“See, the thing is, Andrea,” Serena went on, allowing herself to use her first name. “You and I both know Stride. No one knows him better than the two of us. No matter what mistakes he’s made, he’s an honorable man. If he lied in an investigation seven years ago, he had a reason for it. And the only reason I can imagine is to protect someone he loved. In other words, you.”
Andrea shrugged. “I have nothing to say.”
“Of course. I understand. I don’t expect you to share your secrets with a stranger, particularly me. Except I did my research on Ned Baer. I know what he was doing in Duluth. I know he was here to identify the woman who made an anonymous allegation of rape against Devin Card. And I’m pretty sure that woman was you.”
She could see the pieces of Andrea’s composure breaking apart, and she didn’t blame her for that.
“You need to leave,” Andrea said.
“Please. Give me just another minute. I want to tell you a story.”
“I’m not interested in your stories.”
“Please,” Serena said again. “After that, if you want me to go, I’ll go.”
Andrea held the front door tightly, as if her instinct was to slam it shut. “One minute.”
“Thank you.” Serena had to swallow hard and summon her own courage to get the words out. “I don’t share this with many people, but I think you’ll understand when I tell you. I grew up in Phoenix, not Las Vegas. Vegas was where I ran away to. You see, when I was fifteen years old, my mother became a drug addict. Addiction runs in our genes. I’m an alcoholic. My mother’s drug problem destroyed our family. My father left. Ran away, left me alone with her. My mother blew through all the money, lost our house, lost her job, lost everything.”
“I really don’t see how—” Andrea began.
Serena held up a hand. “Wait. Please. Let me finish. After we were homeless, we moved in with her drug dealer. I was sixteen. My mother couldn’t pay to feed her habit, so I became the payment. I became his property. I’m sure you can guess what that meant. For months, he raped me every day, and my mother did nothing. I had no way out. It wasn’t until I got pregnant, and had an abortion, that I finally realized I had to run.”
Andrea’s face was pale and frozen. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because there is not a day of my life, not one, that I don’t carry the scars of what he did to me. For years, being raped as a teenager defined who I was. Even after I ran away to Vegas, I was always scared. I woke up angry every day. I still don’t need to dig very far to find that anger. It destroyed how I thought about men for years. It ruined my sexuality for years. It almost killed me. I was suicidal. So when I meet another woman who has experienced that kind of horror, all I can say is, I get it.”
Andrea was silent, but a single teardrop slipped from her eye. She wiped it away and nervously smoothed her bobbed hair. She opened the door without a word and waved Serena into the living room that faced the street. Serena took a seat in a stiff backed, uncomfortable armchair near the window, and Andrea sat opposite her on a claw-foot beige sofa. The furniture didn’t encourage guests to stay any longer than necessary.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Serena said softly. “You were the one who made the accusation. Devin Card raped you when you were a teenager.”
Andrea didn’t look at her, but her head nodded almost imperceptibly.
“I’m so sorry for what you went through,” Serena said.
Andrea shook her head with a kind of wonder. “Jon said it was probably going to come out. Did he tell you? Is that how you knew?”
“No. He kept your secret. I just know Stride.”
“I suppose you think I should have come forward years ago,” Andrea said.
“I don’t think that at all. I would never dream of judging a woman in your position.”
Andrea peered back in time through a haze of memory. “I was seventeen when it happened. Jesus, I can’t believe that was almost thirty years ago.”
“The amount of time doesn’t matter at all.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I’m still that girl,” Serena said.
Andrea nodded. “Me, too.”
“I know it’s hard, but can you tell me what happened?”
Andrea hesitated, but her demeanor had changed. Her anger had washed away for the moment. Then she started talking.
“I was shy. Into science, which made me a little weird for a girl back then. I tried fitting in — hell, I was even a cheerleader for a while — but I kept crawling back into my shell. I dated a few times, but never even felt comfortable kissing boys. My sister, Denise, was the party girl. She kept telling me I should let loose a little.”
Serena waited. She watched Andrea gathering the emotional strength to go on.
“There was this party crawl one summer. It was sometime in August, I don’t remember exactly when. I went with Denise and a bunch of her friends to a concert, and then we started going from house to house. There must have been a couple dozen of us. I’d never had alcohol before, but I drank a lot. You get that’s why I didn’t want to tell anybody, right? I knew they’d say it was my fault.”
“I do,” Serena said.
“It was after midnight. We were at somebody’s house, but I really have no idea whose house it was. We’d been to so many. I was drunk. The lights were low. It was so crowded you could hardly move. The music was so loud you had to shout to the person next to you. And there were these two guys flirting with me. Older guys, college guys. One was Devin Card. The other was a friend of his, a rich kid, Peter Stanhope.”
Serena closed her eyes. That was a name she didn’t want to hear. “Peter Stanhope? Are you sure?”
“Yes, why?”
“Never mind. Go on, please.”
Andrea shook her head bitterly. “See, I knew that’s what everyone would ask me. Are you sure? Was it really them? Maybe you forgot. Maybe you made a mistake. How much did you have to drink? But I know it was those two. I knew Peter. Everybody did, because of his father. And I knew Devin, too.”
“What happened?” Serena asked softly.
“Devin was handsome. The coolest kid at the party. He’d been drinking, I’d been drinking, and the next thing I knew, we were making out on the sofa. I’d never even had a boyfriend, and there I was, with this stud telling me how pretty I was, how soft my lips were, all that bullshit. He asked if I wanted to go upstairs with him, and I said sure. Yes. Absolutely. We went upstairs and found the master bedroom and started kissing on the bed. He began to take off my clothes. That’s when I freaked. I was feeling sick from drinking, and suddenly I was lying on a bed with some guy I’d just met, and he was pulling off my shirt. So I told him no. I told him to stop. I said I didn’t want to do this, that I was a virgin, that he needed to leave. I remember saying the magic word: stop. And then I don’t remember exactly how it all happened after that. I think I passed out or something, but when I came to, I was naked, and he was on top of me. He was inside me. I was crying and saying no, no, no, but he kept going. And when he was finished, I just grabbed my clothes and ran out of there.”
“Did anyone see you?” Serena asked.
“No. There was a balcony outside the bedroom right over the garage. I left that way. I had to jump down from the garage. I couldn’t go back to the party. I didn’t want anyone to see me.”
Andrea got to her feet with a kind of proud stiffness. She went to the fireplace in the living room and rubbed a finger along the wooden mantel. There was no dust anywhere. Serena understood; everything had to be clean.