“Hadn’t anyone paid attention to you before?”
She blew out a breath in a whistle, Gina’s version of a sigh. “I didn’t have any brothers and sisters, and I didn’t have very many friends. I was really shy and never made friends easily. My mom and dad both worked. I think they were more interested in their college students than they were in me.”
“Did you ever sit in your mother’s lap? Or your father’s?”
“Very rarely. They weren’t very affectionate to me. Or to each other for that matter.”
My heart went out to the young girl. Children needed affection. If they didn’t get it from their parents, they would go looking for it elsewhere—sometimes a teacher, a friend’s parent, a coach. Gina had gone to her uncle.
“Some people just aren’t as affectionate as others,” I said. Not that I excused her parents’ lack of affection toward her. I wasn’t quite ready to voice that thought, though. We’d only had a few sessions.
“I know I must sound like a needy little kid,” Gina said, shaking her head.
“All children want affection,” I said. “There’s no reason for you to feel like you were any needier than anyone else.”
“I look back…” She closed her eyes, shuddering. “I can’t believe I actually liked it in the beginning.”
“Gina, you’re not alone. You’re not the first child yearning for affection who got taken advantage of by an adult you trusted. It’s more common than you know, and though I don’t expect that fact to offer you any solace, perhaps it will make you feel a little better just to know that you’re not alone.”
She opened her eyes, tears emerging. “I wish, Dr. Carmichael. I wish it did make me feel better.”
“Believe me, it’s okay that it doesn’t. So you said you liked sitting on your uncle’s lap at first.”
She nodded.
“What was his name? What did you call him?”
“I called him Tio.”
“Why did he want you to call him that?
“I don’t know.”
“It’s Spanish for uncle. Was your uncle Spanish?”
“No. He was my mother’s brother. They were both born here.”
“All right. What did you do while you sat in his lap?” I cringed inwardly, knowing what horrors might come tumbling out of her mouth.
“He read me fairy tales.”
“Oh? And did you like those stories?”
“I did…until…”
“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.