I imagine little Jonah and Elise suffering to keep the two babies safe, and their bravery tears through my heart. “When did he stop?”
“When did Carter stop raping my mother? Never, as far as I know. But when Elise and I got close to puberty, he stopped wanting us in the room while he did it. Maybe he had a touch of pedophilia mixed in with all his other psychoses. Or he thought we might finally be big enough to challenge him. At the time, I didn’t analyze the reasons why. I was just glad it was over.”
“And your mother never left him?” Of course not. They’re living on different floors of Redgrave House. I remember the news stories now—Jonah’s mother’s insanity, her violence.
No wonder the children haven’t turned on her. They know she’s mad because Carter Hale drove her mad.
“I used to ask her why she didn’t go,” Jonah says. “When I was little. I said she shouldn’t let Carter hurt her. But she told me—over and over, she told me, that’s how things are between men and women. She pretended nothing was wrong. And so in my head, that kind of violence, that kind of humiliation—to me, that was what sex was.”
He’s been reliving his worst memories. Letting his demons out to play. Each of us assumed the other was simply indulging a kinky fetish, when in fact we were shepherding each other through our nightmares.
“Obviously I learned the difference between sex and rape.” Jonah turns back to me. When our eyes meet, it feels like we’re looking at each other for the first time. “I knew I would never, ever do to anyone what Carter did to my mother. That I would defend any woman in that kind of danger, to make up for the times I wanted to defend my mother and didn’t. Yet deep inside, on a level I couldn’t consciously reach—I wanted something I could never allow myself to have.”
“Until we found each other,” I say.
“No. Knowing what happened to you . . . it changes everything.”
“Why?” I want to shake him. “You haven’t hurt me, Jonah. You’ve helped me. For some reason, what we do helps me work through this. I’ve felt so ashamed of myself for so long. So dirty. With you, I could let some of that shame go.” Why do I feel so much freer when I’ve surrendered to Jonah in that way? I don’t know, and yet I do.
Our games are the only escape from that shame I’ve ever had.
Jonah looks torn between anger and tears. “I’m glad it meant something to you. Something good. But the things I do to you—I can’t do that, knowing how you’ve suffered. Knowing that when we’re together, you’re reliving an actual rape—I just can’t.”
I cannot handle any of this for-your-own-good bullshit right now. “You’re leaving me to protect me?”
“No. I’m protecting myself.”
He gets to have limits, Doreen’s voice reminds me. Maybe I should restrain myself for Jonah’s sake, too. We’re dealing with horrible experiences, probably not in a very healthy way. Yet I still feel like I could scream, or shout, like I would do anything to keep him from walking away again.
“What we have goes beyond sex,” I say. “At least, it does for me.”
Jonah won’t look at me. “For me too.”
“So shouldn’t we at least try to love each other?” I take one step toward him. “We found each other—two people broken in the exact same way. That’s pretty rare.”
“And you think our broken edges would fit together, make us whole?” He looks so sad. So lost. “It doesn’t work that way. I wish it did.”
Is Jonah right? Maybe he is. Despite everything, I can’t make myself believe that.
But I also can’t make Jonah stay.
“Is this good-bye?” I ask.
Jonah opens his mouth to say yes—I can sense the word on his lips—but instead he says, “I don’t know.”
Hope seizes me. He wants things to be different. He doesn’t seem to know how they could be, and I don’t either, but if we both want that, maybe there’s still a chance.
“You know where to find me,” I say. “Even if it’s not, you know, about us. If you just want to talk.”
He gives me a look. I don’t think Jonah makes a habit of sharing his troubles with anyone. However, after a moment he says, “You can talk to me too.”
Jonah has now become the only person besides my therapist who fully understands what’s going on with me. I’ve needed someone like that in my life. But Jonah and I will never have the kind of transition to friendship that Geordie and I have—or had, before I confronted Geordie last night.
What we have cuts too deep. Matters too much. Jonah and I will find our way back to each other, or we’ll drift apart forever. We won’t wind up with anything in between.
In either case, our future won’t be decided today. It will take a long time for us to weigh the truths we’ve learned, and told.
“I should leave,” Jonah says.
Don’t walk away. Don’t go. But this intensity is too much to bear for both of us. We have to leave the wreckage of our pasts and go back to the lives we’ve built. “Me too. I’m supposed to go see Shay and the baby.”
“Tell them congratulations.”
Does he mean it, or is it just something to say, words to fill the silence? Both, probably. “Okay. I will.”
We walk together through the park, the only sounds our feet crunching on dry grass, the distant rumble of traffic, and the water flowing next to us. Neither of us is walking very quickly. Jonah wants to stretch this moment out as much as I do, I realize. The difference is, he’s willing for this moment to be our last.
I’m not. But how do I change that, if I even can?
Only when we reach the edge of the park does Jonah speak again. “I’ll never forget you.”
Goddammit, now I’m going to cry. “I won’t forget you either. Like I ever could.”
He smiles unevenly at me. “I’ll think of you every time I see your picture on the wall, of the man capturing the dove.”
“He’s not capturing the dove.”
“But his hands are cupped around it—”
“He’s protecting the dove. Keeping it safe. In a minute, he’s going to open up his hands to let it fly.”
Jonah looks at me for a long moment, his gray eyes searching mine. Then he nods and walks away. Yet again, no good-bye.
This time I’m glad he didn’t say it. Because it’s not good-bye for us. When I told him about the dove flying free, I saw something in Jonah I’ve never seen before.
I saw hope.
And that’s how I know that somehow, someday, Jonah will find his way back to me.
Warning (will include spoilers): This book contains multiple explicit scenes that graphically simulate sexual assault, although every encounter between the hero and heroine is fully consensual. There is one flashback depicting a rape that took place long before the main narrative of the book, as well as discussion of past nonconsensual sexual encounters. The hero is not the perpetrator of any nonconsensual sexual acts. Potential readers should be aware of the intensity of these scenes, and those who find such depictions triggering or traumatic are advised not to read. Return to Reader Advisory
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