“She forgave my father,” Jessa says in a soft voice. “He cheated on her years ago when I was in middle school.”
“She told you that?”
“Neither one of them ever did,” she admits. “I heard voices in the middle of the night one day. I snuck downstairs and heard my parents talking. Arguing, rather. Apparently, Dad was having an affair with one of the women in his precinct. Mom asked him if the fling was over. He said it was. She asked him why he ended it, and he actually told her the truth. He didn’t end it; she did. The woman wanted him to leave us, and he refused.”
Jessa’s eyes are glazed over, lost to the memory. “And my mom… She reacted by walking over to him and hugging him. It was probably the first time I’d ever seen them hug like that. The next day when I came down, it was like nothing had happened. Dad was reading the newspaper. Mom was making breakfast. They continued with their lives like nothing ever happened. So I did, too.”
She looks up and, for a moment, she looks surprised to see me there. Or maybe she’s just surprised that she’s shared so much.
“My dad realized after a while that I was being bullied in school,” she says, jumping back in time a little. “He asked me if I wanted him to speak to their parents. I said no.”
“Pride?” I ask.
“I don’t know, honestly. I felt like I could do it alone. Stand up to them alone. And I also knew that running to anyone else for help would prove to them that I was as weak as they thought I was. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.”
“And how long did it take for them to back off you?”
“Years,” she whispers. “It took years.”
I see years of battle in her eyes, in the slump of her posture. Someone who still carries the scars they got when they were too young to know to protect themselves. It makes my chest throb with a strange kind of hot anger I’ve never felt before.
Anger at these unnamed girls for daring to hurt her.
Anger at her parents for not intervening.
Anger at myself, crazy as that might sound, for not being there to stop it all myself.
“But you know what?” she continues. “No matter how bad it got with them, I never went to the teachers. I’m proud of that.”
“Ah,” I say, pretending to be impressed. “Just like you won’t go to the cops now.”
“Exactly,” she says with a nod of satisfaction. It’s as though she’s resting her case.
“Was that the point of all that information about your childhood and your parents?” I ask. “A roundabout way of reassuring me that I can trust you?”
“Maybe.”
She bites her lower lip self-consciously and my engine revs all over again. I cross my legs, but she doesn’t seem to notice the effect her little mannerisms have on me.
“I watched this documentary once,” she says, almost as an afterthought. “This true crime thing. This psychologist or psychiatrist or whatever, he was talking about killers’ mindsets, and he said that predators—that’s what he called them, ‘predators’—they can do all the horrible shit they do because they dissociated from their victims. The people they kill aren’t really ‘people’ to them. But if you can make a sociopath learn something, anything, about the person, they couldn’t go through with it. It’s harder to murder the girl you know has anxiety issues growing up because she watched her mother die in a car crash when she was twelve. It’s harder to gut the man who liked to eat peanut butter sandwiches because it reminded him of his idyllic childhood before his parents divorced.”
I smile. “So you think I can’t kill you now because I know that you were bullied as a child?” I ask. “Because I know your father cheated on your mother?”
“It was worth a shot,” she mumbles.
I push myself off the sofa and take a step towards her. She sinks into the cushions while I lean in and trap her between my arms once more.
“It’s unfortunate that you went through that. It’s sad that you had to spend most of your life fighting off your bullies on your own,” I tell her, my face inches away from hers. “But neither piece of information is going to stop me from getting what I want. I’ll be back tomorrow night. And I expect you to have my phone with you.”
“Would you really kill me?” she asks in a small voice.
I lean in and press my lips to hers. A reminder of everything she’s given me already.
When I pull back, I keep my face dangerously close. “I will do whatever I need to,” I rasp. “I always do.”
Then I straighten up and head towards the door, feeling her eyes on me the entire time.
“Anton?” she calls.