Paige put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t help the moan of pain.
“I don’t think I’d ever actually seen him hit her before. I knew he did, because I saw marks, bruises on her. And because I could hear her crying in pain. But he’d never done it in front of me.”
“Evan.” Everything inside her wanted to touch him, wrap him in her arms, give him her warmth. But if she touched him, she knew he would stop talking. Stop unburdening himself the way he needed to exorcise his demons.
“After that, it was like he’d broken through some barrier. We both turned into his punching bags whenever he got drunk or just plain pissed. If his boss yelled at him, or he had a run-in with a traffic cop. Hell, he didn’t even need a reason. But she knew when it was coming, and she’d try to send me to my room. Or outside to play. Anywhere. So that she could take the beating, instead of me.”
Paige thought about the way Theresa had been at the dinner table, keeping her mouth shut as much as possible and speaking very softly when she did talk. It was classic—make yourself quiet and invisible, don’t say anything, don’t draw attention to yourself.
“A few times I didn’t move fast enough. But eventually I figured it out too. I called it his bullshit line. You’d think he was fine. Sometimes, he didn’t even seem drunk. Then bam, he’d thunder out, That’s buullshhit.” She could almost see his father’s spittle flying. “Then you either ran or hid. Or you got it. She always got it.”
Paige could no longer keep her mouth shut. “That’s a terrible way for a woman and a child to live.”
“Then she left.” He kept speaking as if he hadn’t heard her, lost in horrible memories. “I came home from fourth grade one day, and she was gone. He said she was sick of me. That she must have hated taking care of me so much she couldn’t stay one more second.”
He’d been nine years old. Abandoned to a monster. “Oh God, Evan. I’m so sorry.”
“I can step back now and see what it was like. He was pissed about having to feed me, clothe me, pay for anything at school. And he’d made her life a living hell because of it.” He shook his head as if to try to clear it. “I’m not heartless. I see how bad she had it.” He stopped, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “But she rescued them.”
The words he didn’t say all but shouted into the room: Why didn’t she rescue me?
“He went crazy after that. He didn’t have anyone else to hit. Just me. I couldn’t hide from him anymore. He sent a note to the school saying I was sickly and he refused to allow me in gym class anymore. So I never took my clothes off. I always wore long sleeves and long pants. Nobody ever saw.”
No one ever saw him cry, never saw his pain. No one knew.
Until the Mavericks found him.
“How long did you live alone with him before you moved in with Susan and Bob?”
“A couple of years.”
She couldn’t make a sound. Not even a gasp of horror. Not now that she knew he’d endured seven hundred and thirty days in the worst kind of hell.
But then Evan laughed. Like he wasn’t dying inside with all the memories. Memories she’d never be able to shake, though they weren’t even hers.
“Susan and Bob. You had to love them. I came home with Daniel one day after school, and Susan and Bob just gathered me right in. Like they did all the Mavericks. Sometimes I spent the night. One of those times, Susan made me take a bath, because I must have stunk the way only a dirty teenage boy can. I was standing there with a towel wrapped around my waist when she walked in to get my clothes so she could wash them.”
He stopped, drew inside himself again.
“She saw the bruises?”
A barely there nod was his answer.
“Did they call child services?”
“They wanted to make sure I came to them, not shunted off into the system to end up with strangers, like what happened to Ari. They sat me down at the kitchen table and made me tell them my story.” He huffed out a breath with the memory. “It was like pulling out every single one of my teeth.”
It explained why he’d flown off to Europe last month. When under the strain of discovering Whitney’s lies, he’d shut down, shut everyone out. He’d learned to do that in childhood.
“I remember them strategizing. Bob, he had it all figured out, what would get my dad to let me go.”
“They’re good people.”
“The best,” he agreed. “I wasn’t with them when they approached him. They figured it would go better without me—and I was scared he’d demand to keep me around as his punching bag. They told him they sympathized with how much kids cost, the terrible financial burden.” Evan dropped his voice to a gravelly note as if he were Bob. “Especially with his wife gone, all that responsibility, no one to take care of a kid during the day when he had to work. They understood how it was just too much. So they’d be happy to take me off his hands, relieve his burden.” His face turned dark again, his tone suddenly hoarse. “Thankfully, he couldn’t wait to get rid of the little guttersnipe. Said I was a pain in the ass, had always been a pain in the ass, and no amount of trying to fix me was ever going to do a damn bit of good.”
She blinked back tears, but the crack in her heart was already wide open. “Susan and Bob wouldn’t have told you any of that.”
“It was a kid who lived across the hall in our tenement block. He overheard it all and wanted to make sure I knew all the reasons my dad didn’t want me.”