33. Reed
It’s been twenty-four hours now since the shit hit the fan, and the press still haven’t given up.
They’re camped on our doorstep, the road crowded with them.
Should I contact a lawyer? No criminal charges have been brought against me, but I’m wondering if I’m going to need to protect myself.
I want to phone Laney, check if she’s all right, but I’m worried our phones might have been tapped. Will it only make things worse for her if any of us try to contact her? If we leave her alone, will the reporters leave her be, too?
She doesn’t deserve this. She’s been through so much already.
“What are we going to do?” Cade asks. “We can’t hide away inside this house forever.”
Darius drags his hand through his hair. “What choice do we have? If we go out there, we’re going to be hounded.”
Cade shakes his head. “We should never have let Laney go back to the trailer. She should be here with us.”
I hold up a hand. “First of all, we don’t get to decide what Laney does or doesn’t do.
She’s an adult, and she gets to make her own choices.
” I take a breath, painfully aware of how hypocritical I’m being right now considering how I’d acted when that boy had tried to dance with her.
“Secondly, how do you think it would be better for her to be here with us? What would the press do if they knew she was locked away in this house with us? What would the cops do? They’d probably decide she was in some kind of danger and raid the place.
Imagine the media showdown if that happened? ”
“But she’s alone,” Dax says. “It’s not right that she’s alone.”
He’s right. It suddenly hits me how little I know of Laney’s life outside of us. I know she used to work, but I couldn’t say where. She’s never spoken of any friends who might have been missing her. The only person I knew was in her life was her mom, and she’s dead.
“Fuck.” I knot my fingers in my hair. “What are we going to do?”
I’m normally the one with the answers, not the one asking the questions.
My two sons stare at me, but no one provides a solution.
* * *
Later that afternoon, my concerns about the police showing up are proven to be real.
A cop car pulls up in front of the house, and two uniformed police officers knock on my door and then ask that I come with them. They don’t put me in cuffs, but they do pat me down for weapons. The press have an absolute field day snapping photographs of me being put in the back of the car.
Within an hour, I find myself in an interview room.
The room is bare, apart from a table in the middle of it, and chairs on either side. In the corners of the room are cameras, and I’m fairly sure it’s rigged with recording equipment, too.
An officer in his late forties, who introduces himself as Detective Knox, is there to interview me.
“I’m not under arrest?” I check.
“No, Mr. Riviera. You’re simply helping us with our enquiries.”
“I see. I’m fairly sure I know what those enquiries are about.”
I can’t lose my temper. As frustrating and insulting as this is, it won’t look good for me if I come across as hot-headed or violent.
I’ve always known this would happen. It would come out at some point.
I could kick myself for being so stupid, though.
What the hell had we been thinking, having sex out in the open like that?
We hadn’t been thinking; that was the problem.
On a laptop, Detective Knox pulls up a still image. It’s clearly me, with my fucking pants open, and Laney bent over the hood of a car. My chest tightens, but my cock also tingles at the sight. It’s not good timing to get an erection.
“Can you identify the two people in this photograph, Mr. Riviera?”
“Yes. That’s me and Laney Flores.”
“As you can see from the photograph, it’s been brought to our attention that you have a sexual relationship with your stepdaughter.”
From the look of disgust on his face, it’s clear what he thinks of me.
“That’s right. There’s no point in me denying it. We’re not related by blood, and she’s eighteen. We’re both adults. Legally, we haven’t done anything wrong.”
The detective clears his throat. “See, that’s what we have to figure out. Laney Flores came into your guardianship when she was seventeen years old. We need to know the nature of your relationship while she was still underage.”
“There was no nature of our relationship. We barely had one back then. She didn’t come into my life until shortly before she turned eighteen.”
“You have to understand, Mr. Riviera, that Miss Flores was trusted into your guardianship when she was an emotionally vulnerable young person. Did you and your sons take advantage of that?”
I grind my teeth. “I don’t believe so.”
“Did your sons have a sexual relationship with your stepdaughter before she turned eighteen?”
I hate that he’s brought Darius and Cade into this. He has no proof that there’s anything between them.
“No, they did not.”
“Three adult men and a vulnerable girl, all trapped together in the wilderness. She had no one else to turn to. You can understand how this looks from the outside.”
A horrible thought occurs to me. What if he’s already spoken to Laney, and she’s said that we hurt her?
“You’re saying that we groomed her?”
I hate the suggestion. Is it because there’s just a tiny part of me that worries he might be right?
I remember seeing Laney for the first time, how it had been like a punch in the chest. She’d had a physical impact on me from the moment I’d laid eyes on her.
But I’d done my absolute best not to cross any boundaries that would have been considered inappropriate, at least until she’d come of age.
Had Cade and Darius done the same? I couldn’t say for sure.
It wasn’t as though I’d been with them every second of every day.
Besides, Cade had acted as though he hated Laney, at least at first, and I didn’t think Darius was like that.
“You’re putting words in my mouth, Mr. Riviera,” the detective replies curtly.
I turn the questions back on him. “Have you ever been in a plane crash?”
“No, I’m fortunate enough to say that I haven’t.”
“What about any other survival situation?”
“Again, no.”
“Let me tell you that the absolute last thing you’re thinking about is grooming someone.
We were focused on our survival, on finding shelter and food.
We were focused on not getting sick or injured, because if we did, it could kill us.
Yes, over time, our relationships changed, but none of us did anything wrong, and I am one hundred percent certain that when you speak to Laney, she will say the same. ”
Am I one hundred percent certain, though?
Do I truly know Laney’s mind? What if she looks back on events and sees things differently?
She’d been traumatized by the assault and rape, and by the struggle to survive.
Maybe that has warped things in her mind.
What if her insistence to stay at the trailer was actually a way of creating some distance between us so she could unravel what had happened?
Time is a strange thing. It has the ability to warp memories. The stories we tell ourselves solidify themselves in our neural pathways to the point where they become real to us, even if the actual events played out differently.
But I remember the morning she came to me, when she had me take her virginity, but I hadn’t even known she was a virgin. There was no way that was me seducing her. She had wanted me, and she’d made it very clear that she wanted me. I hadn’t misread that.
The detective nods and scribbles something down. “I’ll make sure our records are updated to show I’ve spoken with you. Assuming Miss Flores’ account of events match your own, we won’t be proceeding any further.”
“That’s good to know.” I get to my feet. I want out of there.
“Oh, Mr. Riviera, how did you survive out there all that time?”
“We had each other to live for,” I reply.