Echo(51)

“Stop,” I tell him when his voice begins to crack.

“What happened to you as a child . . . ” His hands clench as he fights with his building emotions. “It f*cking breaks me.”

“Don’t do this.”

But he doesn’t even acknowledge my words as he goes on, “And then what I did to you . . . I don’t know how I lost control like that. Seeing you in that room . . . That was supposed to be ours. You don’t know how badly I wanted that. How much I wanted to take you away from the husband I thought was . . . ”

He lets his words drift, and I want to cry, but I don’t. I know he doesn’t want to see my tears, so I keep myself focused, but I’m dying on the inside. To sit here and listen to his words that are masking cries of his own is awful. This is a man of abundant discipline and authority, so to hear him so broken down, so weak, it destroys me.

“How do I get past a deceit of this magnitude?” he eventually questions.

“I wish I knew. I wish I could go back. But I can’t. I don’t even really know how to explain this all. I want to be honest. I want you to know the real me, to know the truth, but it’s so hard. Because the truth is so gross and twisted, you probably wouldn’t even believe it, because people don’t want to believe that life can be that horrifying. I’m a f*cked-up human; I know this. I don’t know what it is to be a rational person, but you make me want to learn. You make me want to try.”

“His eyes were open,” he says out of the blue, and I’m confused as to what he’s referring to, but then he adds, “After I shot him. I saw photos of you on his desk. I gathered them up along with the file, and when I looked down at Bennett’s bloody body, his eyes were still open.”

He says this and I remember that Pike’s eyes were the same. I’ll never forget how haunting they looked.

“He knew who you were.”

“I know,” I say. “I heard him in the hospital. He was having me followed; he knew you and I were together.”

He then stands, walks over to the bed, and sits down next to me. He doesn’t touch me, although I wish he would.

“I hurt you today.”

“I’m okay,” I whisper.

He then looks down at my knuckles that are wrapped in band-aids. “My shattered mirror tells me otherwise.”

“Bad memories.”

“Did it happen a lot?” he asks on a voice that’s barely even a whisper. Like he’s afraid his words will break me, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like they possibly could. That I’m not as tough as I used to be.

I give him a nod, but it isn’t enough for him when he urges, “I need you to tell me.”

I hesitate, licking my lips, wanting to give him the honesty he’s asking for but also terrified for him to know.

“Tell me, Nina.”

“Please . . . don’t, don’t call me that.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking away from me. “It’s all I know you as.”

“Look at me.” He does. “This is me. This is what I want you to know.”

“Elizabeth,” he murmurs, and I nod, affirming, “Yes . . . Elizabeth.”

“Tell me then, Elizabeth. Because I need to know you, to figure you out.”

“Yes,” I respond. “It happened a lot. It was dirty and gross and—”

“What did he do to you?”

I swallow hard, scared to say the words. My hands fidget nervously, and when Declan sees, he covers them in his own.

“I’ve never told anyone,” I confess. “Only Pike knew, and he was there. I didn’t have to say a word because he saw it all.”

“I told you about my mum, remember?”

“Of course I remember.”

“I opened up to you about something I had never spoken about to anyone. I gave you that piece of me. A piece that makes me embarrassed and ashamed.”

I remember seeing his tears when he told me he cowered under a bed while he watched a man shoot his mother in the head. A shot that killed her. He thinks himself weak and a *—those are the words he used. He made himself vulnerable to me, so I’ll give him what he’s asking for, something I’ve never given anyone.

“It started on my tenth birthday with him forcing Pike to have sex with me. He would take us down to the basement. There was a dirty mattress he kept on the floor. He’d watch us while he sat in a chair and jerked himself off. Most of the time he would get up to cum on either Pike or myself.” Saying the words turns my stomach, and I can already feel the wave of nausea come over me. “We would be down in that basement at least four times a week. A couple years later was when it switched and Carl started touching me.”