I’ve had enough. She’s at the end of my tolerance for denial.

She’s pushed me away for long enough.

There’s no sound from her the rest of the way home. She’s wallowing, and her denial is hurting her as much as it’s hurting me. The self-pity she’s festering in is deeper than the ocean outside her window.

I park her car in the driveway and she doesn’t move.

“Get inside,” I say.

“I’m s-sorry.” She sputters.

“I don’t care. Get out of the car.”

She inhales like she’s ready to yell at me again. I jump out of the car before she can speak.

She’s going to drive me insane. Almost as insane as the dread lacing my veins. It’s here. It’s time.

I don’t want it to be.

I yank open her car door.

“I’m going. I’m going.” She treads slowly into the house.

I want to force her to go faster, but I brace my hands against the rear of my truck and make myself breathe.

I’ve been sheltering her from the truth. Like everyone else has, her whole life. She deserves to have the lies abolished. My hands start to shake. I haven’t been saving her from it—I’ve been saving myself. Opening those files again is the last thing I ever want to do.

The brutal evidence of what happened to Louisa—it shreds me every time I look at it. I’ve read the files exactly three times. All three times are landmarks of before-and-after. I’m never the same.

Penny reaches the front door and slips inside the condo. The door closes and I move as slowly as she does to the cab of my truck. I pull the seat forward and pull out the manila envelope in the compartment behind it—three inches thick, with files and hard CD cases inside.

In many ways, it’s the most valuable proof I have left of her life. My fading memories are less clear than what’s written on these pages and recorded on these CDs.

Her voice comes back, the described images return, the things a person can never forget once read. Like always happens when I see this envelope, half of me longs to set fire to it and destroy it. The other half of me can’t wait to open it, to read it again and see the real reason why I don’t have her anymore.

My feet tread heavy on the steps up to the door. My heart is pumping faster than it should.

What will Penny say?

In my hands are the vital secrets of the past that, once shared, can never be taken back.

If she doesn’t believe this, I’ll have to leave. There’s no way I can look her in the face again if she doesn’t. The rest of my plans for her, for how I want to torture her, use her, and tease her, they won’t matter if she fails at this.

Inside, she’s sitting at the table. On seeing the envelope in my hand, or maybe it’s the look on my face, her expression ices over.

“What’s that?” she asks.

I drop it on the table, and it lands with a thud. “The truth.”

She ducks her chin, shame folding her shoulders. A fiery blush sweeps her neck and face. “I can’t.”

“You have to.” I open the envelope and pull out the file on the first incident, the first time Louisa went to the police after he attacked her. I put the papers in front of her. “Read it.”

She clenches her eyes closed as tight as her fists. “I don’t want to see it.”

I don’t want her to have to read it any more than she does, but she’s spent so much time in denial she has no choice left. “Open your eyes.”

With a sharp inhale she looks at me, her eyes pleading, as much for the truth as for me to spare her.

I tap the paper. “You owe it to yourself to learn what happened.”

She hesitates again. “I don’t want to know.”

“You’ll never know who your father really was until you know his secrets. And waiting won’t make it easier.”

She gulps, and holding her breath, turns the page.

* * *

I scan the pages, and it’s nothing like I expected. But just like I feared.

At first the reports are clinical, factual evidence.

Then I get to the details of her testimony, and the things that are written . . . it starts out with nonviolent but harassing language, and I have to close my eyes.

It sounds like my father. Not that I ever heard him say such crude things or use such explicit language, but the phrasing, the proprietary sexist context of it—it sounds like him. The same voice he used when he’d say to me, “You’re a pretty thing,” when I dressed as he said for a party.

I convince myself, it’s no big deal. What I’m reading isn’t that horrible. My father was a chauvinist. I’ve always known this. Sure, no man should ever say these things to a woman, but it doesn’t make him a criminal.

Those thoughts are more denial. My stomach contorts, and I feel sick. I’m lying to myself. But this man who I loved and who loved me couldn’t be so horrible. He was my father.

The descriptions change, morphing from verbal to physical, and my heart slows into a state of shock. Like watching a horror scene in a violent movie. I don’t want to read, I can hardly wrap my head around what’s there, but I can’t stop, either.

Somewhere amid the lines, the details that are too meticulous to be fabricated, something changes in me. The bad things about my father that I repressed and tried to forget resurface. His neglect, his control, his dismissive treatment of me, were not strange phenomena excusable by his high-powered job. They were more accurate signs of the violent man he really was than any of the good things I’ve clung to for years.

