Page 57 of Nineteen Seventy-Six

“Sounds nice,” Evangeline said, taking another sip.

“It is, in a way. This is nice, too, in a way.” Cassie looked down into the cup, frowned, and set it aside. “Everyone fights for their way of life eventually, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s all small towns are, people fighting to keep things in a bottle, a pocket in time. Preserved, unchanging. And Cambridge? Well, we have pockets, too. We’re creating one, now, the two of us, living together. Our way of staying safe, to protect what we love.”

“Our lives, you mean.”

“More than our lives. We’ll survive this, Evie, but we might never be the same. There’s no such thing as a single victim in any crime.”

“You think so? We’ll survive this?”

“You know what I think.” Cassie should’ve been a criminal justice major. She talked a lot about some people at the FBI who were working on a project profiling perpetrators of serious, violent crimes. She was fascinated; had read a book by someone about it, and now seemed as if she might even toss aside all her hard work and apply at Quantico. “He’s escalating. He’s not in control, like he once was. He used to be so neat and methodical, and now he’s leaving messes at crime scenes. Not giving the women the attention he used to, cleaning them up the way he did the first few.”

Evangeline rarely had so much to learn from someone else. She’d spent her life being the smartest in a room, at least until MIT, but this was a topic she had almost nothing to contribute to. “How does that help us, though?”

“A careless criminal becomes easier to catch.” Cassie passed her cup for a refill. She was drunk, and Evangeline had never seen her drunk. “But he’ll kill more before that happens.”

Evangeline started to screw the lid back on the bottle, when she realized it was empty. With a scoff, she tossed it toward the trash, missed, then abandoned her interest altogether. “What makes us special?”

“We’re ready for him.”

Evangeline laughed. “I am not ready to meet this Neanderthal!”

“Hey, Neanderthals were more civilized than today’s psychopaths.” Cassie grinned. “I mean, we’re taking precautions. That’s all. Other girls are cowering in fear, but we’ve done a lot, haven’t we? You just got your brown belt. We’re both sharp shots with our guns. I spent my whole life going over the checklist my father ingrained in me from a young girl. I’m just saying, we’re better prepared than most.”

Evangeline liked many things about Cassie, but this was perhaps the most endearing. Anything Cassie said, no matter how ridiculous, had an air of confidence that was utterly believable. She didn’t know if Cassie gave these reassurances because she meant them, or because she knew it would give Evangeline comfort, but if it worked, did it matter?

But it was this same trait in Cassie that made her feel safe, and she supposed that was why she finally told her the whole story.

Serendipity.

Her minions.

Everything, without holding back. The liquid courage took her halfway, and Cassie, eyes wide with empathy but not sympathy, took her the rest of the way.

“Well, Evangeline, I wish I could tell you the universe was built to limit our suffering. That what happened to you once can never happen again.” Cassie bowed her head, dropping her elbows to her knees. “My mother was raped.”

“Cassie,” Evangeline whispered, breathless.

“She was raped, two years after she married my father, by a man who the state failed to keep locked up after he raped three women years before. She was raped and discovered she was pregnant, and that’s how I came into the world.”

The blood rushed away from Evangeline’s face.

“So my father isn’t my blood father. He is my father. There is no one else in the world who will ever be my father, and that’s that,” Cassie said. “But I don’t have a mother, because a year later, when a jury failed to convict him, he returned and killed her. He slashed her throat in broad daylight and ran away. They never found him. Even if they had, would it matter? The law isn’t built to protect us, Evangeline. It never has been.”

“God. I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say. I’d guess the reason you haven’t told more people about what happened to you isn’t because of a lack of trust, or even shame, but because you don’t want to look into someone’s eyes as they struggle to adequately express how fucking sorry they are.”

Evangeline considered this, and it felt right. “There is something I think I should say, though. You won’t like it.”

“You might be surprised.”

“If the universe saw fit to give me a baby after my assault, I would’ve seen fit to destroy it before it became real.”

Cassie smiled. “You think I don’t understand that? Just because my mother chose differently?”

---