“Now I know,” she echoed. “I wish…”
“Wish what? That I’d told you sooner?”
“Yes.”
“When? When we first met? When we first started dating? On the night I proposed? Or on our wedding day? When is the right time for a man to tell a woman that he’d been sexually molested for almost a year?”
“I know it would have been hard, but if you’d shared your it with me, I would have understood. We could have talked about it—”
“I didn’twantto talk about it,” he reminded her.
“We could have come up with a game plan,” she insisted.
He shook his head. “It wouldn’t have been fair, forcing you to live with the burden I did every day. The shame. The endless questions about what I could have done better, or sooner—”
The idea that he could be blaming himself for this made her gasp. “You were a child! There was nothing you could do.”
He rubbed his forehead in frustration. “I know that. I was weak then, and every time I think about it, every time a memory of it assaults me in my sleep, I am weak again. I’m a child again. Do you have any idea how humiliating, how emasculating that is?”
She wished she could hold him as he had his mother, comfort him with the warmth of her body, but she was afraid to move. “It wasn’t your fault. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Just as a girl who’d suffered the same ordeal has nothing to be ashamed—”
“I wanted to be a man for you. I didn’t want to be diminished in your eyes!”
“You were always a man for me! And you still are now. Did you think it would make me see you as less than the man you are?”
He broke their gaze. “That’s not all of it. There’s more to why I behaved the way I did.”
There wasmore?
“The brother of my father told me that his own father, my grandfather, molested him when he was that age. And he abused my father too—”
“My God—”
“I don’t think my mother ever knew. He probably took that secret to his grave. Probably as ashamed of his experience as I was.”
“But,” she asked tentatively, puzzled, “What does this have to do with our son?”
“Tobias used to taunt me that the Michiels' men were tainted. And that these wicked desires were an inherited trait, passed down through the generations from man to man. That he was only doing to me what his father had done to him, and that one day I would understand what it felt like to have these desires and not control them. That it was my destiny to have a son. And that I would do to him what had been done to me—”
“What? No! You’d never!”
He tightened his lips grimly. “When you hear the same song being played over and over in your mind, eventually it gets stuck there.”
“You think you inherited some kind of pedophilic gene?”
He shrugged and looked away.
She asked, tentatively, “Did your father ever—”
“If he did, I don’t remember. But I can’t imagine that he did. I was never fearful of my dad. The parts I remember about him were his kindness.”
“Hold on to those parts, Nate. You’ve become a wonderful father.”
He shook his head. “How can you compliment me when I’ve been mostly absent? When I’ve avoided my own baby as if he had a disease, and his touch would contaminate me?”
She began to understand. She got up and perched on the arm of his chair so she could be closer to him, look at his face. “Nathanael, was this why you didn’t want kids? Because you were afraid there was some sort of monster lurking inside you?”
He didn’t answer, but she knew it to be the truth.