Page 13 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

"I'll be okay," I said. "Go home."

She studied my face.

"Fifteen minutes away. You call me for anything." She kissed the top of my head and gathered her things. "Eat something. Toast, even. Drink some water."

At the door she turned like she had one more thing to say, decided against it, and let herself out with a soft click.

The house went quiet in a way it had never been quiet before, because before there had always been the chance of Brad in it. Whiskers crossed the floor and jumped up beside me. I had one more call to make, the phone heavy in my hand, my father's name sitting on the screen. I picked it up and set it down twice.

I sat with my thumb over his name a while before I pressed it.

I was seven the year my mother left. I don't remember her going. I remember him after, sitting at the kitchen table with the big light off, not eating, still as a building with a load-bearing element removed. She'd wanted more than us. That was how I understood it, in what he said and mostly what he didn't. Wanting was what burned a family down.

And he was the only one I had left. I wanted to please him so badly it organized my whole childhood. I buried anything in me that might make that dark kitchen happen again.

He never said don't be like her. He said it in smaller ways. Do you want to be respected, Lacey, or used? You don't get to choose after. Good girls don't need so much. I was a bright child. I learned.

By fifteen, half-listening to my friends talk about boys, I understood that whatever ran under my surface ran hotter than theirs, a wanting with a strange insistent weight to it that the other girls didn't seem to carry and I already knew never to say out loud.

He had loved Brad. From the first time I brought him home, Dad had looked at him the way you look at an answered prayer, the proof that I had come out right, after my mother left, that he had done my raising well enough on his own. That's a good man, Lacey. Steady. He'll take care of you.

Now I had to tell him his good man had been on our couch with two college girls while I was three miles away looking after other people's sick children.

I dialed before I could stop myself.

Two rings. Then his voice, warm, the one that could still reach all the way back.

"Hey, baby girl. How's my favorite doctor?"

I almost couldn't answer it. "Hi, Daddy." I had not called him that in years. It came out small.

"You sound tired, sweetheart. Long day?"

"Dad." I made myself say it flat and fast, delivering a diagnosis. "Brad's leaving. We're getting divorced."

The silence was complete enough that I could hear the clock in his kitchen.

Then his voice changed, and the first thing out of him, before anything else, was, "What did you do, Lacey?"

I had known it might come, and it still went in clean.

"I didn't do anything." My voice held, barely. "He had an affair."

A disbelieving breath. "Brad? Come on. That man wouldn't cheat on his own shadow. What happened, did you two stop getting along? Did you stop paying him any attention? You know how men get."

I cut him off. "I have a recording, Dad."

That stopped him. "A recording of what?"

"A cat cam. For Whiskers. I watched him. On our couch. Two girls, college age, in the middle of the afternoon."

He let out a long breath. I could see him rubbing his jaw. "Was it love, at least? Because a man like Brad doesn't blow up a good marriage over nothing."

"It wasn't love. It was two girls together while I was working. There was nothing wrong with me that he was fixing."

When he spoke he had retreated to safe ground. "People don't throw away fifteen years for no reason. Maybe he's not well. Maybe something happened to him that you don't know about."

"What did he say?" he asked, before I could answer. "When you confronted him. Did he have any explanation at all?"