt because of a bad decision I made.”
Caroline freezes, her arm strangling mine as her grip tightens impossibly, nails biting into my skin. “The decision to use the bathroom? Jules, you didn’t ask to be assaulted. You know that, right?”
I nod, because I’m supposed to, but the truth bubbles in the pit of my stomach, a boiling cauldron of shame threatening to scar my soul. Caroline might not believe in karma, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist—doesn’t mean I didn’t deserve what almost happened last night.
Bad things happen to bad people, and with the secrets I harbor, I’m afraid I might be the worst of all. Worse than the men who kill and torture for a living, worse than the man my father turned out to be, worse than the woman my mother is.
Because what kind of person would miss a father like the one I had, or crave the attention of a mother who never wanted her in the first place? Who would find solace in the embrace of a murderer?
So, maybe this is my penance. Maybe the demons I’m plagued by manifest physically when ignored too long.
“No one has a right to just take what they want from you, without your permission.” Caroline shakes her head, pulling me forward as she begins walking again.
“All right, Care, I get it.”
She pauses a second time, pulling her arm from mine and putting her hands on her hips. “I don’t think you do, Juliet. I feel like you think I don’t pay attention to you and that I don’t know you, like I haven’t spent my entire life studying everything about you. Protecting you, trying to save you from yourself.Youare your worst enemy, because you don’t respect yourself.”
My mouth falls open, prepared to ream into her for slut shaming, but she holds her hands up, halting me. “No, I don’t mean the meaningless sex. I mean the way you treat yourself as if you don’t have the right to feel. You brush your pain off, even when it destroys you, like you...” She cuts off, choking on a sob, and reaches out, brushing a strand of hair from my face. I hate the tears I see brimming behind her cerulean eyes. Hate the way they claw at my heart, constricting my throat, as my soul begs me to open up to her. “Like you think you deserve it.”
A burn flares in my lungs as I stifle the ache behind my eyes.
“Nobodydeserves to be treated like they’re not worthy of human decency. I thought I’d done a better job of teaching you that, but it looks like our parents did a worse number on you than I realized.” She tilts her head, a single tear slipping down over her cheek. “They really broke you, huh?”
I want to say no, want to lean on her strength and claim it for myself. Because despite the abuse Caroline suffered, breaking was the one thing she never did. And I never could comprehend it, because I always seemed to bend to anyone’s will if they just asked.
Standing here, with her trying to see into my soul, starts to feel like careening off a cliff without a parachute as my body dive-bombs through the air toward a fiery pit—a place to land where I’ll feel nothing but the flames licking my skin, incinerating my body until I’m a heap of bones.
Bones that may break, but at least I won’t have to feel through an atonement.
A reckoning.
But instead of answering, of defendingorimplicating myself, I crumple. The weight of the last twenty-four hours gets too heavy, and I relent into my sister’s arms, letting her lead me to Benito’s car so he can take us home.
Caroline’s best friend, Liv Taylor, is there with a sleeping Poppy in her arms; she greets us, raking a hand through her thick black braids and handing my niece to her mother. Gripping my arms with her bronze hands, Liv gives me a comforting smile, the marketing mogul more demure than I’ve ever seen, then excuses herself for date night with her girlfriend.
Shifting her toddler onto her hip and cradling the back of her blonde head, Caroline looks at me from her end of the upstairs hall. “You know where I am, if you need me.”
I nod, and she says Elia will be home soon, but I’m not really hearing her. The words move through a dense fog, slow like molasses; as she disappears inside her bedroom, I push the door to mine open and make a beeline for the shower in the en suite bathroom, not bothering to flick on the light.
Naked and situated beneath the scalding spray, I lean against the wall and let the water punish me. Let it remove the feel of a degenerate’s hands on my skin at the same time it erases the scrape of a lover’s before that. There’s no way to separate what it eliminates, no way to only scrub one from my body.
