Page 94 of Stone Rules

“If he turns out to be the bastard you’ve always thought him to be, he’ll be out of your life in thirty minutes. But what if the opposite happens, Charlie? What if he turns out to be the father you never knew you had? The father you never knew you wanted? It’s worth a twenty-minute conversation, right, snookums?”

“Oh, my God.” She spins around in her chair. “That’s even worse than ‘peaches.’ If you ever call me that again, I won’t do that thing you like me to do. You know, that thing I did last week that drove you—”

“Got it,” I say, interrupting her. “Never again.” I hold my hand out to her. At twenty-four weeks, she’s starting to get big enough that getting out of chairs is becoming a little more difficult. “Let’s do this.”

Forty-five minutes and one very needed late-morning scotch later, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what George has told us. He went over everything that he told Charlie a few months ago. He went over all of it in painful detail. As a man, I was a bit skeptical about another man being abused by his wife. But listening to his story, I get it. I get how it started out as Caroline being a controlling woman. She had him over a barrel with his career. With their finances. As he tells it, the abuse started out slowly. Months would go by between instances, so he thought maybe she had changed. By the time her attacks came on a more regular basis, she’d already worn him down so much he didn’t think he had a choice but to be with her. He loved her. Despite what she did to him, he thought he loved her. But now he knows he was really only in love with the women she would portray on the screen.

His red-rimmed eyes look at Charlie as she sits beside me on the couch, holding onto my leg for dear life as he pours his heart and soul out to her from the chair across from us. “You will never know how sorry I am for not taking you with me. For not coming back to get you. I have no excuse for not fighting for you, Charlie. All I can say is that she was rich and powerful and I thought there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d let me have you. I knew no judge would give a child to an unemployed screenwriter whose only source of income was alimony from his ex-wife. If she’d had her way, I never would have gotten that, either.”

He takes a drink from the bottle of water I’d offered him, declining the stronger route I’d taken myself. “If I had known what she did to you after I left, I’d have found a way, Charlie. I would have kidnapped you. I would have figured something out. But I had no idea. I swear I had no idea she hurt you. I had no idea she . . . letmenhurt you.” He looks physically pained when he reveals that, like I’d punched him in the gut.

Charlie stiffens beside me. I know this is news to her. She told him about the hitting, the burns, but not about the men. But before either of us can ask him about it, he says, “I know about the men, Charlie. Or more specifically, one man. I can only assume there were more.”

“How?” I ask, squeezing Charlie’s hand to remind her I’m here for her.

“It was last December. Before your mom died. Before you came back to New York. I was sitting at a bar watching a football game when I overheard a drunken conversation at the table next to me.” He shakes his head in disgust, rubbing a hand across his jaw. I can tell he doesn’t want to say aloud the words he’s about to speak. “The men were comparing their sexual conquests. They were trying to one-up each other. It was an interesting conversation to say the least, so I found myself eavesdropping. One of the men said he’d not only slept with a movie star, but with her lookalike daughter. He told the other man if he’d never had a” —he looks at Charlie with tears pooling in his eyes— “sweet young girl, he needed to try it sometime. He said all he had to do to get the daughter was guarantee the mom an audition for his upcoming film. He said it was like taking candy from a baby.”

George looks like he’s going to hyperventilate, and as a father, I feel every emotion I see cross his broken face. “When his friend asked him who the movie star was and he said your mother’s name, I had to run to the bathroom and throw up.”

Charlie is pale. I make her drink some fruit juice while George gathers himself.

“When I was cleaning myself up, I looked in the mirror, disgusted at myself for not protecting you. I knew you left home when you were eighteen so I knew it had to have happened before that. This guy was in his forties. It didn’t take much to put two and two together. I punched my reflection in the mirror, sending shards of glass to the floor. One of the pieces was jagged and in the perfect shape of a knife. So I rolled up some paper towels and bunched them around one end so I wouldn’t slice my hand open. I put it under my coat and walked back out into the bar. I wanted to kill him right then and there, but I knew his friend would jump me, so I went out front and waited for him to come out. I knew he would. The guy had been going outside to smoke every twenty minutes. I stood outside, planning his death. I saw it play out in my head, right down to the number of times I was going to stab him in the chest. I was insane with fury that just seemed to burn deeper every time someone walked out the front door.

“When he finally came out, I watched him for a minute. I watched him light a cigarette. I watched him lean against the building. I watched him stare at women walking past the bar. All the while, my hand working itself around the makeshift handle of my knife.

“I walked over to him and told him who I was and that I was Charlie Tate’s father. He had no idea who I was or what that should mean to him. Then I told him I was Charlie Anthony’s father and that I was sitting behind him in the bar ten minutes ago. Then I told him I was going to kill him.

“Before I could even pull the knife out, he pushed me down and started running away, turning around to see if I was following. I was still trying to pick myself up off the ground when he ran right out into traffic and got hit by a car.”

“Oh, God,” Charlie says. “Peter Elliot.”

My jaw twitches at the revelation and for a moment, I find myself admiring the father sitting across from me.

George nods. “I didn’t know his name until days later when I’d read about the accident in the paper. I read that he’d drunkenly stumbled into traffic, being struck by a car that caused massive damage, putting him in intensive care. I remember being upset the accident hadn’t killed him. I didn’t have one ounce of guilt that he ran into traffic because of me. I still don’t. He deserved that, Charlie. He deserved that and more.

“I have a friend who works in the hospital so he was able to find out about his recovery. He’s still in rehab for his spinal injury and the guy may never walk again. He must have never told the authorities about me, because no one ever came around asking about him.”

He lowers his head, resting his elbows on his knees as he slowly breathes in and out. He makes eye contact with Charlie. “I take it he wasn’t the only one, Charlie. How many of them were there? How many men did she let use you?”

Charlie closes her eyes, a tear escaping one of them as she says, “Twelve.”

George puts his head in his hands, sobbing quietly as he realizes the full extent of her nightmare. “I’m so sorry,” he chants over and over.

I feel bad for the guy. What happened to Charlie is not his fault. He wasn’t the one who hit her, burned her, molested her. He didn’t even know it was happening. But I also know he’ll never look at it that way. He will blame himself forever.

What if I’d taken Cat to daycare that day instead of a distracted Cara? What if I would have skipped class and spent the day in the park with her as I’d often done. What if I’d called Cara earlier in the day?

I want to tell him it’s not his fault. That his only mistake was leaving without Charlie. That he had no way of knowing what would happen. But it’s not my place to offer him forgiveness.

Charlie doesn’t say a word. Her body is frozen to mine as she stares blankly at the wall. I want to know what she’s feeling. What she’s thinking. But with George here, I know she won’t tell me.

“You need to give her time” I say, standing up to dismiss him. “It took a lot of guts for her to agree to this meeting. And now, after hearing all this. Well, you just need to give her time.”

He nods, getting up off the chair to make his way to the door. But before he leaves, Charlie surprises us both by speaking. “I’ve read your books,” she says.

We both whip around and look at her. This is news to me. I had no idea she had done that.

“You have?” he asks, a glimmer of hope shining through the pain in his eyes.

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