The Winter Sister(76)
“Well, why didn’t you say anything?” I asked. “To a doctor, or a nurse.”
Ben shook his head. “You don’t know my father. He can be incredibly manipulative. And he can turn on the charm like that.” He snapped his fingers. “By the time we got to the hospital, he’d twisted things around so much that I started apologizing profusely. He made me believe it was all my fault, for refusing to do what I was told.”
I stared at Ben’s scar. If Will had done that to his own son, how easily might he have done something like that to Mom, someone who had no ties to him but the tenuous ones of the heart? I felt grateful in that moment that he’d chosen Ben’s mother over mine, that he’d committed to his family in the house on the hill and laid his destruction on them instead. Mom was lucky, I thought now, to have escaped Will Emory with only an aching void inside her.
But then I looked at Ben’s eyes, how they winced with remembered pain, and I felt guilt as sharp as a blade across my face. It wasn’t my mother that the worst of Will had happened to—but it was still Ben’s mother, a woman who had known enough to flee him when she could, and it was Ben himself, the person sitting in front of me, the person who, I was beginning to concede, was maybe as human as anyone else.
“Anyway,” Ben said, “it was years later and everything, but when my mom left and my grandfather passed, it was hard for me to be alone with him.” He touched the scar again. “Since this happened, he’s never been violent with me like that—not physically anyway—but I’ve seen bursts of that same rage, usually when he’s not getting what he wants, with business, with the town, with me. He’s like a child in that way.”
“Then why do you still live with him?” I asked. “Or on his property at least.”
Ben picked up his drink, swirled it around, and then sucked the rest of it down. He set the glass heavily onto the carpet.
“After Persephone died,” he said, “my life kind of went off the rails. Or, I don’t know, maybe it was already off the rails. Like I said, I wasn’t going to college or anything. I hadn’t taken high school very seriously, and there wasn’t a single university that would take me—not the ones deemed fit for an Emory anyway. So my father wanted pretty much nothing to do with me, and for years, I lived in this dingy little apartment I could barely afford—working at a gas station during the day, delivering pizzas at night. At some point, I finally realized I was in a really dark place. I got promoted to assistant manager at the gas station, and it was like a wake-up call. I knew I didn’t want that life. Nothing against people who work at gas stations—retail, customer service, that’s hard, honest work—I just knew I wanted something different.”
His eyes latched onto Persephone’s letter beside me on the bed. “But the good thing about the promotion,” he continued, “was that it came with health insurance. So I started seeing a therapist—which was probably long overdue—and he actually helped me out a lot. I told him about Persephone and everything that happened. Loving her, bruising her, letting her out of the car that night instead of just insisting I drive her back home.”
His voice became sharp, edged with a regret I could almost taste on the tip of my tongue.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I finally realized I wanted to do something with my life that would—in some way, at least—make up for the horrible mistakes I’d made. I knew I’d been trying to help her, to heal her in the way she said she needed, but I’d been hurting her, too. So I wanted to help people for real this time, and eventually that led to me wanting to become a nurse. The only problem was—I couldn’t afford to pay for school. My father had cut me off the second I moved out of the house, and all the money I earned went into my living expenses. I couldn’t get any loans, either, because I didn’t have the best credit. So, when I finally admitted to myself that I had no other option, I returned to my dad—tail between my legs, the whole thing—and I asked him for a loan. And he surprised me by saying that a loan would not be necessary; he’d pay for my education himself.”
He smiled a little before continuing, but it was a wry and wavering smile. “Only, there was a catch, because with my dad, there’s always a catch. He said he would pay for my education if I moved back to the house.”
Ben paused, his shoulders sinking so noticeably it was as if his father’s hands, heavy with ultimatum, were pushing them down.
“Why?” I jumped in. “Why would it matter to him where you lived?”
“Well,” Ben said slowly, seeming to take his time choosing his words, “an Emory male is not a true Emory unless he’s under the thumb of his father. It’s like my family is one big revolving door of power. And at a certain point, it becomes the elder Emory’s job to ensure that the younger Emory—the Emory heir—will continue on in a manner befitting the family name. Take my dad and my grandfather. I’ve never seen a tenser relationship in my life. My grandfather was great with me—kind and funny and we always got along—but with my dad, he was different. He was critical, demanding. He was disappointed in him because, in terms of his political aspirations, my dad only ever wanted to be mayor. Unlike my grandfather, who was a congressman for years, my dad just wasn’t interested in anything that took him away from this town.”