“Yes,” he said. His voice was almost inaudible. “I wanted them to like me. And I knew it was wrong…” He picked up his bottle, seemed surprised to find it was empty, and held on to it with both hands, clutching it like a life preserver. “Look,” he said. “I went to Emlen because my brothers went, and my dad went, and my uncle, and their dad went there, too. And they were all…” His voice trailed off. He gestured vaguely with his free hand. “They could handle it there, you know? I couldn’t. I wasn’t smart, and I wasn’t good at sports.” He dropped his head, so that his chin almost rested on his chest. “No one liked me.”
Diana stared at him in disbelief. “No one liked you?” she repeated. Her heart was thumping, and her face was burning, and she wanted to slap him, to claw at his smug face, to pull out what was left of his hair by the handful. “Do you know how I felt when I went home? Do you know what it did to me? I almost flunked out of high school, and I did flunk out of college. It’s been all this time, and I still have nightmares. I wake up in the middle of the night because I think that someone’s in my house, or in my bed with me, or in the closet. I was a virgin, before that night.”
He dropped his gaze and slumped backward like he was trying to merge his body with the couch.
“Do you know what you did to me?” Diana asked him again, leaning forward.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I know.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t.” She sat back, waiting for him to say something else. When she realized he wouldn’t—that this was all she was going to get from him, that he didn’t have the capacity to give her any more—she stood up and picked up her bag.
With his eyes on his lap, Brad said, “I went to rehab the first time when I was twenty-six. I couldn’t figure it out, you know? Couldn’t hang on to a job when people gave them to me. Couldn’t keep a girlfriend. Couldn’t make anything work. So I drank. And then I totaled my car, and my wife finally left, and my brothers and my parents did an intervention, and they sent me to Minnesota. Everyone there talked about hitting rock bottom, and how maybe that was mine.” Finally, he raised his eyes, which were bloodshot and bleary. His gaze was unfocused and very far away. “But I don’t think that they were right. I don’t think that was my bottom. I think that maybe the best thing would have been if they’d just let me keep falling.”
Diana felt very heavy, as if her limbs, her hands, her heart had all been encased in lead. Was this victory? Not really. She couldn’t feel like she’d hurt Brad, or opened his eyes, or injured him. He’d been broken already, broken for years, well before he’d ever seen her face.
“So what now?” he asked with a chilling indifference. “You got a gun in that purse?”
“I don’t want you to die,” said Diana. “I want you to live with what you’ve done. Every time you look at your daughters, I want you to think about what you did to me, and think of some guy doing it to them. I want you to suffer.”
She stood, without looking to see how he’d react, and struggled against that paralyzing heaviness to make it to the door, taking one step, then another, and then she was in the hall, at the stairs, in her car. She drove straight through the night to Cape Cod, stopping just once for gas. Michael and Pedro were both already awake when she got home just after dawn, sitting side by side on the couch.
“Where did you go?” Michael asked. Diana didn’t answer; couldn’t answer. Michael looked at her carefully, then stood up and opened his arms. She stepped into his embrace, pressed her face against the soft plaid of his shirt, and let him hold her, rocking her gently against him.
“You could have told me, you know,” he said in his soothing rumble. “Whatever you do, I’ll support you as best I can. Only don’t shut me out.”
She sat down with him at the table and told him where she’d been. “I went to Emlen,” she said, head down at the small table in the kitchen, with Pedro at her feet. “I learned their names.”
Michael nodded calmly. “And that took you a week?”
“The guy who held me down—he lives in Baltimore. I went to see him. I watched him for a while, and then I knocked on his door yesterday morning and told him who I was.”
Her husband stared at her, his face dismayed. “Diana. You went there by yourself? Without anyone knowing where you were? Jesus! Did you think about what could have happened?”