The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(127)

“He must have hit an artery,” she murmured. “It happened so fast.”

Kovac wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a brotherly squeeze. “Let’s get you out of here, Wonder Woman. You’ve got a date with a shitload of paperwork downtown.”

Nikki leaned into him, grateful for his presence and his friendship. “You always know just what to say to a girl. And here I was thinking you didn’t care anymore.”

His mouth turned up on one corner in his trademark sardonic smile. “I wouldn’t let you off that easy, Tinker Bell. Let’s go,” he said, turning her toward the door. “I’ll even buy the coffee.”





48


“I never hated him,” Evi said quietly. “I’ve always been ashamed of that.”

They sat in a private meeting room at the Hennepin County Medical Center, a drab gray room with drab gray modern furniture, and a wall of glass that overlooked a courtyard several stories below, where snow was accumulating on the trees and bushes. Just down the hall in the ICU, Eric lay sleeping. His condition was stable.

“I shouldn’t need to tell you it wasn’t your fault,” Detective Liska said gently. “You were a child. He was an authority figure. Consent was moot.”

“It was nobody’s fault,” Evi said, knowing her colleagues would have pounced on her for her answer.

Ted Duffy took advantage of a vulnerable girl; the culpability was his. That was true. Of all the people who should have known that, he was at the top of the list. The decorated Sex Crimes detective had committed a sex crime against a child in his care. She should have hated him. Anyone would have vilified him, crucified him, sent him straight to hell.

Evi knew, though, that hell was a place of one’s own making, and both she and Ted Duffy had served time there for their own reasons. He was dead because of her, because of what he’d done, and while that may indeed have been justice, all Evi saw when she thought of him was a broken man, ruined by his life, begging her forgiveness, sobbing with his head in his hands. What use was there in hating him? She had hated herself enough to know it didn’t serve any purpose.

Her emotions at the time had been so tangled and confused. She had made an uneasy friendship with Ted Duffy as she did the Duffy laundry in the basement and he sat at his workbench sipping his whiskey. He asked her about her days at school. He gave her advice about boys. He was kind. She felt sorry for him. She had never had a friendship with a man. She had never had a father figure. She didn’t know how those relationships were supposed to work. She didn’t understand how or where to draw boundaries.

If she had asked for love, then she didn’t have the right to say no, did she? If she believed she could trust, then she had to accept betrayal of that trust, right? That was what she believed because she didn’t know any better. How could she have been expected to know what love was and what love wasn’t when her only example of love was a woman so tormented by life that she had ended her own?

“He wasn’t a terrible man,” she said. “He did a terrible thing.”

“Did you tell Barbie?” Liska asked.

“Only when she found out I was pregnant,” she said with a sad smile. “She called me a liar, said no one would ever believe me. It would be my word against his—against hers.

“And you didn’t try to tell another adult? A guidance counselor, a teacher?”

“Why would they believe me? I was just a foster kid. I hadn’t been in that school half a year.”

“You didn’t trust anybody.”

“Why would I?”

She looked to the other end of the room, where Eric’s mother sat reading quietly to Mia in an oversize chair by the window. Her daughter’s only physical scar from their ordeal would be the mark on her throat where Charles Chamberlain cut her as a threat. Emotionally, the damage would go deeper than a surface wound, and the guilt Evi felt for that was choking. But Mia would always be surrounded by people who loved her, people who would do their best to protect her and care for her. She would never know that terrible yawning emptiness that Evi had lived with for most of her life.

She reached up and brushed a tear from her cheek. She had that family now. Eric’s parents loved her unconditionally, without judgment. Even with their son lying in the ICU hooked to tubes and monitors because of her, they loved her. It was difficult for her to believe she deserved that, but they helped her work at it every day.

She felt that she had so much to make up for. She had never trusted Eric with the details of her time with the Duffys, and the product of her time there had appeared in their lives like a monster from a nightmare and nearly killed him.

The doctors estimated he had lost a third of his blood supply the night of the attack. The paramedics had brought him back from cardiac arrest in the ambulance. The ER staff revived him a second time. He had lost an eye. The wound to his face would require multiple plastic surgeries. The cut across his back, which had sliced through his heavy jacket, required more than a hundred stitches to close.

And yet, the first thing he said when he opened his eyes and saw her was, “I love you.” And when she told him the terrible truth she had kept to herself all these years, the first thing he said when she finished was, “I love you.” And that would make all the difference in both their lives and in the life of their child.