“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.”