Chapter Twenty #2
Her words came back to my brain that was no longer numb and slow.
I want it to be over.
She hadn't meant the week like I had.
She had meant the obvious pain inside.
She had meant her life.
She told me.
She told me and I didn't listen.
I didn't hear.
I didn't take five minutes out of my own life to save hers.
Eight weeks after the funeral, Luis needed to go back to his life. I had to let him.
And I retreated wholly from my own.
I never went back to work.
I didn't need the money.
I didn't clean.
I barely ate.
I screened calls from my family.
I shirked all social obligations I had agreed to attend before.
It was somewhere around the tenth week that I decided I couldn’t just accept that Sammy, this woman I knew as well as I knew my damn self, was somehow secretly hiding depression from me for weeks or months.
It made no sense.
Yes, even knowing all the stories about celebrities who were happy and smiling and laughing with their families but later went and hanged themselves or shot themselves or downed some pills.
I understood depression could be sneaky.
I was becoming intimately acquainted with it myself.
But there was just a gut feeling, something sharp and uncomfortable, that told me Sammy hadn't lost a battle with depression.
It was something else.
It had to be.
And I was going to figure it out.
With a purpose again, I showered, I changed, I got in my car, and I drove the hour toward Sammy's apartment.
Sammy lived in a beautiful area in a giant penthouse apartment she shared with one of her friends who, clearly, was raised just as wealthy as we had been.
She could have afforded to live alone, but Sammy always claimed she didn't like being alone, that she didn't feel safe. Despite the twenty-four-hour doorman and the state-of-the-art security system.
She liked having someone close by.
That someone, Charlotte Patrick, had been the one to find her body, to call the police, to get the police to call my parents.
I didn’t remember seeing her at the service, but I was sure she had been there, my brain just was too sluggish to place her.
I let myself up using my key, avoiding the sad eyes of the doorman and the fellow tenants in the elevator.
But, for the first time, I knocked on the door.
Because Sammy didn't live there anymore.
"Reagan," Charlotte's voice sighed out of her, shoulders slumping. "It's nice to see you up and about," she added, no doubt having heard of my descent into grief, And the depth of it.
"She wasn't depressed, Char," I said by way of greeting, shaking my head.
"Okay," Charlotte said, inviting me in, closing the door behind me.
"You know I'm right."
"I do," she agreed, nodding. "She wasn't depressed."
“Something else happened."
"Yes."
She wasn't just agreeing with me to be polite because I was clearly just one bad day away from being back in the psych ward. And she wasn't doing it out of respect for the dead or wishful thinking.
She was agreeing because she knew.
She knew more than I did.
"You know what happened, don't you?" I asked, adrenaline surging through my system at the idea of getting an answer, stopping the voice in my head demanding I do so, driving me crazier by the hour.
"Sit, Reagan," she demanded, moving to do so herself.
Because it was more of a demand than a request, I did, dropping down on the couch, one large cushion between us.
"What happened?" I demanded, wincing at the raw sound of my own voice.
"I was waiting," she said, shaking her head. "I didn’t want to pile on. I was waiting for one of you to come and ask me. I knew you were... struggling."
"I'm here, Char. I'm asking."
"She was raped, Rae."
The words were ugly. They were always ugly. I didn't think it was possible to hear them without cringing on the inside. They were made uglier still by knowing they applied to someone you loved.
"What? When?"
"Tuesday night. She had gone out after work.
I came home late after going to see Asher.
She was in the shower when I got in. I thought nothing of it.
Until an hour passed, and the water was still running.
Then almost two hours. Honestly, I was more worried she'd fallen, and hit her head or something," she admitted, shaking her head.
"Instead, I found her chilled to the bone, shivering, and silently sobbing. I knew."
"She didn't actually say—“ I started, but she cut me off.
"I knew because I've seen the aftermath a few times. Because I know it myself," she admitted, giving me a piece of her past I had never known before. The ache in my chest amplified. "I got her out of the tub, dressed, under the blankets. And then I waited for it to spill out. I knew it was coming."
“What did she say?"
"She said she wanted to get the feel of his hands off of her," Char told me, closing her eyes tightly, tamping down an ugly memory. "I didn't really need more information than that."
"Why didn't you call the police?"
