“You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“No ...” Oh, God, could she tell him? He waited, brushing a damp curl from her forehead in such a tender gesture she thought her heart might crack.
“Selena?”
Slowly, she let out a long, shuddering sigh. She supposed he deserved the truth. “It’s personal.”
“I think what just happened here is pretty personal.”
He wouldn’t let it drop. She knew that, so she rolled to the side of the bed, walked naked to the closet and dragged her robe from its hook on the back of the door. Quickly she shoved her arms down its sleeves and cinched the belt around her waist, as if she could find strength in the everyday routine. Then, barefoot, she stood at the side of the bed and said, “Okay. So ... you asked about Gabriel’s father? If he was a high school boyfriend or something ... It ... He ...” She cleared her throat and squared her shoulders, then glanced at the window, where snow was still falling past the panes. Gathering her strength, she said for the first time in half of her life, “My cousin Emilio, he’s the father. Gabriel’s father.”
“Your cousin?”
She was shivering, cold despite the thick robe. “He raped me, O’Keefe,” she finally admitted. “On the night of my sixteenth birthday.”
Chapter 21
How had he missed all the signs? O’Keefe wondered and mentally kicked himself to hell and back for not understanding. “Come here,” he said, and reached out a hand. When she took his, he pulled her back onto the bed, flipped the thick coverlet over her and held her tight. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”
“I know, but—”
“It’s over.”
“Is it?” He didn’t believe her and he felt her shudder against him.
“It’s a long time ago.” Still fighting tears, she admitted, “I’ve had trouble with intimacy ever since.”
He remembered.
Now, her fleeing his home in San Bernardino made more sense, though he had to have been ignoring all the signs not to have realized what was wrong.
“I’ve ... I’ve never told anyone,” she admitted.
“Except your parents.”
She hesitated and a slow-burning rage stole through his blood.
“They don’t know,” he guessed.
“No one does. But you.”
“But they must’ve asked questions.” He couldn’t believe what she was telling him, that she alone had borne this burden, that her parents had allowed it.
“No, no. I mean, yes, they did and they knew I was raped, yes, but ... but I said it was someone I didn’t recognize, a random thing.”
“Why?” Horrified, he wanted to shake her. It didn’t seem that she would ever have backed down, that she, ever meticulous, determined to right every wrong and punish any criminal in her path, would have let this go.
“Emilio threatened me. Said he would come after me again and he would bring his br
others ... I shouldn’t have been afraid, but I was, and he swore that if I breathed a word of it, he’d see the same thing happened to my younger sister. So ...”
“So you buried it?”
“I was only sixteen. And scared. And ... and broken. My mother wanted me to be checked out by a doctor but my father, he sent me to the church, not to ask for forgiveness; he didn’t blame me,” she was quick to explain, as that was sometimes the case, “but for some kind of counseling, but the priest ... No, it wasn’t a good idea. Didn’t work.” She shook her head. “And then I turned up pregnant and my father was really upset. He and my mother thought it would be best to send me away, but I pleaded to stay close, because of my sister, so we reached a compromise and I stayed with my great-aunt in Portland, about thirty miles away. There, I did the home schooling thing and was counseled, again through the church, by a nun who ... Sister Maria was ... kind. Forgiving.”