Mother May I(94)

He wiped at his eyes, then shrugged helplessly. I saw nothing in him but sincerity and shame, but I couldn’t help wondering at the way he’d processed it all so fast. His words, the arc of his feelings—the actor in me thought that it would make a good audition piece, and then I hated myself immediately for thinking that. Trey was a litigator, smart and articulate, his brain honed by years of work to process information fast. He’d been thinking of little other than Lexie for days now. His sorrow felt genuine, and I knew him. I loved him.

Still, I couldn’t leave it be. Lexie would not let me, and I would not let him. I touched the last photo in the line. It felt cool and smooth, like nothing with a heartbeat, and yet I felt her there.

“This is the one where I . . .” I paused. “Where I have trouble.”

He didn’t look at it. He’d never seen them before, he said. And yet he did not look.

“What kind of trouble?” he asked. Interested. Concerned. He reached past the photos to put his hand on mine. This was the Trey I knew. I said I had trouble, and he instantly wanted to fix it for me.

“I think Spence is holding her arms. Holding her down. And your hand is . . . Trey, she sees the camera.” His eyebrows were going up. He still didn’t look back at the picture, though. He kept his eyes on me. He kept his hand on my hand. I said, “I love you. And I know you. You can tell me what happened.”

“I did tell you,” he said, calm and even. “I don’t particularly remember Spence grabbing her arms, but I also don’t remember who all grabbed what and when.” He smiled, a wry sad smile, shaking his head. “You can’t see her hands, or Spencer’s anyway.” He said all this without once looking back down at the photo. That he had barely glanced at. That he had never seen before.

“I can see your hand.” He kept eye contact, but he stopped touching me, folding his arms over his chest. His eyebrows went up, interested, faintly puzzled. I said, “Your hand is over her mouth.”

“Okay. But, Bree, the camera catches a fraction of a second. So my hand was on her face. For that tiny captured moment at least. What are you saying?”

I swallowed. “I’m saying I want you to look at it. Really look.”

“Okay,” he said, a small impatience in his tone now. He glanced at the shot again, and then he shook his head. When he looked back to me, I saw a little anger in his eyes.

“I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s awful. They’re all awful. But we were high. And drunk. Maybe she was being loud. Or my hand landed there accidentally. Maybe she was kissing it. It’s a fraction of a fraction of a second, Bree.”

I didn’t like the irritated way he said my name. “I know, but, sweetheart, no matter how many times I looked at it, no matter the angle, I see a fraction of a second of a rape.”

It was the first time I’d said the word. It was like a small electric shock inside my mouth. He must have felt it, too. He stood up, rising so fast that I flinched. I never would have thought any move my husband made could cause me to flinch. Never in a thousand years.

“I told you what happened,” he said. “Everything, exactly as I remember it.”

He stared at me. Not the picture. His eyes refused to turn that way again. When I first saw the photos, I had not been able to look away. I’d stared and stared at the last shot, the pleading eyes, her blond hair in a matted tumble, trying to make Lexie tell me a different story. She had not.

I pointed to her. “Trey. Look. Really look.”

Instead he snatched the picture up, only that one, on the end, and began tearing at it. “I told you what happened. And sure, I was pretty high. Lexie got me high, remember? But I didn’t rape anyone. I would never rape someone.” He paused before the word “rape,” both times, as if it were too ugly to be allowed into his mouth. Much less his history.

I made myself stay seated and calm. I made my gaze stay only loving. This was my husband, my best friend, the father of my children. And this was hard for him. It had to be.

“You can tear it up, but you can’t unsee it. I can’t either. That photo shows me a girl who wanted out. If the evening happened like you said, even if she started it, in that shot I see a girl who changed her mind.”

“If?” he almost yelled. His chest heaved with fury or some other tightly leashed emotion. “If it happened like I said?”

I didn’t stop, though. “Maybe you don’t remember this part. Maybe she only changed her mind when she saw the camera. I could believe that. But you have to see. Even if you don’t remember it that way, even if you thought it was all fine the next morning, and every morning, up until this minute. That’s fine. I can believe that. But you have to see now. You have to face it. You have to fix it.”

“I cannot fucking believe—” He choked on the words.

I kept talking, calm, relentless, loving. “There’s a way past this. For you and me, maybe even for Lexie. We won’t know until we find her. She may be a murderer, in this hip-deep with her mother. Or she may not have known the things her mother planned to do. We can’t control that. We can only choose what we do. You can only choose what you do. Please don’t be too afraid to look and admit and try to make it right. Think if it was Anna-Claire in that photo. Think if it was Peyton.”

Something broke inside him then. His face flushed so dark it nearly purpled. I rose, too, reaching for him, worried he would have a stroke. He jerked away from my hands. He bent and snatched up the other pictures, tearing into all those small, trapped Lexies as he spoke, his voice graveled with fury.