“I tried to leave a few nights ago,” I finally told them, brushing my hand against the doorframe and stopping there. “Back to Montreal.”
Silence suddenly filled the room, and I could guess both of them were trying to process if they should be angry or not. My mother wanted me safe, even though she wouldn’t do anything to ensure it herself, and I was pretty certain my sister would love having me out of the way. They would both know, however, that it would displease Damon, and there might be consequences if I ran and he couldn’t find me fast enough.
“The police,” I went on, “on Gabriel Torrance’s payroll, no doubt, caught up to me and turned me around.”
“Ethan was helping you?” my mother asked in a tone that said she already knew the answer.
I nodded. “And if I want him to stay safe, then he’d better not help me again. That was the gist of the warning anyway.”
I heard a slow but deep intake of breath and a quiet exhale, and I knew my mother was trying to stay calm, but I was done pretending to be. Damon was clever, diabolical, and patient. All of the things I wasn’t. At least not right now. I was too fucking angry.
It finally dawned on me that no one was actually on my side.
“I hate you,” I said to my mother, letting it go with my chin trembling. “I would rather live in the gutter than have him in our lives!”
I gestured to where I’d heard my sister chatting. “I know why she’d do this, but you’re supposed to protect me,” I told my mom. “He raped me!”
“He didn’t rape you,” my sister snapped back, pushing out of her chair. “We all saw the video. The whole world saw the video! You wanted him. You were in love with him.”
I shook my head. “Not him.”
I had never been in love with him. Not with Damon.
That damn video.
Tears spilled, and I couldn’t stop them. I folded my lips between my teeth to keep from sobbing. A video of us was leaked, he was sent to jail for statutory rape, because he was nineteen, and I was still a minor, but nearly everyone in this town took his side. He was a little richer, a lot more popular, and two of his friends went with him for their own misdeeds leaked on other videos, as well.
But he got the most time.
He was the only one convicted of a sex crime, and in everyone’s eyes this was a grave injustice, because their basketball star, golden boy only had sex with a willing girl who just happened to be a couple years shy of the legal age of consent. Big deal.
Hey, in some other states sixteen is old enough, isn’t it?
This is a technicality.
Did he even do anything wrong? How many of us were having sex at that age?
Don’t ruin his life. It’s not like he hurt her.
Hey, she seemed to love it well enough.
The backlash was sickening, and while other girls claimed he’d taken advantage of them, too, by the end of it, they’d all folded, and it ended up just becoming an example of how warped our justice system was when there were “actual” predators out there. I’d ruined a young man’s life. To-may-toes, to-mah-toes.
All they saw in that video was me willingly kissing him.
Touching him.
Holding him.
In their eyes, I’d wanted it, and he was ‘the man’. But they didn’t know what was really going on in that video. They didn’t know what he’d done to me to get what he wanted from me.
Footsteps approached, and I smelled my mother’s Chanel No. 5.
“Winter,” she said calmly. “Do you really think he needed to marry into this family to get anything he wanted? He could’ve easily threatened Ethan anyway to keep you in Thunder Bay and under his thumb. Or threatened us, your grandparents, or any other friends. No matter what, this was going to play out how they wanted, because they have the money and we have nothing anymore. Nothing.”
‘Because of my father’, I finished for her.
Yes, I knew. She wasn’t entirely wrong.