Page 45 of Good Guy Gabe

It’s enough to break me. Laughter bubbles out of me, and only Gabe shimmying between my legs and kissing me gets me to stop. “You’re going to wake the entire house, and then you’re gonna have to tell Rydell you were laughing at him. Now here, drink this.”

He stays in my space as I sip my tea, his hands absently wandering under the hem of the jersey but not going too far. It’s just touch. Just contact. I savor my sip for a moment longer than I need to before I say, “I was 20 years old when I met Brian Edgars. He was 32. In retrospect, I should have known something was up then, but what girl ever realizes she’s being groomed until after the fact?”

Gabe hums, just a single note, and then those hands travel further up the jersey. To my waist, to pull me closer.

This is good. This is safe. In his arms, I don’t have to be scared of the story.

“He seemed amazing. He was kind and understanding and so incredibly smart. You expect someone like him to be controlling, but he wasn’t. Not in any obvious way. I was still in college, and he encouraged me to finish. He liked that I was a pageant contestant but also a business major, said it proved that I was motivated. He was finishing up his residency and planning to start his own practice. Said he’d need someone who could run the administrative side of the practice. That could be me.

“I ate it up. Every word of it. My mom had died the year before. Scholarship money from the pageants was the only thing that kept me in school, and my grades were slipping because I was working so much to cover expenses. Brian helped with all that.”

Gabe smiles reassuringly. “I don’t know how anyone in that situation could have been thinking clearly enough to see someone like that for what he was.”

I want to point out that he has no idea what Brian was, but he would have gotten only the absolute worst of it from those news articles. Instead, I take the moment to breathe in his scent. We both need a shower, but his musk blended with the sandalwood in his bodywash is a comfort.

“I married him straight out of college. I finished in May, moved to Wilmington in June, married in July, bought the house in August. He gifted it to me. He told me since I owned the house free and clear but his practice was in it, I could trust he’d never leave me, and I actually thought it was romantic. Turned out, that’s the only reason it survived the civil suits. I . . .” I shake my head. “I don’t know why he gifted me the house. I don’t know why he did anything. One day, life was normal, happy, perfect, exactly what I thought I wanted, and the next day, one of his patients is dead. And it was awful, right, but he’s a surgeon. An oral surgeon, but his patients are still getting anesthesia; it’s always a risk. I must have spent a week terrified that he was going to lose his license, and what was going to happen then?

“And then they did the autopsy. She was fourteen years old. A flautist, and she was getting corrective surgery for her jaw and was scared she wouldn’t be able to play anymore. They discovered she’d been raped. Brian raped her while she was sedated. According to him, she came to in the middle of it, so he, um, he gave her more anesthetic. Too much more.”

“Come here,” Gabe murmurs even though I’m already pressed against him, but he sinks enough that I can throw my arms around him and dry my damp eyes on his shoulder as hekisses my neck. “You didn’t do it. You didn’t hurt that girl. You didn’t know.”

“I should have!” I sniffle to clear my thoughts. “She wasn’t the only victim. No one knows how many there were. Four that we know of. They all came forward while we were waiting for the trial. He was charged with assault and second-degree murder for the one girl, but it was taking forever to start. There were both criminal and civil trials happening, and since they went with second-degree, he was able to make bail. He was still living at home, sharing a bed with me. I didn’t believe his lies, that he was at fault for the girl’s death but not the assaults, he’d just made a terrible mistake, but I . . . I . . .”

I let it happen because I didn’t have a choice.

“It must have been terrifying for you,” Gabe says, but he has to think I’m one of those women who believe their criminal husbands are innocent to the point of embarrassing themselves.

“One of the girls who came forward, she was sixteen, and she wasn’t a virgin. But she swore she didn’t know how she could have been pregnant, that she hadn’t been active at the time. Everyone thought she was lying. The other kids bullied her. Her parents thought they could force her to admit who the father was if they pushed hard enough. No one believed her that she truly didn’t know — because she was raped by my husband and had no idea. They put the kid up for adoption when they were born. I tried to take the baby in, but my lawyers wouldn’t let me. Said it would look bad if I embraced anything related to Brian. But it was a baby. They needed someone who would have loved and protected them, and that could have been me. I could have—!”

I cut myself off once I realize I’ve gotten hysterical. I couldn’t get any information about that baby. I didn’t have any right to it. They weren’t mine, no genetic relation, only a horrificconnection. I don’t even know if it was a girl or a boy or if the adopted parents are local or not. I still think about them frequently, whenever I see a kid about that age who looks at all like Brian. I’ve lost nights of sleep wondering if Keira Allore’s friend is the one who had the kid, if that’s why she hates me so much.

And now I’m blabbering about how much I wanted that kid to Gabe. Not only am I spilling the nightmare of Brian’s crimes out on him, I’m bordering on forcing the baby conversation on him.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper as evenly as I can, fiercely swiping more tears away. “It’s . . . never mind, it’s dumb.”

Gabe kisses my forehead and says, “I’ve seen your nursery.”

“Shit.” I shouldn’t be surprised about it. He’s been over there enough that he probably didn’t realize when I told him not to go in there, I meant it was off-limits. And off-limits purely because of my own insanity that refuses to let go of the past or even have this one critical conversation with him.

“You wanted to adopt that baby so badly you set up your home to welcome them.”

My brain shuts down at that, at the idea that I would have done something like that, that the truth of why I really wanted to adopt that baby wasn’t so incredibly pathetic. I peel away from him, and he lets me. He even looks hopeful, like we’ve gotten over the worst of it and I’ll be happy for his support and understanding here.

I grab my cup and hold it between my hands, a crucial barrier.

“A lot of people didn’t believe me that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t in on it in some way. I was working in the office, I setup appointments, I knew these girls. And he liked to brag about how I was a pageant queen, and you know there’s all kinds of nasty stuff behind the scenes there.” I take a sip of my tea, frown down at it, and wrinkle my nose. The first couple of sips were fine, but this one’s off. Probably my rapidly souring mood. “They think we’re all nasty in the pageant world. That’s why Emily Hess tried to get me removed from the fundraiser. Why Keira Allore hates me so much.”

“I’m going to talk to them,” Gabe insists for the millionth time.

“You won’t. They’re entitled to their feelings, and they’re not hurting me.”

“You were crushed!”

I look him in the eye, needing him to see me and not his idea of me or the world around me. Not what a perfect world should be like but what it actually is. “Gabe, I lost everything in the civil suits. Everything except that house. I didn’t have anything going into the marriage. I narrowly avoided bankruptcy. And on the day the judge decided that everything was done properly so the house could not be seized, I was leaving the courthouse, and someone threw a rock at me. I don’t think they meant to seriously hurt—Gabe!” I shriek as he backs out of my space, only to punch a hole through the drywall next to the fridge.

He stands there for several seconds, taking deep breaths and staring hard at where his fist has just vanished, before he reclaims it from the void between the studs. “Are they in jail now?”

I shrug. “I don’t know who did it. I was knocked out and—stop!” I whimper as he puts yet another hole in that wall.

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