Page 51 of Reckoning

When you were born, with your head of dark hair, we cried again—this time, tears of joy. Because we knew that at least you weren’t Conrad’s. At the very least, we had that burden off our backs. He could never come for you. Joseph put his name on the birth certificate, and from that moment forward, he was your father.

We were safe for years. I really allowed myself to believe that he would let me go. I went back to work. I finished my GED. And I raised you the way I always wanted to, with love and compassion. You turned into such a wonderful, caring young woman. And we probably would have been safe except for my trip. Do you remember? I had to return to New York a few weeks before your sixteenth birthday. I can’t tell you why—it’s Meyer’s story to tell if he chooses to. But I think that was how Conrad discovered us. All I knew was that Meyer needed me, and I couldn’t leave him alone.

After your birthday, I came so close to telling you everything. I’m so sorry, baby girl. Please forgive me. Every time I tried to speak about what happened, the weight of all those years came crashing down on me, and I couldn’t breathe. Your father wanted to move, but I knew he would find us no matter what. All I could do was pray that he would forget. I see now how horribly, horribly naïve I was.

I hope Meyer gives you this note. I hope you are holding onto your contagious optimism. I hope… God, I hope he hasn’t hurt you. The Meyer I knew was sensitive and kind, but as I said, that was a long time ago.

I love you so much. You are and always have been the light of my life. You helped me heal from years of abuse and oppression. And I believe that someday I will hold you in my arms again. I’ll walk you down the aisle as you wed your love; I’ll hold your child and shower him or her with more love than you can possibly imagine.

We are working on everything we can to find you and bring you home. I won’t stop until we’re together again.

With all my love and more, your mother

I stared at the final words in shock. My father wasn’t my biological father. I’d never known my grandparents not because they’d passed on, but because we were hiding. And my mother … my mother had been kidnapped and raped as a teenager, and imprisoned for years. I waited for the tears to come, but they didn’t. It wasn’t sadness or grief I felt, it was red-hot anger.

I was fucking furious with Meyer.

All this time, he’d made my mother out to have abandoned him, running out on her obligations. In reality, she was just trying to survive. He had been eight when she left—surely, he could have seen something was wrong! I crumpled the paper in my hand but then immediately smoothed it back out, not wanting to mar my mother’s handwriting. No, he needed to answer for this. I wasn’t going to let him get away with twisting the truth anymore. If he refused to see reality, I would hold his eyes open until he couldn’t look away.

My footsteps sounded loudly on the hard floors, soles smacking against wood as I hunted down my captor in his own house.

“Meyer!” I yelled. “Come here!” I wasn’t going to let him fuck with my head anymore. Any inkling that my mother was in the wrong or that I somehow deserved even a fraction of what was being done to me was gone. Conrad was a worse man than I had ever thought possible. Where was Meyer’s mother? Someone else he’d kept captive for years before he grew tired of her, or killed when she tried to escape? And all this time, he’d tried to make me feel bad.

“Where the hell are—”

I came up short, walking into the sitting room. I’d never spent much time in here, but Meyer looked at home now in front of a roaring fire, legs crossed at the knee and studying a piece of paper identical to the one I now held in my hand. At home except for the shake of the paper as he read it one final time before crumpling it into a ball.

“What do you want, Madeline.” His tone was deadpan, no real question in his voice.

I set my feet on the floor gently as I approached, trying not to disturb the silence that suddenly felt too precious to shatter.

“What did it say?”

“I will die before I tell you.”

I sank to my knees before him, set my letter to the side, and placed a hand on his leg. He laughed out loud.

“You said you’d never get on your knees before me, yet here we are.”

I wanted to slap him, but he was hiding so much pain. He’d been drowning in it for so long, and it was only when his hand nearly slipped below the surface that I finally noticed. What did my mother want to say to him? “Meyer, please st—please talk to me.”

“What is there to say, Madeline?” He dragged his hand down his face and then threw the paper into the fire before him, eyes glowing in the flames. “Things will always be the same. We are who we are. No letter is going to change that.”

God, he was insufferable. I’d seen the man break down twice in twenty-four hours, but he still wouldn’t open up to me.

He picked up a glass from the table next to his chair, drinking deeply from the amber liquid. I doubted he was supposed to be drinking again, but it didn’t seem wise to say so. My heart was rubber, bouncing around my chest uncontrollably.

“Why did my mom have to come visit you right before my sixteenth birthday?”

He leaned forward on his elbows and exhaled heavily through his nose, but he answered without hesitation. He stared into the fire as she spoke. It had to be burning his retinas away. “I tried to kill myself. The first time. Anita found me bleeding out in the bathtub and called an ambulance, but no one rode with me to the hospital. I don’t know how Eva found out what I’d done, but when I woke up, she was sitting beside me. I’m sure Conrad was monitoring me while I was admitted, even if he never came to see me himself. The day they released me to go home, he told me to pack a bag because we had to go to Iowa.”

So it was true. My mother’s heart had broken for her other child, the one she left behind. And when she tried to comfort him, he ended up throwing it in her face. “Didn’t you fight him? Try to talk him out of it?”

He snorted. “Of course not. I’d been released into his care. I had no autonomy while under psychiatric supervision. He threatened to have me institutionalized if I didn’t come along. He barely saw me as human as it was, so it wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch. I didn’t know about you, of course, but he must have.” His tongue darted out to run across his lower lip. “He’d seemed so excited. He must have already decided what he was going to do.” One of his cheeks moved as he gnawed on the inside of his mouth. “I built this house after that. It was the only way I could get distance. There was nowhere else for me to go.”

I picked up his free hand and turned it in mine, running my fingers over his wrist. He barely had a scar, but when I looked, I could see a faint line over his pulse point stretching up to his elbow. It was nearly invisible next to the deeper scar on top of his arm, one that had never healed as well for some reason.

“What’s this one from?” I touched the other scar, running my hand over the bump that spanned the length of his forearm. He shook off my hand.

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