Don't Make a Sound (Sawyer Brooks #1)(11)

And then there was Sawyer—paranoid, unable to trust, and angry. Angry with her uncle for abusing her and Aria. Angry with her parents for being blind to it all. Angry with Harper for abandoning her. And especially angry with herself for being unable to move on.

At the advice of a counselor, Sawyer had hired a private detective she couldn’t afford and had gone in search of her long-lost sisters. Five minutes after she’d handed the PI her money, she had an address for a Nate and Harper Pohler.

She was twenty when she found them living in the same house they lived in now. Harper insisted Sawyer live with them while she worked on getting her degree. Sawyer hadn’t liked the idea of moving in with her sister, but neither did she enjoy living in a run-down apartment.

Once she moved in, every day was like Groundhog Day. Sawyer woke up, went to school, came home, studied, and went to bed. Nobody talked about the elephant in the room. Everyone simply went about their business as if everything were hunky-dory.

Her sisters’ ability to wash their hands of the past had only made things worse for Sawyer. For eight years she hadn’t heard from them, and yet they wanted to pretend everything was fine. It was bizarre, and it pissed her off. She struck out in the only way she knew how, by ignoring them, including all their small talk: How was your day? How are you doing? Do you need anything? Are you hungry?

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you, and fuck you.

Except she also made sure they knew she was around by being loud. She walked loud, talked on the phone loud, made coffee loud. She wanted to punish them for leaving her behind, and she had been doing a pretty good job of making all their lives miserable until Aria had taken Sawyer aside and told her what had happened, starting with her own nightmarish childhood—every disgusting detail.

Until that day, Sawyer had thought she was the only sister who’d been abused by Uncle Theo and his friends.

But she’d been wrong.

Aria told her that every time Mom and Dad had left Uncle Theo to watch over them, Harper would put Sawyer to bed and then run off to party with her friends. At first, Aria had enjoyed her time with Uncle Theo. He would make her hot cocoa, and they would watch movies together. She would often wake up the next morning feeling nauseated. It turned out Uncle Theo had drugged her and taken her to rape fantasy parties where she was passed around.

It all sounded much too familiar. Until their little talk, Sawyer had no idea there was a name for that sort of perversion.

Rape fantasy parties. Big business. Big money. Who knew?

Aria said Uncle Theo had threatened to kill family and friends if she ever told a soul. So she’d kept quiet. He’d done the same with Sawyer. Threats were a common tactic used by many sexual abusers.

Aria also went on to explain—something she’d often heard from Mom too—that Harper had been a rebellious child who drank and did drugs, nothing like the uptight woman who now used a lint roller on the floor of her bedroom to get every hair.

It wasn’t until Harper was dropped off at one of her uncle’s parties, where she stumbled into a back room and saw what was happening to Aria, that a plan to escape River Rock was set into motion.

The only thing Aria remembered about the night she and Harper left River Rock for good was being jostled awake, then staggering barefoot down the gravelly drive before being shoved inside the back seat of a truck, where she blacked out. It dawned on Aria only later that Uncle Theo had drugged her before he’d left the house after warning them to stay put until he returned.

That same night had been seared into Sawyer’s brain to relive over and over again—crying and out of breath, cold and shivering, she’d stood on the front porch, watching the twinkling back lights of a truck disappear down the road, her sisters inside, leaving her alone, and then Uncle Theo’s hand clamping down around her shoulder before he dragged her into the house and handed her off to four strangers.

Nothing was ever the same again.

The days had melded into eternity until her parents returned home. Sawyer had cried with relief, but Mom and Dad hardly batted an eye when they learned that two of their daughters had run off. Her parents had always been neglectful. They’d allowed their daughters to wander miles from home when they were much too young to do so. Sawyer and her sisters used to walk home from school, never worried about the time. They made their own meals, did their homework unassisted, figured things out on their own without much supervision.

Most parents would have called the police and spent day and night searching for their missing daughters. But Mom and Dad were certain Harper and Aria would return. When a week passed and that didn’t happen, Mom blamed Harper, committed to her long-held belief that her eldest daughter was hyperactive and out of control, determined to disrupt their family since the day she was born.

Sawyer had tried to work up the courage to tell her parents about Uncle Theo, but his threat of doing them harm stopped her every time. Without her parents, no matter how negligent, she would have no one. If not for Gramma being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and moving into their home months after her sisters ran off, Sawyer wasn’t sure she’d still be around. She imagined she might have taken her uncle’s life, or worse, her own.

Sawyer parked at the curb in front of Connor’s house. She climbed out of the car, and as she walked toward the house, she realized she hadn’t thought of Connor all day.

The door opened before she reached the welcome mat. “I knew you would come back,” he said.