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“You have no idea.”
His eyes met hers and he stilled at the openness staring back at him.
She looked away, her brow pinching into thin lines as she toyed with the gold crucifix hanging from his neck. “Did you ever want to say something, but when you try, your words don’t make a sound?”
“Sure.”
“That’s how I’ve felt most of my life.” She pressed the crucifix to his chest and stopped fidgeting. “I know what everyone thinks of me. I know how mean I’ve been. The way they think of me… It’s my fault. I chose to be a bitch.”
“People can change.” And how well did they really know her? The woman he saw tonight was not the woman he always suspected she was.
She looked up at him. “Do you actually believe that? Do you honestly think people can change at our age?”
“Yes, I do. But I also think it’s a lot easier for us to change than it is to change other people’s opinions of us.”
Her head sank against the pillows. “They’ll never see me differently.”
“How do you know? Show people a different side and they might surprise you.”
“I can’t. I hate feeling vulnerable around others.”
He was starting to figure that out. No vulnerability. No intimacy. “Why?”
The silence stretched and he wondered if she was trying to tell him but her words refused to make a sound. He scoured his mind for possible reasons a girl might be so intimidated by intimacy.
“Did someone force you to do something you didn’t want to do?”
She shook her head.
“But someone hurt you.”
She nodded.
“Someone close to you?”
She nodded again and a tear trailed down her face.
“Your brother?”
She didn’t shake her head or nod. He’d watched Harrison that afternoon, noting the way he stood by his sister’s side and held her arm for support. Siblings argued. Sometimes words hurt, but he didn’t believe Harrison would ever purposefully harm his sister.
“Maybe Harrison disappointed you, but he’s not the one who hurt you, is he?”
She looked up at him and shook her head.
That left one other person. “Your dad?”
Her lips trembled and she sucked in a sharp breath that shook like another aftershock of a sob.
Her dad hurt her? He pictured Ward and tried to imagine him angry. He couldn’t envision it. The guy always kept to himself and he had the best crumb cake around. Erin’s crumb cake.
He looked at her cheek, really looked at it. “How did you get the bruise on your face, Erin?”
She shut her eyes and he knew at that moment it hadn’t been from the car accident.
He pulled her closer, hugging her to his chest and kissing the top of her head. “Try to get some sleep.”
She just trusted him with a huge piece of personal information and he wanted to know more, but it was not the time to pressure her. His first instinct was to protect her, but from what? A ghost?
