S.E.C.R.E.T. Revealed (Secret 3)

No worries, the text read.

I thought it was from Denise, but it was Julius. Julius? I noted the time: 12:30 a.m. Uh-oh. My heart skipped.

What are you still doing up? Everything ok with Gus?

All good. Doing payroll. What are YOU still doing up?

I’m in the back of a limo, with sore wrists and ankles from the restraints used to tie me up against a wall, where an unseen stranger fucked me silly … Ha!

I typed, Can’t sleep.

Me neither.

The joys of parenthood.

Truth.

Try counting sheep.

That doesn’t work.

Read a book? Maybe one of Gus’s?

One with sheep in it?

Exactly.

Stop! I shoved the phone into my purse. Too weird—texting my ex-husband after a sex fantasy. Especially that sex fantasy. I had submitted to an unseen stranger simply because he was confident and persistent.

I thought of Pierre Castille. The word no was anathema to me; I hated being rejected. It suddenly felt paramount to get that man to submit to me. And there was only one other person who could help. I took my phone back out and texted Matilda, requesting a coffee and a catch-up. Soon.

CASSIE

Will had forgotten he even had the sleeping pills. In fact, they’d expired, but they were nonetheless potent enough to put Claire into a brief coma. And though she didn’t take all of them and admitted later it was just a cry for help, it was a cry we all heard loud and clear.

After she left the hospital, Claire was away from school and work for the rest of the month of February. The first week she spent with her folks back in Slidell, during which she permitted Will and me to log in to her social media accounts to see what she’d been dealing with, and to gather evidence, for what, we didn’t know yet.

“Holy shit,” Will muttered, scrolling down her pages, the light from the computer illuminating both our faces.

The comments came from several young women who flung words like “ho,” “hoebag,” “whore,” “bitch,” “cunt” (even “cum rag,” which I thought was “scumbag” spelled wrong, until I really read it). Up and down her wall, the abuse poured, under her pictures, and in reply to every post.

“Look at all this hate,” I said. “Poor kid.”

Some of the posts listed ways in which the people posting were going to hurt and dismember her if she didn’t “leave Ben alone,” as though Ben had had no say in their relationship. They described how they would also run her out of the school if she didn’t “fucking off yerself.” Claire the joiner, the artist, the hard worker, the friend and niece, that girl was lost amid all these ugly, vile insults and threats. But the label that seemed most prominent, the one hurled most often, the one that seemed to stick, was the word “slut,” usually pasted beneath a certain photograph posted over and over again, of Claire holding up her shirt to bare a breast, just one. If that was the notorious photo, I thought, it wasn’t even a sexy one. It looked insouciant, more like the product of a dare between her and the photographer, presumably Ben. But posted over and over again with horrible slogans and tags attached, it took on darker tones.

Claire missed New Orleans and when she begged her folks to let her come back to her uncle Will’s, they were too afraid to say no, worried they’d set off more self-destructive behavior. When she returned to Will’s, a home with disconnected Wi-Fi, we all spelled one another o

ff to spend time with her, Dell filling in for the both of us when necessary. Of all of us, Dell was the most perplexed, her face dropping when I told her how Claire had coped with this abuse.

“Well, once she’s all better, please don’t mind me if after I hug her, I slap her a little,” she said, fighting back tears.

The staff at Cassie’s was incredible, picking up shifts at the Café Rose so Maureen wouldn’t be overwhelmed or on her own, especially during Mardi Gras.

Will demanded the addresses of her tormentors. Over the course of that month, he made personal visits to each kid’s home, requesting meetings with parents, asking the girls to delete the posts, to write apologies and to give assurances that they understood the scope of their damage.

“I only wanted them to consider what it would feel like to be Claire,” he told me, while we shopped for new floor runners and plastic cutting boards for the restaurant. He looked as lost as I’d ever seen him, wandering the aisles of Home Depot. “Why did this happen? What did she do to deserve all this shit?”

“Nothing. She did nothing.”