And more than any words I’m reading, my desire to know, to keep going, to read every word, pokes holes in my denial. Though it hurts like a wound ripping through my chest, there’s light on the other side.

Through the darkness of the words, there’s a lightness to learning the truth, horrific as it may be.

There’s no DNA evidence with the first packet. The report says she went to the university clinic for help, and they did nothing. They “lost” the evidence. Only then did she go to the police.

I reach for the second packet, one with DNA evidence attached. I could stop, but the pages are addictive. I don’t want to see what the words are making me see, yet I have to know everything.

Gone is my need to reject it. In its place, I’m greedy to hear it all.

I devour the third packet.

Then there’s no more. I don’t want to think about what this means—how this changes everything. Everything I’ve believed of this man I called my father all my life.

The envelope dumps upside down, and three CDs tumble out.

Bile rises in my throat. To hear the voice of the woman who experienced the things I read—I’m terrified.

“You don’t have to listen to them.” Logan stands beside me. I’d forgotten he was there. He’s been silent, watching me.

The CDs are labeled with the dates. Each a few months apart.

I breathe deep. “I have to.”

“I don’t have a player.” The look on his face is strange. His fury replaced with something resembling fear.

That can’t be right.

I squint. “You don’t want me to listen to it?”

“You’ve read it. You don’t need to hear it.” He tries to take the envelope from me.

“No. I have to.” Holding it tightly, I go to my storage closet.

I don’t know why he doesn’t want me to listen, but I have to hear it. It’s the final puzzle piece. The last of my denial still hangs by a thread. I want it gone.

I dig between boxes. My fingers are coated with dust, but in the back of the closet, I find a boombox with a CD player.

I show it to him, and fear lights his face. He steps back from the table like he can’t touch the CDs. I dig for new batteries in the kitchen drawer and put the first disc in.

The scratchy fuzz of the recording starts, then an official female voice says, “The testimony of Louisa Kane.” She follows with the date and asks, “Miss Kane, can you tell us about your encounter with Malcolm Vandershall?”

The door to my terrace slams shut. Logan went outside. He couldn’t stand to listen. And it hits me harder than any piece of evidence—this is his sister.

And on these recordings, she was younger than me. Twenty years old, the report says.

It’s not obvious by her tone, though.

Her voice is shaky at the beginning, but it’s tinged with determination. There’s fear, but nothing can stop her. Word for word she says what I read in the transcripts. Her voice rises and thickens over the course of each disc. By the end, she’s seething with righteous anger.

The coil in my gut, the fisting in my tongue, it unleashes a torrent. My father, a man in his fifties, president of the university, did this to her, as a college junior.

I have the urge to scream. But I clamp my teeth and listen. I can give her that respect, at least. I force myself to sit through all three of her recordings.

At the end though, I’m left wondering.

How did she die?

The violence in the last packet was brutal. There had to have been lacerations, and she would’ve needed medical attention, but he didn’t kill her.

Did she kill herself?

Sorrow like I’ve never felt fills my chest, and I’m torn open. Like he said, it hurts, worse than any pain I’ve imagined. I rub my hand over my heart.

If this is painful to me, it hurts Logan more.

He doesn’t reappear.

Out the window, I see his back. He stares at the ocean, and I’m amazed at what I don’t feel. My anger at him—it’s gone. It all makes sense now.

But it doesn’t make it easy.

I am confusion and mourning, and my brain is a tilt-a-whirl, reevaluating my entire life. How could this happen and I didn’t know? Why would my father do something like this? It’s like the father I knew and loved has died. Again.

Except this time, it’s like he never existed. My father was never the man I loved and believed him to be.

Instead, he’s this vile, monstrous, violent criminal—no. Worse. That’s not a terrible enough description for him. There are no words to describe a person who would do something like what’s on these pages and recordings.

The man who did this was not the man I loved. The man who did this was not someone worthy of being loved.

And Logan? I not only understand his need for revenge, I wonder he hasn’t done worse. In retaliation for something like this, I’m surprised he didn’t try to kill my father.

Shame braids around my heart.

I’ll never be able to look Logan in the face again.

My body, my bones, my blood pound with the need to hit something, to rid myself of these feelings—it’s too much. I’m an overflowing cup of despair, anger, guilt. I can’t hold all of this inside me. I have to do something with it.

I grab my purse and run out the door to my car. I drive. The only thing I want is to numb myself. I can’t feel all these things at once.

I need out.