The Girls I've Been(65)

“What are you two doing?” My mother’s voice breaks through the numb cloud spinning in my head.

“Talking about some changes,” Raymond says. “Horseback riding instead of tennis, for instance. And no more clothes that’ll make people whistle at her.”

Abby smiles, fondly and indulgently at him. “Honey, she’s a girl on a beach, she’s gonna get catcalled, it’s just—”

“Then she won’t go on the fucking beach!”

Her eyes widen at the shift and rise in his voice.

“Why don’t you go downstairs and make me a list of the appropriate clothes you’re thinking about so I can go shopping?” she suggests softly, going into mollify mode, just like I did. “I’ll get these ready to donate to charity and then come downstairs. Does that sound good?”

“Fine,” he says. “But she’s not stepping foot back on that beach without an escort.”

He leaves and Mom watches him, a smile creeping back on her face, and when she turns to see the mess on my bed, she tuts, like it’s cute that he dragged me up from the beach and tore my entire closet out onto the bed.

“Will you get me some bags?” she asks. When I don’t move or speak, she looks over her shoulder at me, expectant. “Baby?”

“You told him,” I say.

“I—” She frowns for a second, her hands half full of sundresses I’m not allowed to wear anymore.

“You told him.”

She doesn’t even have the grace to blink or look ashamed now. “He’s my husband.”

I just stare at her, unable to voice the betrayal, seconds from launching myself at her because I want to tear her fucking eyes out. I want her to hug me. I want some part of this to be okay.

Did she tell him everything? Did she tell him what she did?

“The past year has been difficult for me, too,” she says. “I sacrificed everything, baby. For you. So I need you to start behaving. Stop being so sullen. I did not raise you to show this level of disrespect to your father.”

“You didn’t raise me to have a father.”

Her lips press together so hard they nearly disappear. My heart thumps in my ears, but I keep going:

“You keep acting like this was the endgame all along. It wasn’t. You raised me to be one thing.”

“And now I’m telling you to be another! This is not hard! You are a smart girl. You are adaptable. Why can’t you just . . . adapt? Your sister was never like this when they . . .” Her mouth clicks shut, and my eyes widen.

My entire world splinters apart in that moment, like I was in darkness and light ripped through it, seam by seam. Because my sister . . .

My sister is the strongest person I’ve ever met, and my mother has made it clear that strong girls don’t get hurt like I did. That I should’ve been stronger. That I should’ve just dealt with it, like I did when I was Haley.

“What are you talking about?”

She holds her hand up, shaking her head, backing away from me, already heading toward the door. I scramble off my bed; I’ll chase her down the hall and those death-trap marble stairs if I have to.

“I’m talking to you! Tell me what you meant!”

“This conversation is over.”

“Who’s they? What did they do to her?”

Did you kill them, too?

She lets out a frustrated breath. “Drop it.”

“I won’t.”

“My God,” she mutters, staring at the ground, gritting her teeth against me. “Fine,” she says, and when she turns on me, there’s a kind of cruelty in her eyes that I’ve only seen directed at marks. Never at me. “What happened to your sister when I was still honing the con is a lot worse than what happened to you. I tried to keep her safe. I thought I had it under control, that they’d never get close enough to . . .” She shakes her head, like she’s trying to shake it off. “If you want the details, I’ll give them. But all it’ll do is make you damn grateful I learned from my mistakes and adjusted the con before you came along so the marks were criminals.”

“Instead of what?”

She’s silent.

“What were the marks before?”

But I know. I know. I don’t want to, but of course I do. Her silence says it, and I feel like I might die, right there and then, like I can’t exist with this knowledge.

“I’m going to kill you,” I tell her. It comes spilling, automatic, out of my mouth, so I guess it’s the truth and nothing but. It certainly feels like that.

She laughs. She actually laughs at me. “Baby, you are such a drama queen. You don’t have to worry about your sister. She’s a grown-up and she’s fine. I made my mistakes with her and I paid for them, didn’t I? She’s not here with me like a daughter should be.”

No, she’s not, is she? She got away. I know why now. She’s free now. The thought sparks something in me.

“I learned from my mistakes with your sister,” she says. “That’s why you’ve had the life you do. You got to be a little girl for as long as I could give it to you. And I worked hard to give that to you. But bad things creep through in the long run, baby. That’s life. You need to learn that and get over this so it won’t destroy you, because you’re better than that,” she says, and her voice softens, but I don’t. “And you need to listen to your father. He’s trying to protect you. That’s what fathers do.”