Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(92)

He looks away from me for a second.

This is not your fault, I tell myself. You didn’t do this. Nate did.

Dad clears his throat again. “There’s no question that at least one, if not more, of the sexually explicit photographs is of you. I followed a second link to much the same thing, and I can only assume that the additional links were also to these photos.”

There’s a long pause, and I wonder if I’m supposed to say something. But what can I say?

Yes, that’s me.

That’s me, giving Nate a blow job.

That’s my vagina, my hand between my legs, stroking my clit.

Yes, that’s me riding Nate’s cock. My face with his semen on it.

Yes.

That’s your baby girl. Your pride and joy.

I sit silent. I knew this would be hard, but it’s harder than I expected. I’d thought about his judgment, feared his disgust, but I’d never thought about his grief.

The grief is in his face, in his eyes.

These pictures make him sad, sad because of me, sad for me, and it’s unbearable.

“So.” He folds his hands on his stomach, over the top of the ratty beige cardigan that he wears on top of his Oxford shirts at home. “Tell me how this happened.”

I take a deep breath and imagine a string tied to the crown of my head, pulling me up straight and tall. An exercise that our high school choir director gave us, but one that comes in handy anytime I need to be perfectly poised, perfectly careful.

“Nate took the pictures. When we were still going out. And he—they showed up online right after we broke up.”

The lines around his mouth deepen, twin parentheses framing his impatience. “Am I correct in remembering that you broke up with Nate soon before returning to school in August?”

“Yes. It was August when he first posted them.”

“You know that he posted them.”

“No. I assume it was him, but I can’t prove it. They were submitted anonymously to the sites. He denied it.”

“Caroline.” My father looks right at me, leaning in a bit. “It’s March.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what happened between August and March.”

“I made a systematic effort to remove the photos from the Internet. I set up automatic searches, sent out cease-and-desist email—”

My dad makes an impatient sound. He doesn’t approve of homegrown lawyering.

“—and whatever else I could think of to get them off-line. And then, when that wasn’t working, I hired a service to help me scrub my reputation. On the Internet, I mean. They do the searching for you, get photos wiped, try to push the legit results up on the search pages …”

And I haven’t heard from them in weeks. The reports they did send me were late, sketchy, and incomplete. It’s possible they’re frauds or just crap at what they do.

It’s possible I threw away fifteen hundred dollars of West’s money on a pipe dream.

How many hours of his effort, his sweat, did I waste so I could cower in my dorm room, wishing life were fair?

On the list of my regrets, that loan is way up near the top.

“But this latest attack was launched from an online bulletin board,” I continue. “Presumably by Nate. A number of others participated in it with him. I don’t know their identities. What I do know is that the pictures have spread so far and wide, it’s probably a wasted effort trying to get them removed. I’d like to focus my energy at this point on—”

“A wasted effort? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you if you don’t remove the pictures?”

“I have a good idea, yes.”

“You’ll have trouble getting into law school. Recommendations will be difficult, but even assuming you can present a good application—admissions committees search the Internet. Internship applications, scholarships, job applications. There’s no chance at the Rhodes Scholarship, the Marshall. Getting the pictures off-line will have to be your top priority. You should have brought me in from the beginning, Caroline. So much damage has already been done.”

So much damage.

But to what? To whom?

“I’m not damaged.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It is, though. You’re talking about this—about my future—as though it’s this white, pure thing that I’ve gotten dirty. Like you sent me out to play in a white dress, and why wasn’t I more careful with it?”

He frowns.

“I’m not a white dress, Dad. And I didn’t take those pictures. I didn’t share them. I didn’t say all that stuff about me. Nate did.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Fine. Someone did. The important thing is, that someone wasn’t me.”

He grunts and looks out the window at our yard. Our house is in the nicest part of Ankeny, with a big shaded lot and an acre of lawn that I had to mow in high school if I expected to be allowed to go out on the weekends. Today it’s overcast, patchy snow still on the ground, spring weeks away.

It’s not my yard anymore.

This isn’t my house.

I’m not a child.

“Did you report this incident to the college?” he asks. “Or to the police?”