“I’ve never shared my past with anyone before. Only Dig.” I smoothed the soft waves of her hair from her face. “But I couldn’t stop myself from telling you the truth. I wanted you to know. But when I heard you say my name—”
“You see her in me, don’t you? Your cousin, Inès?” Her face reddened, and she shifted her weight. “The wanting to keep me safe, like you kept her safe. I get that.”
Jesus Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth, but I couldn’t tell her that now, I couldn’t tell her the whole horrible tale. I couldn’t.
I swallowed hard. “It’s not about her. This, what we have, is about you.”
Her eyes searched mine.
“When I lost Dig and Grace, that old futility came washing back over me, chaining me. I lost everything all over again. Couldn’t save anybody. But you—you’d survived your shit. You survived, Jill. I knew you would.”
“What do you mean?”
“I ran you off club property—at least, what? Twice?”
She nodded.
“I watched over you for a year after that, making sure none of them found you. Making sure you hadn’t told and that other assholes weren’t taking advantage of you. I made sure.”
“You watched me?”
“Going to school. Going to church. Youth group meetings. Going to football games with your girlfriends. Going on dates. To your therapist. I watched you.”
She stiffened in my hold. “I saw Dready off and on, but then he stopped showing up.”
“I came up a few times after I’d told Dready to stop. Until I was sure you had settled back into normal.”
“Normal? Nothing was ever normal after that!”
“The last time I’d come up, was when you had just gotten your Honda. I was on my way to Montana, but I stopped at Ellston and trailed you from school. You’d left alone that afternoon and headed for this strip mall in the next town. I parked my bike across the street and followed you into one of the offices.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and could still picture that big black plastic plaque on the door with the doctor’s name on it.
“You were getting help,” I said. “It was a year after your abduction, but good times at Ellston High and a bi-weekly serving of God hadn’t been enough to keep the boogie man at bay. You were there at a therapist’s on your own, maybe your parents and your friends knew about these visits, maybe they didn’t. But either way, fuck, you were getting the help you needed, doing something about your pain, facing it, wrestling with it in order to move on.”
“Dr. Linda Hoskins,” she whispered. “Specializing in children and adolescents and issues related to family conflict, sexual abuse and neglect.”
“Yeah.” I studied her face, a faraway look in her eyes.
I had rubbed my gloved hand over the engraved letters of the doctor’s name on that plaque in front of her office. “Help her,” I’d whispered to them.
Jill’s anguished voice from that first night at the club had come back to me as I stood in front of that therapist’s office: “Just a girl. Just a stupid girl.”
“You fucking are not,” I’d muttered to myself.
Dready and I hadn’t seen the usual signs of a teenager acting out in Jill—smoking, wearing skanky clothes, or heavy makeup, anything obvious that from an otherwise normal kid would have said “I’m flipping the fucking bird at you, world.” And there she was getting professional help.
I’d gotten back on my bike and ripped down Route 90 toward Montana. Toward business. Back to my day to day.
Away from Jill forever.
“You followed me back then? You?” she asked, her soft voice bringing me back to the present.
“Lots of times, and I’m glad I did. Watching you, I’d thought to myself, ‘there’s one less fucked up person in the world.’ Two parents who gave a shit and showed it, school, friends, therapist, a system that worked. You’d gotten into college, had a boyfriend. You were golden. If any of us had a shot at normal it was you. After about a year I stopped. You didn’t need me no more, for whatever it was worth.”
Her fingers pressed into my flesh. “It was worth a lot. I didn’t even know.”
“I needed to make sure.”
“You did that for me?” She whispered. “Why?”
“You were worth it.”
“Boner.”
“I didn’t want you collapsing in on yourself—like I had, like Inès had done. You were around the same age as she was when shit went south for her.”
“Bone—”
“I figured I could believe in a little bit of good for a change after seeing you do well.”
“Boner!” She gripped my arms. “My parents got killed the following year.”
“What?”
“They were driving back from a cousin’s wedding in Oklahoma, and there was a tornado. The motel they were at, it—”
“No.”
“Yes. I had to quit school. I lost their house, lost the boyfriend, got a job and then another.”