Page 130 of Falling Too Late

He took the porch stairs and walked barefoot out on the lawn, turning back to me.

“I left you to gokillhim.” He gestured wide with his hands.

“I know, Alex. I know you did, and today, right now with you here in front of me, that is what needed to happen. I could not have gone on with him still walking this earth. No matter what happened that day, him being dead is the greatest gift you could ever give me.” I was standing, moving down the steps to follow him. I didn’t like the distance he’d created. The void between us was getting bigger by the second. “But that day, after everything he did to me, you still leftme.”

It was like I opened the dam and the words didn’t stop. “You left me there bleeding and broken on the floor for someone else to pick up the pieces. Someone I never even wanted to be there in the first place.”

“I came back to you, Wren. As soon as he was dead, I came back.”

“Yes, you came back, and you were ripped away from me, tased and arrested.” The words came out angrily.

His mouth parted to speak but I interrupted him.

“I had no time to heal, Alex. I immediately went to the ER and had another rape kit done because I wanted them to have the evidence to help you. I had them pull my first rape kit and had it run and evaluated because I wanted them to know that you did everything to save me. But of course, justice would never be on my side, because they didn’t include what happened to me in that courtroom. They treated what he did to me and what you did to him as two totally separate things.” I ran a hand through my hair, catching on the tangles. “Then we got the diagnosis of your mom, and then she died.” I was walking in circles now, pausing only to catch his gaze. “And then, Alex.” My voice rattled with the pain. Tears bloomed in my eyes and ran down my cheeks in hot rivers. “Then you died.” Gloria’s death hurt, but Alex’s death wrecked me.

“Wren, I never died. I?—”

“Yes you did!” I screamed the words that were swallowed up by the trees. “No matter the miracle of you standing here in front of me today, the universe still played its sickest joke on me! First, it gives me you, and you save me. Your mom takes me in and loves me like I am her own, and then the rug is ripped out from under me, and you and her both die withinmonthsof each other. I had no time to grieve her before you were dead, and then I was grieving the both of you.” My hands dropped to my sides, exhaustion hitting me. “Then I was fighting the state to get your. . .your body. Jon had spun this story that because there was no living relative, I couldn’t claim you, so they were holding your body for five years, and then I could collect your ashes and finally put you to rest with your mother.” I pushed my hair out of my eyes, holding my throbbing head.

The anger that I thought I had a handle on was coming out of a bottomless pit. “I ordered your headstone, Alex. I had your name, your birthday, and your death date engraved. I was trying to figure out if I putloving son and friend, and my heart broke all over when I realized that there was no space for me to be buriednext to you in the cemetery. That our names wouldn’t be on the same headstone.”

My body was limp and I just wanted to lie down. I wanted to go to him and be held, be comforted. “I’m not pissed at you, Alex, I’m just. . .” I fought for the right words. “It’s just been a lot to take in this last month. Everything has happened so fast, and I just need to take some time to process everything.”

I brought my eyes up to look at him again and he held my stare, his head shaking slightly.

“Wren, youshouldstill be pissed at me.” He pointed to himself, the gesture hitting him right in his own chest. “If I would have made sure he died in that fire, if I would have just finished him off ten years ago, you would have never gone through that again. It would have been over. But because I broke my promise,thathappened again.”

I heard the way he stressed that one particular word.

That.

“Rape.”

He flinched, then cast his eyes down. I could see the disconnect now. The way he had been avoiding the word. Avoiding that night. Everything up until now had been about my abandoning him. Jon’s betrayal to us.

We hadn’t talked about that night, though. It was always him killing Kevin. Never Kevin raping me.

“Alex, say it.”

He turned his back to me. It was then I could see the brick wall he’d built around himself. Around what had happened to me. Before, I had always kept a barrier around what had been done to me in the apartment. To me, it was another Tuesday, but to Alex, I could see the confusion and anger that hearing about my abuse caused him. I had always been careful about how I said things, I never wanted to upset him, but the fact of the matter was that itshouldbe upsetting. It shouldn’t be something that was tiptoed around, and I had set the path for tiptoeing.

“Alexander James Harper.”

His head tilted back to the sky, and I watched as his shoulders lifted and dropped.

“Raped. I was raped that day.” I walked around, forcing him to look at me. “He broke into our home, quietly came upstairs, closed the door, and he raped me.” There was no way Alex knew everything. The word was a blanket statement. It gave no detail of what had actually happened that day.

“Wren. . . Stop. . .”

Just like in the police report, I had to be specific. I had to say exactly what had been done to me point blank. I couldn’t leave room for his imagination.

“I was lying in bed, still naked waiting for you, he sodomized me, then vaginally raped me. He beat me and choked me. He left me alive only because he planned on finding me again and doing it all over.”I could see his body vibrating with rage. His hands were fisted at his side and he wouldn’t look at me. If I didn’t know him, I would think he was about to reach out and hit me. “If you hadn’t killed him, he would have come back and done it again.”

“Wren.” He rushed at me, cupping my face. I placed my hands over his. His amber eyes held mine. “You can tell me it wasn’t my fault until you are blue in the face. You can make me sayrapea million times, but you can never convince me that what happened to you that day wasn’t my fault, because I failed you. I swore to protect you, and I failed. I broke that promise. It wasn’t on purpose, but I broke it.”

“You are holding yourself responsible for someone else's actions and that's not fair to you!”

He ripped his hands away from me. “How was it fair to you!? How was it fair that your own mother sold you to someone! I just. . .” He ran his hands down his face. “After all these years, I still can’t fathom that kind of heartlessness.”

---