"Because she told me not to. Because she said she couldn't go through that, that she didn't want more hands touching her.
I've been through that exam, Rae. I can't blame her.
It was her choice. So I gave her one of her pills.
I let her sleep. I waited to speak to her in the morning.
I tried to coax her into making a statement. She told me no."
"You could have called me," I told her, voice small, maybe even a little accusatory.
"That wasn't my place," Char insisted, voice steely.
"If someone trusts you with that, you don't break that trust. I did get her to talk to the hotline, though.
I heard her on the phone with them on Thursday night.
I thought that was a step in the right direction.
I figured the next foot forward would be confiding in you.
I never could have known she would kill herself the next night, Rae.
I couldn't have known that. You can't blame me for that," she insisted, tears welling up and pouring out.
Mine joined hers as I wrapped my arms around her, as I told her that Sammy had come to see me, that I felt guilty too. And we shared those unfounded sensations of guilt for a long time before we managed to pull ourselves together again.
"She never said who it was?" I asked, swiping at my salty cheeks.
"No. I don't know why. I don't know if it was because she didn't know, or.—“
"Or because she did," I finished.
"Yeah," she agreed, nodding her head. "I wish I had pressed harder. But I didn't want to make it any worse for her."
"Did she say anything? Do you know where she went that night?"
"No. When I asked that morning as we got ready for our day, she said she had a dinner."
"A date?"
"No. No, it didn't sound like a date at all. She was talking about it very formally. Like she had a dinner. You know, like an obligatory dinner or something like that.”
"She wasn't dating anyone.”
It wasn't a question, but she answered anyway. "No. She'd been single for a long time. No hookups. No nothing. Just happily single."
It could have been anyone.
She could have gone to her dinner, left, and been attacked.
Or she could have gone home with whoever she had dinner with. Maybe she felt like she was to blame because she followed him, because he said she led him on.
I didn't know.
It was killing me not to know who the person was who had caused my sister to cut her life short.
"I just remember one thing she said about him. About the attacker," she clarified.
"What?"
"She said he kept calling her 'princess' the whole time he raped her."
‘Princess’ was a common word.
An annoying pet name.
Plenty of men used that endearment
But as soon as the words were out of Charlotte’s lips, I knew.
I knew like I knew the sun was going to come up the next day.
I knew who she'd had a dinner with.
I knew who called her princess.
I knew who had raped her.
Michael McDermot.
My mind flashed back to every interaction we'd had with the man. He'd been a fixture in our lives as far back as I could remember. When my parents hosted a dinner party—which was often—he had always been invited. When there was a charity fundraiser we attended, he was there.
It all tapered off maybe a year before when he decided to relocate to the east coast. I remembered feeling a sigh of relief when I walked into a dinner party and didn't see him there.
He always had a tendency to corner Sammy, or me, or both of us, something that had always set me on edge.
I'd always been pretty social, had a large circle of friends, easily conversed with those older than me because I'd been raised to do so.
None of my parents' other friends made me uncomfortable. But Michael did.
And a large part of it had been the fact that he insisted on calling us princesses. Repeatedly.
It was weird.
I'd told Sammy as much a few times.
She, being the nicer of us, the one who always gave everyone the benefit of the doubt, always insisted that I was being paranoid.
"Charlotte?" I asked on my way out the door a little while later, after pulling myself together, knowing I had to play this card close to my vest, that men like Michael didn't let rumors spread about him, that if I wanted proof, I had to be very careful.
"Yeah?"
"You went to the Mitchell’s dinner party with Sammy that last weekend right?" I asked. I'd decided to sit that one out, which had gotten me a pout from Sammy because she had already said she'd go and didn’t want to do it without me.
"Yeah. God, the food was terrible."
"It always is," I agreed, shaking my head. “Sammy wanted me to go. Now, I feel like I missed out on a chance to spend time with her. Did I miss anything? I never got to talk to Sammy about how it went."
"Uneventful for the most part. Judy is back in rehab. Alice got her nose done. Oh, and Michael got the most obvious hair plugs. God, they were bad. You'd think with all his money, he could get more convincing ones."
"Michael McDermot?” I asked, hoping my voice came off as casual even as my head started spinning.
"Yeah."
"I thought he was over in New York or something."