Page 72 of Secret Nights and Northern Lights
“I learned to make myself small, invisible, even, so I didn’t upset the precarious climate in the house. They ruined so much of my childhood—if you can even call it that. As I got older, I got better at fending for myself, better at hiding their neglect, but I became more resentful. Maybe it was seeing your parents together, being around a family that actually loves each other, I don’t know. Butthatnight, them ruining the best night of my life, something inside me just…snapped.”
“What did you do, Ben?” My voice breaks on his name.
His tired eyes focus somewhere over my shoulder, like he can’t bear to hold my gaze, like maybe he’s afraid of my judgment. “The next thing I knew, I had my father pinned against the kitchen wall. And I screamed at him to leave. Told him if he was so goddamn miserable here to leave and toneverfucking come back this time. Ever. I said if he ever so much as thought about walking through that door again, I’d tell everyone about the years and years of neglect I’d suffered at their hands.”
My stomach roils. I might be sick.
“I’ll never forget how he looked at me. He gave me this sick grin like he was somehow proud of me for losing control. Like he finally recognized a version of himself in me after all.”
“Ben…”I cannot breathe.
“The worst part was that as soon as the words were out of my mouth, my mom wrapped herself around my father’s leg like a child, begging him not to go, not to leave her. But he packed a suitcase and walked out the door with my mom still clinging to him, and he even winked at me and told me to take care of my mother as he got in his car and thankfully drove the fuck out of our lives for good. Then I picked my mom up off the wet lawn, carried her inside, and sat with her while she cried. Cried and blamed me for making him leave, that is.”
Each beat of my heart is a sharp, stabbing pain.
Ben’s beautiful green eyes, glassy with tears, focus on mine again. “Did you know she knew about us, Ems?”
“Your mom?”
He nods. “She didn’t know much, but she saw the receipt for the necklace I bought you and figured it out.”
I squeeze that very necklace in my palm.
“She told me that night that if I really cared about you, I’d leave you alone. That if I’d proven anything, it’s that I was destined to be just like my father, and I’d end up breaking you the way he’d broken her.” Ben drops his head again, and when he shrugs, it’s the saddest movement I’ve ever seen. “At the time, I believed that. So that’s what I did.”
The pieces all snap into place in my head, a puzzle I’d rather not solve. The vacant look in Ben’s eyes when I showed up to his place that day. How he’d slid outside and pulled the front door closed behind him, because he didn’t want me to see what had happened inside. The way his voice sounded hollow when he told me he was sorry. How he paled when I’d finally admitted those three words to him I’d been holding back.
Three words that I know in hindsight he felt, too.
I want to move, but I’m frozen with the weight of so many emotions bearing down on me at once. Anger that any child would have such a shitty home life in the first place. Grief because Ben deserved so much better than what life gave him. Guilt for never putting the pieces together back then.
But mostly, there’s love.
Love for seventeen-year-old Ben, who I thought used me and forgot about me after that night together, but who was actually trying to protect me. Love for the thirty-one-year-old Ben sitting across from me now with tears in his eyes. If I’m honest, I’ve loved Ben Carter since he walked up to me in that kindergarten class, and I know in this moment that no matter what happens between us in the future, I’ll love him until the day I die.
“You aren’t him, Ben. You aren’t your father,” I say, words as broken as my heart.
“I know that now,” he says, resolute. “But I didn’t then.”
“If you didn’t want to tell me about it back then, you could have told someone. My brothers or my parents. We all loved you. Any of us would have helped.”
“Your mom did help,” he says. “You just didn’t know it.”
“She did?” My world has been tipped off its axis. Everything I thought I knew back then was a rose-colored version of reality, and I was a naïve child who didn’t see what was right in front of her. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Because I asked her not to. But she started piecing things together that last year or two, and it was her, along with a school guidance counselor, who convinced the administration to let me do a home study my senior year and still graduate. She broughtdinner and groceries to our house more times than I can count. And when I took the bartending gig in the city once I turned eighteen, your mom would come and sit with my mom on the nights when she wouldn’t eat or get out of bed. When I started traveling with Dan, your mom would check in on mine. Mary Ellen was the only reason I was able to keep us above water.”
“So you were still around?” I ask. “That whole year in Hudson Springs, I thought you’d become a ghost. My brothers thought you’d become a ghost. They went to your house, Ben. They called you. They looked for you. I don’t understand.”
Ben tilts his head and delivers the saddest words I’ve ever heard. “I wasn’t a ghost. I just didn’t want to be found. And I had seventeen years’ worth of experience at hiding.”
“How did I never knowanyof this?” I demand, angry at myself for being so stupidly oblivious.
“Because I loved you, and I didn’t want you to know.” Ben scoots closer and cradles my face with the hand that isn’t clinging to mine, his thumb wiping away one of my tears. “It was my burden to bear, not yours. I’m so,sofucking sorry for breaking your heart. I was a messed-up kid in an impossible situation with no goddamn idea what I was doing. But I knew before you even showed up on my doorstep that day exactly what I’d be losing, and that brokemyheart, too.”
For fourteen years I thought he’d simply changed his mind and rejected me. Learning that he did love me but was dealing with circumstances no teenager should ever have to, any years-old resentment I had dissolves instantly.
All I want is him.
