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“Don’t what, Claire? Don’t speak the truth because it’s not something you want to hear? Because it’s disgusting? Because you don’t want to think about your brother jerking off to pornographic pictures he took of your daughter when she was a child? A teenager? Well, he probably did do it, Claire, and did it a lot, because he was a fucking pervert, but you can take solace in knowing that jerking off to pictures of me is actually the least horrible thing he ever did.”
“Please stop—”
“There was much worse,” Paige told her mother evenly. “Remember all those weekends I spent at his house? You’d drop me off and then go and do whatever you wanted to do, leaving me there alone with him—”
“I didn’t know. I thought he was—”
“Whatever you thought was wrong. Did you know sometimes he barely waited for you to back out of the fucking driveway before he was on me, pulling my clothes off? No, you didn’t. Well, now you do.”
Claire began crying in earnest, and David felt like crying, too, at the horrific picture Paige had just painted. Not for the first time, he wished Carter was still alive so David could kill him, slowly and painfully.
“Is this hard to hear? Tough. Shit. It was hard to be molested for thirteen years by a pedophile. That’s what was hard. Being raped, sometimes in the middle of the night, being forced to suck his uncircumcised dick starting when I was ten, while he stroked my hair and called me his ‘pretty little girl’ and destroyed every last bit of my childhood.” Paige shook her head. “Yeah, so finding out there were naked pictures of me isn’t that bad, relatively speaking.” Then, after a quick beat, she asked, almost conversationally, “So, what did you end up doing with the pictures?”
“I destroyed them.”
Paige gazed at Claire, seeing the misery on her face, not knowing if it was for what Paige had gone through or because Claire had been forced to face an appalling truth about her brother. “You know that day I came to your house and told you about Carter? I imagined you responding like this. With anguish and sorrow, because you were supposed to believe me.”
“I’m sorry,” Claire whispered, backing up against the door, as if needing the support. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve believed you then, but I believe you now, and that’s the main reason I wanted to talk to you—”
“You only believe me now, because you have to, since you saw pornographic pictures of me taken by your brother, with your own eyes. You shouldn’t have needed proof, though, because I was your fucking daughter, and I had no reason to lie to you. Had you believed me, we could’ve drawn strength from each other and healed together, but you didn’t believe me and I actually had to spend extra time in therapy having to deal with your betrayal and your vicious rejection, along with everything else.
“So the fact that you believe me now doesn’t count for shit, because I don’t need you to believe me anymore. I have people who did believe me and who helped me get through the worst hell of my life, so your trip here is completely wasted. Your belief is three years too late and your apologies will never be enough.” Paige gently pulled away from David and walked to the door, opening it. “Goodbye, Claire,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“Paige, wait.” Claire’s voice was heavy with desperation. “I read your book.”
Paige tilted her head. “Was that before, or after, you found the pictures?” she asked softly.
Claire swallowed hard and her eyes widened at the question, not answering it.
“That’s what I thought.” Taking her mother by the shoulder, Paige pushed her out into the hall and without another word, closed the door and engaged the deadbolt for good measure. Then, pretending to dust her hands off, she murmured, “Well, that’s over.”
David briefly contemplated letting that truly be the end of it, but then found himself shaking his head. “Not quite,” he said, quickly unlocking and re-opening the door, then slipping out into the hall where Claire was still standing, as if she didn’t know what to do.
“You stupid cunt,” he said coldly, after closing the door, shocking her with his icy anger, as well as his words. “What the fuck were you thinking, doing this on her birthday?”
“I—”
“You could’ve just told her you believed her, without mentioning the pictures. You should’ve kept that shit to yourself. But you didn’t, and now she’s going to have to deal with knowing he took pictures of her—when she was a child, no less—so you’ve just given Paige something else to put behind her and she’s had more than enough to put behind her already.” He released an aggravated breath. “Stupid. Fucking. Cunt.”
“David, please. I know I’ve made mistakes—”
“What you’ve done doesn’t qualify as ‘mistakes’.”
“—but I want to try and re-build what I destroyed.”
For a moment, all he could think was that Claire was beyond delusional, if she thought there was a chance to ‘re-build’ anything with her daughter. “I’m usually a ‘glass-half-full’ kind of guy, but not on this, Claire. The glass isn’t even half-empty here. It’s totally empty. You’re too late. You were actually too late the minute you said reprehensible, unforgivable things to Paige and threw her out of your house like garbage.
“You should’ve believed her when she told you what Carter had done to her and not called her a lying bitch. You could’ve been a real mother and helped your daughter heal, but instead, you compounded the problem and took the side of her abuser.
“You need to leave her alone, Claire. I mean it. Please take Paige at her word when she said she doesn’t ever want to see you again. What you did to her was almost worse than what Carter did to her. Now get the fuck out of here and get used to not having a daughter, because Paige doesn’t have a mother.”
David waited for Claire to start walking away before going back into Paige’s apartment. She was standing in the exact spot where he’d left her, and with a gentle smile, he pulled her against him and held her tightly. “Now it’s over.”
Chapter 86
For the first time in a very long time, Paige was plagued with insomnia. She wasn’t surprised, since it had happened frequently when she was going through rigorous therapy sessions and dealing with flashbacks, but it still depressed her. In turn, she also became anxious that another flashback was imminent, one that would be a specific moment in time of being posed and photographed by Carter.
After a few sessions with Lauren to discuss Claire’s visit and her revelations, Paige began to feel a little better. Lauren was of the opinion that Paige was needlessly stressing herself over something that likely wouldn’t happen, especially given that all of her previous flashbacks had been to reveal enough abuse to enlighten, but not enough to be crippling. And, since Paige had been told about the pictures, that made a ‘reveal’ unnecessary, and therefore highly unlikely.
