Page 67 of Tough Love

“It’s not your fault,” I reassure him. “You did the best you could. Shit, we were young, Evan. What chance did we stand, really?”

“What finally stopped the guy?” Jess whispers.

“Tristan saw a guy from school talking to me as I walked out to the car one day. Got jealous. Went crazy.”

“She turned up to school the next day with a split lip and some bullshit excuse about tripping over,” Evan fills in.

“Andstillnobody twigged?”

“How could they?” I shrug. “Mum and Dad worked until five. They wouldn’t get home until six some nights, so Kath and I were left to fend for ourselves after school. As far as they knew, I was just hanging with friends.”

“But what did you tell them when you came home with split lip?”

Evan tilts his head to see me better, waiting on my answer.

“I said I got in a fight with a girl over a lie that was going around about me.”

“And they bought it?”

I nod in answer to Jess’s question. “Yeah. All the lies I gave them about where I was, who I was seeing, they thought I was a typical delinquent, off the rails and out of control. In their eyes I was the bad kid, misbehaving for attention.”

“That’s whacked.”

“It’s more common than you’d realise,” Evan says. “I see it a lot: parents who don’t realise what their children are up to because the kid has concealed it so well.”

“So he left you alone after that?” Jess asks.

“Not quite.” I glance at Evan, aware this is the part he’s only heard about through gossip.

He gives my hand a squeeze, leaning over to place a chaste kiss to my lips. “It’s okay.”

Jess cocks her head to the side, her wine glass pressed against her bottom lip as she frowns.

“I didn’t see Tristan for two weeks,” I continue. “Thought he’d given himself a fright when he marked my face, scared himself by thinking it might have given the game away. But he’d just been out of town. Kath told me after the first week; she was mad he’d left without saying anything.”

“So what, he was still dating your sister the whole time too?”

“Yeah. Kath had a job after school five days a week. We always dropped her off first, and then he took me back to his.”

“And you didn’t say anything to her because of his threat to kill her?”

I nod.

“Shit, Amelia.”

“Right?” I laugh to save from crying again. It’s so screwed up in retrospect, but living it was like fighting to survive with tunnel vision—I couldn’t see the end, only a path that seemed to extend forever. “When he came back, all hell broke loose.”

Evan slips his hand to my shoulder, rubbing up and down slowly as he no doubt prepares for what he’s heard comes next.

Only he doesn’t know all of it.

Nobody in the town did.

“Two days before Tristan showed up at the school again, I’d been to see the family planning nurse.”

“To get tested?” Jess asks. “For STDs?”

“Pregnancy.”

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