“I don’t want to fight.”
He laid the robe beside her, bent so their eyes were level. “If I have the opportunity, I’ll take whoever put that look on your face, my darling Eve, and peel the skin from their bones. One thin layer at a time. Now put on your robe.”
“She shouldn’t have called you.” Her voice hitched before she could steady it, and added another tear to humiliation. “Peabody contacted you, I know it. She should’ve left it alone. I’d‘ve been all right in a little while. I’d be fine.”
“Bollocks. You don’t go down easy. I know it, and so does she.” He crossed to the AutoChef, programmed for a soother. “This will take the edge off that headache, settle your stomach. No tranqs,” he added, glancing back at her. “I promise.”
“It’s stupid. I let it get to me, and it’s stupid. It’s not worth all this.” She pushed at her hair. “It just caught me off guard, that’s all.” When she got to her feet, her legs felt loose and ungainly. “I just needed to come home for a while.”
“Do you think I’m going to settle for that?”
“No.” Though she wanted to crawl into the bed, pull the covers over her head for an hour, she sat, met his eyes as he brought her the soother. “No. I left Peabody with a mess. I let her take primary, and she did good, but right at the sticking point I left her to deal with it by herself. Stupid. Irresponsible.”
“Why did you?”
Because it was drink the damn soother or have him pour it into her, she drank it in three gulps. “There was a woman waiting for me in my office. I didn’t recognize her, not at first. Not at first.” She set the empty glass aside. “She said she was my mother. She wasn’t,” Eve said quickly. “She wasn’t, and I knew it, but having her say it knocked me. She’s probably about the right age, and there was something familiar, so it knocked me hard.”
He took her hand, held it tight. “Who was she?”
“Her name’s Lombard. Trudy Lombard. After they… When I got out of the hospital in Dallas, I went into the system. No ID, no memory, trauma, sexual assault. I know how it works now, but then, I didn’t know what was happening, what was going to happen. He told me, before, my father, that if the cops or the social workers ever got me, they’d put me in a hole, they’d lock me in the dark. They didn’t, but…”
“Sometimes the places they put you aren’t much better.”
“Yeah.” He’d know, she thought. He’d understand. “I was in a state home for a while. Few weeks, maybe. It’s sketchy. I guess they were looking for parents or guardians, trying to track where I’d come from, what had happened. Then they put me in a foster home. That was supposed to help mainstream me. They gave me to Lombard. Someplace in east Texas. She had a house, and a son a couple years older than me.”
“She hurt you.”
It wasn’t a question. He would know that, too. He would understand that. “She never hit me, not like he did. She never left a mark.”
He swore, with a quiet viciousness that eased the tension balled in her more than the soother.
“Yeah, it’s easier to cope with a direct punch than subtle little tortures. They didn’t know what to do with me.” She pushed at her wet hair, and now her fingers were steady. “I wasn’t giving them anything. I didn’t have anything to give. They probably figured I’d do better in a house with no male authority figure, because of the rape.”
He said nothing, simply drew her toward him to brush his lips over her temple.
“She never yelled at me, and she never hit me—no more than a few slaps. She saw to it I was clean, that I had decent clothes. I know the pathology now, but I wasn’t even nine. When she told me I was filthy and made me wash in cold water every morning, every night, I didn’t understand. She always looked so sad, so disappointed. If she locked me in the dark, she said it was only to teach me to behave. Every day there were punishments. If I didn’t eat everything on my plate, or I ate it too fast, too slow, I’d have to scrub the kitch
en with a toothbrush. Something like that.”
I set store by a clean kitchen.
“She didn’t have domestics. She had me. I was always too slow, too stupid, too ungrateful, too something. She’d tell me I was pathetic, or I was evil, and always in this soft, kindly voice with this look of puzzled disappointment on her face. I was still nothing. Worse than nothing.”
“She should never have passed the screening.”
“It happens. Worse than her happens. I was lucky it wasn’t worse. I had nightmares. I had nightmares all the time, almost every night back then. And she’d… oh, God, she’d come in and she’d say I’d never get healthy and strong if I didn’t get a good night’s sleep.”
Because she could, she reached for his hand, let it anchor her in the now while she took herself back. “She’d turn off the lights and lock the door. She’d lock me in the dark. If I cried, it was worse. They’d take me back, put me in a cage for mental defectives. That’s what they did to girls who wouldn’t behave. And Bobby, her boy, she’d use me there, too. She’d tell him to look at me, and remember what happened to bad children, to children without a real mother to take care of them.”
He was touching her now, rubbing her back, smoothing her hair. “They did home checks?”
“Yeah. Sure.” She dashed a tear away—tears were useless, then and now. “It all looked nice and clean on the surface. Tidy house, pretty yard. I had my own room, clothes. What would I have told them? She said I was evil. I’d wake up from a nightmare where I was covered with blood, so I must’ve been evil. When she told me someone had hurt me, thrown me away with the garbage because I was bad, I believed her.”
“Eve.” He took both her hands, brought them to his lips. He wanted to gather her up, cover her in something soft, something beautiful. He wanted to hold her until every horrid memory was washed away. “What you are is a miracle.”
“She was a vicious, sadistic woman. Just another predator. I know that now.” Had to remember that now, Eve thought as she drew a deep breath. “But then all I knew was that she was in charge. I ran away. But this was a small town, not Dallas, and they found me. I planned it better when I ran the second time, and I got over into Oklahoma, and when they found me, I fought them.”
“Damn right you did.”