Haley considers this. “I miss my dad. I want to talk to Cash. Whatever happened must have been bad if it convinced him to do that to me. He has to feel like shit. I miss Petra, too, but she has her own life now. And I—” Another heavy breath. “I don’t know if I can fix all of this. Not just for now, but forever. I don’t know if I can keep them in my life.”
She doesn’t say the rest. She doesn’t say if I’m with you.
I hear it anyway.
“What do you miss?” I miss very little about my childhood. I have no desire to spend more time with my father, or my mother. The photo Haley found was a rare moment of happiness on my part. We had money, yes. We lived in a mansion. Attended an expensive school. And suffered a private hell. The best times were undoubtedly the vacations, like the one in the photo. My father wore his public persona when we were on vacation. He didn’t beat the shit out of me in the Bahamas.
“You’ve met my dad,” Haley begins, “so you know how he is. He’s so excited about his work. And he’s absentminded. He’s always been like that. His mind is always in his own world, with his inventions and his projects, so sometimes he missed things. Sometimes it was Petra who came to my after-school things and not him. But we spent time together.” I can’t see her face, but I can hear the smile in her voice. “On the weekends he would take us to the public library. Petra would go to the romances. Cash and I would go to the youth section. My dad would go to the science section, and we would spend hours there. We would go and find him when our stomachs started growling.”
It sounds so normal. So un-fucked up. “And then you would go home?”
“We would stop at this hot dog stand outside. I would get mustard, and he would get ketchup with relish.” Haley laughs. “I can’t stand relish. Sometimes the hot dog guy would get mine wrong, and Cash would always make him fix it.” A sad sigh. “He would defend me. He was younger, but he would always stand up for me.”
“At the library?”
“At the parties.” Haley outlines the shell of my ear with a fingertip. “We had to go to the Constantine parties, and I would get teased.”
I pick my head up, take one look at her face in the pale light of the stars, and switch with her. Gather her into my lap. It’s times like this I wish I could just sit in the chair like a normal fucking person. But I’ll be damned if it stops me from holding her like this and looking out into the night. “What could anyone have to tease you about?”
Haley snorts. “You ripped up all my Target clothes the first night I was here. Which was kind of hot, honestly. But that’s what they would tease me about. My dresses wouldn’t be designer. They would be secondhand or borrowed, and I always brought a book with me. Cash would get into arguments about it. Fights. Even though he wanted to fit in. He was the best at fitting in.”
“I didn’t know Constantines would use such terrible manners at parties.”
A sad laugh. “I felt bad when it got that far. When he could get hurt. And then Caroline’s henchman hurt him again. It’s my fault. I left him out there on his own, and they had to break his ribs to get him to do what he did. More than that, probably. He must have thought—” She shakes her head. “I feel bad that it came to that. I hate that it came to that.”
“Don’t.” Haley turns her face to mine, her eyes luminous. “He defended you because he wanted to.”
She runs her fingertip along the collar of my shirt. “Like you defended your siblings?”
I turn my face away. Pure instinct. I don’t want to talk about that. Don’t want to go back to that time. Except this is what that bastard Father Simon meant. Damn him and his penance.
God’s penance.
Fuck.
When Haley puts her hand on my cheek and turns me back to her, I let her. “You don’t have to talk about this,” she says softly.
“My father was a real bastard.” It feels like new whip wounds, to say these things. “He would get into a mood. Something would set him off. He hated to see us being human. Being weak. But that was always a moving target. He liked it best if you were a ruthless prick like him, but always with fucking flawless manners. That’s why he liked Lucian best.”
“Manners?”
“Yes. The Constantines think we’re uncultured fucks, but they’ve never sat for a formal dinner with my parents. None of them would have survived.” Haley leans her head against my shoulder. She’s too soft to hear this. “I couldn’t fucking stand the waiting. He’d take it out on one of us eventually. Someone would use the wrong tone at dinner or say the wrong thing, and then what the fuck are you supposed to do? The last time I—” Jesus. This is way too far. It’s like being burned alive. “He thought he was doing us a favor. He would say that. I’m doing you a favor. It would only ever be one of us at a time, because he would get tired, or he would get bored. Only Tiernan ever escaped the abuse, because he was a bastard. My father never saw him as a child, more like a tool he could use. The rest of us, though, we were his. His to raise. His to beat. It was his version of parenting.”
“So you—” She’s crying. “You put yourself in the way?”
“I’ll never forgive myself for the last time I let him get to Eva. She insists it wasn’t my fault. It was one night at dinner, and he was in one of his moods, and she made some comment. At first I thought she’d get away with it. That motherfucker waited until after everyone was done eating to call her to his office. And her face afterward—” I can’t let myself think of it now. “Anyway. I decided then I would be the target. Whatever I had to do.”
“How old were you?”
“Eleven.” I kiss her because I can’t say anything else. I can’t drive the knife in any deeper. The taste of her, sweet mint and Haley, soothes the wretched fear that telling her is itself a weakness. Even if I’ve been compelled to do it. “This has to be enough penance,” I grumble against her mouth.
She pulls back, stroking the sides of my face. “What?”
I was wrong. There’s a deeper cut to make. I’m going to make an enormous donation to that fucking church. Maybe then Father Simon won’t try to kill me on a regular basis. “You know that my family is Catholic.”
“Everyone knows that, I think.”
“We never missed a Sunday Mass. We never missed anything at the church. We had to be a credit to our parents. That was—” It hurts to laugh. “That was the great irony of life. That he could be such a piece of shit at home and an icon at church. Most of my siblings stopped going after they moved out.” I hate this. I hate this. “But I couldn’t let it go.”
Haley stares, her blue eyes wide. “Really?”
“I know. I should burst into flame when I step past the threshold.”
“No.” She puts her hands on my chest. Gentle, gentle. Puts one over my heart. “I never guessed. I never knew.”
“Yes, well. I don’t advertise it. And it’s very different now. I obviously can’t go to a regular Mass, and no amount of money would convince me to go back to the one we attended. It was too corrupt.”