‘Do you want to . . .’ He gestured towards the bedroom.
‘No,’ Rachel said. She was afraid that moving would break the spell. ‘Let’s stay here.’
Darcy was tentative to begin with. Rachel didn’t know when the tentative part ended, but she knew it was okay with her. It bore no resemblance to what came before it . . . or anything else. It was like chocolate fondue. Like a mild opiate. The deepest, most intense pleasure. To compare it to what happened on the beach would be ridiculous. Like comparing soft cheese to a car axle. So it was a surprise that afterwards, as she lay with her cheek against Darcy’s chest and his hand running lightly up and down her spine, her mind turned back to the day on the beach.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Darcy asked. She was lying with her head on his chest. They were relaxed and sated and tangled in the blanket.
‘I was just thinking that I . . . I wasted so much time.’
Darcy rolled onto his side and propped himself onto an elbow. ‘Maybe. But we’re here now.’
‘Yes. I guess I’m just kicking myself that I didn’t get here sooner. I didn’t realise how healing it would be, telling someone what happened.’
Darcy stared at her. ‘You mean, you’ve never told anyone? Not even your parents?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It sounds weird, I know.’
‘Not weird. But you must have had a reason. Explain it to me.’
‘Actually, I’m not sure I can. I remember seeing Dad the moment I got home from the attack. I wanted to tell him . . . I was about to. But I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.’
‘Why not?’
‘Lots of people don’t report rape,’ she said. ‘Some statistics say up to ninety per cent of rapes go unreported.’
‘I’ve heard that,’ Darcy said. ‘But I just assumed that meant they weren’t reported to the police, not that they were never spoken of at all.’
Darcy spoke gently, without judgement. And yet Rachel found herself feeling defensive. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘My instincts told me to leave it, okay?’
Darcy had a strange look on his face. He shifted on the blanket, conspicuously silent after all his questions.
‘What?’ Rachel said. ‘You think I was wrong not to say anything?’
‘Look,’ Darcy said carefully. ‘I would never presume to know what was right or wrong for another person, particularly a woman who had been raped.’
‘But . . .?’
‘But,’ he said, ‘you say you have a close, loving family. So I guess I’m wondering why your instinct was to hide the truth from your dad.’
And that was the moment Rachel started wondering the same thing.
40
TULLY
Tully should have seen it coming.
It had been a stressful week. Since the day of the auction she’d been in a bit of a downward spiral. The fact that Snobby Celia knew about her shoplifting meant it might as well have been written in the sky. Yesterday at Pilates, the room had gone silent when Tully walked in. And the moment she walked out at the end of the class, the whispers started up again. Tully could have survived the whispers at Pilates – after all, once her membership expired she couldn’t afford to renew it anyway – but a few of the ladies from Pilates were also pre-school mothers, and a day later the whispers were happening there as well. Tully understood. A few months ago Tully would have delighted in this kind of scandal herself. How fast things could change.
On top of all this, her relationship with Sonny was still on shaky ground. The fifty-odd thousand dollars she’d given him had gone some distance towards smoothing this ground, but the fact that their house hadn’t fetched the price they’d been hoping for served to undo most of this good. Add to this the fact that Dad had set a wedding date with Heather, and that Tully had taken up permanent residence on Miles’s floor during the evening hours and, suffice to say, there were a lot of emotions swirling in her mind when she was in the baking aisle at the supermarket.
This, she presumed, was what brought on the urge to take the bottle of vanilla extract. Whatever it was, as soon as her fingers closed around the smooth glass bottle, everything else faded away. Her handbag sat in the basket in the front of her trolley in the spot where the boys sat if they were with her. It would be so easy. She just needed to lean forward as if about to put the bottle in the trolley but drop it into her bag instead, like she’d done so many times before.
After her last session with Dr Shearer, Tully had started on SSRIs, as well as a drug called naltrexone, which supposedly helped to control impulse-based behaviour. Fat lot of good it was doing her. Beyond that, she’d been given some ‘exercises’ to do if she found herself in this situation. The first was the most ridiculous of them all. Breathe. Good one, doc, she’d wanted to say. She needed to shoplift in order to breathe, that was the whole point! She didn’t tell Dr Shearer this, that would be rude. Who was she to point out that the technique he’d spent his whole life studying was useless? Instead she’d just nodded and smiled . . . even muttered, Breathe! What a wonderful idea.