“Anything else?” There was always more in cases like this.
She heaved in a big breath. “The story made the papers. ‘Fourteen-year-old Stabs Mother’s Boyfriend.’ It was big news. I was famous.”
“That shouldn’t have happened. Juveniles are not named in reports.”
Shay’s mouth jerked but it was not in a smile. “There were enough people who saw me that night to tell their friends, who told their friends, that the girl without a name in the news was me.”
He tried to absorb the implications. None of them good.
She glanced at him from under her bangs. “Yeah. Who wants a homicidal loony, fresh-sprung from the nuthouse, in the classroom with their precious children?”
James sighed. “What did you do?”
“My mother left her jobs and took me up to the lake cabin. It belongs to my dad’s uncle and wife. We lived there a year while she did homeschooling, as best she could. Waitressing and cleaning other cabins to make ends meet.” Her voice began to wobble. “I was a total burden. I ruined her life.” Shay slumped into an even tighter huddle.
James reached in and found a calm tone completely at odds with his emotions. “Did your mom think so?”
She twisted the hem of her skirt in her hands, not speaking for several seconds. When she did there was a new bitter tone in her emotion-ravaged voice. “She felt guilty about bringing Andrew into our lives. Now she had a freak for a daughter. She was stuck.”
Mistakes. Guilt. Being trapped. A triple whammy of emotional disaster.
He had heard tougher stories, and ones with sadder endings. Some survivors didn’t make it through the trauma. Others were human husks, or living like bombed-out buildings that were still standing but damaged beyond repair. It was a wonder she wasn’t strung out on drugs, or worse. Yet here Shay sat, in her own place, with a job, whole but hurting.
Some of his thoughts must have been playing across his features because when she looked over at him a little of her temper flared through the haunted shadows in her eyes. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.”
“I was thinking about how strong you are. It wasn’t your fault. None of it. The courts and society got it wrong.”
She stared at him, looking strained and vulnerable after her confession.
“What did you and your mother do after a year?”
“We moved to Durham. She got a job, a good one, and I went to public school.”
“So, things got better?”
She shrugged. “There were records the school required. Things got leaked. Teachers. Counselors. They were always looking for signs that I would freak out again. When I didn’t, some kids started … doing things.”
To make her react. Damn. He did feel sorry for her.
“How bad did it get?”’
She stared at him in that familiar walled-off way. He understood now how her defiance had sustained her. “They pushed. I fought back. A lot.”
It didn’t require much imagination to guess what her high school years must have been like. But he sensed a change in her tone. She wasn’t asking for understanding any longer. She was now fighting back, testing him.
He gave her a sly look. “You never went all ‘Carrie’ on them, did you?”
She almost smiled. “I thought about it. Especially after they nicknamed me ‘Psycho Shay.’ But then if I’d done something really badass I’d have been put back in that hospital.”
Jesus. Her world had been too full of assholes, creeps, and failures.
Yet she had rejected his sympathy so he wasn’t about to dish any more up. “Smart thinking. You didn’t want your past to follow you. Is that why you changed your name at eighteen?”
Shay stilled and then her gaze went supernova. “You knew!” She sprang from the sofa. “You son of a bitch! You already knew all this.”
He wasn’t going to lie to her but he spoke slowly and calmly, trying not to accelerate her anger. “When I got back to Charlotte, I realized I didn’t even have your address or phone number, or have any way to get in touch with you. I needed to file a report about Bogart’s abduction. So I did some investigating.”
“You put a tail on me?” She sounded horrified.
“No. Nothing like that. It’s the age of digital pursuit.”
“I don’t have much of a digital imprint.”
“Tell me about it. I had to put a department professional on it. He’s better and has more resources. He discovered what I needed, and other things.”
“Other things.” He clocked every emotion as Shay’s face reflected her thinking processes. The final result of hurt and outrage was tough to take. “If you already knew everything, why did you make me tell you?”