The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(55)

Nothing to keep me from remembering the strange, flickering look Bran gave me at the sink, after I said . . .

Oh.

I will not let myself be abused again.

Again.

Why did I say that?

Taking off my bra and swapping trousers for comfortable leggings, I settle onto the bed with my personal phone. It’s Monday, which means I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of my mother being at book club. I brace my throbbing arm against my stomach as I listen to the rings.

Then I hear my father’s warm, deep voice. “My Eliza,” he greets. In the background, I hear a “hmph!” and the slam of a door, as well as the low murmur of recorded voices. “Your mother just flounced away. Is that the right word? Flounced?”

“Knowing Ima? Probably.”

“You don’t normally call if your mother might be home.”

“I couldn’t remember if this was Book Club Monday or not.”

“Eliza.”

“Did you ever worry that Cliff was abusing me?”

I cringe and bite my lip. Surely there was a better way of saying it than that.

There’s a long silence over the phone. Eventually, he pauses or stops the D&D podcast playing behind him. “No,” he says finally. “I knew he was. I worried whether or not it was physical.”

“Aba . . .”

“You couldn’t see it, Eliza, all the ways he was hurting you.” He sighs. “Shira and I were beside ourselves, but you couldn’t see it. He was isolating you from people, shifting who you were allowed to be around. He was always making those little digs about your job, the ones that were supposed to come off as jokes but never did. Like the ones he made all the time about what you were eating, and you got so thin. And all that mess about the wedding . . . you were so unhappy, ahuva, but he had you so twisted around about everything, you hardly knew which way was up.”

“I should have seen it,” I whisper.

“How could you? It doesn’t matter if you’re trained to see it in others; it’s different when it’s you. He was very good at it. It’s not like he slammed into it all at once either. He worked up to it too slowly for you to see. And you were never going to see it, Eliza. Not when he wasn’t the only one doing it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your mother’s been doing it your whole life.”

“. . . Aba?”

“Eliza Adiah Sterling, you are a woman I am proud to know. I am proud to call you my daughter. You have never deserved the abuse your mother has heaped on you. I should have protected you better.” He blows out a gusty breath. When he speaks again, his voice is heavy with pain. With guilt. “I used to think she would stop as you grew. Surely she saw what a wondrous creature you were! So smart, and kind, and quick to help. So lively and bright, like bottled laughter. You were a marvel, a joy, and she had to recognize that. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t. By the time you were in junior high, I’d begun to seriously consider divorce. I loved her, but she was making you feel so small.”

“But then Shira’s father?”

“Yes, precisely. You were with Shira and the Sawyer-Levys, helping them, and it was good of you that you were, but I couldn’t add to that. I couldn’t give you the fear of your being taken away. And the courts, you know . . . they’re getting better, but so many still believe the mother is the better choice for custody. If I divorced her but she got custody, I would have just made it worse. And so I thought, in a few years, you would be away at college, and . . .” He sighs. “I should have protected you better. You were so used to it from your mother, of course you wouldn’t recognize when that man came in and did the same thing just beyond the charm. You were so vulnerable to exactly that kind of man, because you’d already spent your whole life trying to understand why your mother didn’t seem to love you.”

“Does she?” I sniff and wipe at my itching face; my fingers come away wet. When did I start crying? “Does she love me, Aba?”

“She desperately loved the idea of a daughter, but she’s never known you, Eliza. She’s never known you for the extraordinary daughter you are.”

Which, in my father’s blanket of kindness, means no. A sob hiccups out of me before I can clap my hand over my mouth, but he hears it. Of course he hears it.

“I’m so sorry, ahuva. But I need you to remember this: you are so loved. By me, by Shira, by all the Sawyer-Levys. Illa has never stopped calling you her daughter, Shira’s blonde twin. You are more loved than your mother ever has been, because you love us in return. You are so much stronger than you know. Do you know how proud I was when you dumped him? That you stood up to both him and your mother? Do you know how proud I am that you were brave enough to love again? And with such a good man?”

I can hear my front door opening and closing, and a moment later Priya walks into the bedroom, kicking off her shoes to slide onto the bed beside me. She doesn’t say anything yet, just cuddles in close as I’m crying into the phone.

“Why do you stay with her? If you’ve known all this for so long . . .”

“Because she has no one else,” he says simply. “She has driven everyone else so far away, there’s no one left. Even her book club can’t stand her, but she keeps going because it lets her play the victim, and that’s what makes her . . .” He gropes for the word. “. . . fulfilled? She can only be happy by being unhappy.” There’s silence for a moment, and then he says, “What brought this up, Eliza? Is Brandon all right?”