22. Ryan #2
“Dad got angry. He said boys don’t cry.” Her jaw sets. “He’d call him a baby. Told me I made him soft, because when Tobias got scared he’d come to me instead of trying to be a little man about it.”
I think about X on the floor of that bedroom three weeks ago — you miss your mommy, you cry, anybody’s got a problem they come talk to me — and I have to look at the floor for a second.
“Did your father ever physically hurt Tobias?”
“Yes.”
I look at Roman. He still won’t look at me. Coward.
“What did you do when that happened?”
“I got between them.”
“Every time?”
“Every time I could.”
Arthur pauses, and I already know the question coming, and I already hate it. “And what usually happened when you put yourself between your father and your little brother?”
Ally gives him the saddest small smile I have ever seen. “Then Dad hit me instead.”
Mom’s grip on my hand goes from tight to painful. I don’t loosen mine either.
Arthur walks back to the table, checks something in a binder — buying Ally a breath, I think, more than checking anything — then turns. “I want to ask you about your mother.”
And there it is. Ally’s whole body changes. Three weeks is not long enough for this. It isn’t close.
“What was your father’s relationship with Jane like?”
Ally swallows hard. “I didn’t understand it for a long time.”
“What didn’t you understand?”
“Why she stayed.” Her voice drops, goes quiet and raw.
“Why she didn’t stop him more. Why, when he got angry, she’d tell me to be quiet instead of telling him to stop.
” She looks down at her hands. “I was angry with her for a long time. Years. I want to be honest about that. I thought she was weak. I thought she chose him over us, over and over.”
Arthur doesn’t rescue her from it. He lets her own the ugliest part of it, because it’s the truest, and the truest thing is what breaks Roman’s case wide open.
“What changed?”
“I got older. And I started noticing things.” Her breath shakes on the inhale.
“Bruises. She always had a reason. She walked into a cabinet. She fell. She bruised easily, she’d say, like it was a personality trait.
Some of them didn’t add up, and part of me knew that, but she was my mom, and she smiled and made it a joke, and I…
” Her voice fractures. She looks at Roman again.
“I let myself believe her. Because the other thing was too big to look at.”
“Until three weeks ago,” Arthur says softly.
“Until three weeks ago.”
The whole room seems to understand where we’re going now. Even Roman’s attorneys have gone still.
Arthur takes a slow drink of water. Sets the glass down. Returns to the center of the room. “I want to talk about that week. Before we get to what happened inside your home — did something significant happen at Edgewood that Thursday?”
“Yes. Victor came to school. He brought my engagement ring.”
Arthur’s team puts the photograph up on the monitor, and I have to breathe through my nose to keep still.
That fucking picture. Victor sliding a diamond the size of a knuckle onto Ally’s hand in the middle of the Edgewood atrium, kissing her cheek, stamping his name across her in front of the entire school.
“Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know he was coming? Did you choose that ring?”
“No. To both.” Her eyes are fixed on the screen like it physically costs her. “I didn’t know he’d be there. I didn’t pick it. He picked it. He picked everything.”
“What did your father expect of you when Victor gave it to you?”
“To be happy. To look happy.” Her throat works. “So that’s what I did. I smiled. I hugged him. I let him kiss me. I said thank you.”
The next photo comes up — Ally with her arms around Victor’s neck, the perfect little fiancée, and only I know what it cost her, because she told me that night what she was thinking while she did it.
“If I’d embarrassed him in front of people, if I’d made him look foolish, I’d have gone home to my father. And I knew exactly what that meant.”
She doesn’t have to spell it out. The bruises she already testified to spell it out.
The photograph changes. Now I’m in it. So are Kaiden, X, Danny, and Iz — five idiots in blazers standing in the atrium while half of Edgewood films us.
“Did Victor approach anyone else that morning?”
“Yes. The boys. Ryan, Kaiden, Xander, Danny, and Iz.” A ghost of something crosses her face. “He called Ryan over first. Ryan wouldn’t go.”
Dad’s mouth twitches. Mom elbows me like I did it on purpose. I absolutely did it on purpose, but this is not the moment to look proud of it.
“So Victor went to him?”
“He crossed the whole atrium and started in on all five of them. One at a time. He knew things about their families — things that had happened, painful things — and he brought them up on purpose, in public, to intimidate them.”
“Did it work?”
“No.” This time I do let the corner of my mouth move. Barely. “It made him look small. He came to school to remind everyone he owned me, and instead everyone watched a grown man lose to a bunch of teenagers who wouldn’t flinch.”
“What happened after school?”
Ally’s face closes again, the brief lightness gone like it was never there. “I went home.”
“Was your father there?”
“Eventually.”
Arthur gives her the space to gather herself. She takes it. Her hand flattens against the baby, and I watch her decide to keep going.
“Tell the court what happened that night.”
“Dad was already angry when he got home. About the videos, about Victor, about the whole day.” She shifts in the chair.
“Tobias got upset about something small. He started crying. Dad told him to stop, and he couldn’t — he’s six, and he was scared, and you can’t just stop when you’re six and scared.
So Dad grabbed him.” Her fingers press into her own palm hard enough to leave marks of her own. “I told him to let go of him.”
“What did your father do?”
“He shoved Tobias down.” Mom makes a tiny sound.
I stare at Ally, and my whole body is one held breath.
“Tobias hit the floor. I went for him, and Dad grabbed me before I got there, and I fought him, because all I could think about was getting to my brother.” Her breathing changes, going shallow and quick.
“And he hit me. More than once. I ended up on the floor next to Tobias.”
She has to stop. She makes herself keep going anyway, and I have never been more terrified of or more in love with anyone in my life. “And that’s when Mom tried to stop him. She got between us. Between him and me.”
“What happened to Jane?”
“Dad shoved her.” Ally wipes under one eye with the back of her hand, quick, like she’s annoyed at the tears for being there.
“She hit the kitchen island. Then he grabbed her again.” Her voice shrinks, goes small and young.
“That was the first time I ever saw him hurt her. With my own eyes. In front of me.”
Arthur waits until she looks back at him. “What did you understand, in that moment?”
“That it wasn’t the first time.”
“How did you understand that?”
“Because of how she reacted.” The tears come now, and Ally doesn’t fight them, doesn’t wipe them, just lets them fall while she says the worst thing she’s ever had to say about her mother.
“She knew how to cover her head. She knew how to turn her face away so it wouldn’t catch the worst of it.
She knew when to stop talking so it wouldn’t get worse.
” Her mouth trembles. “You don’t know those things unless somebody’s taught them to you.
She knew. She’d always known. And I never let myself see it. ”
Mom is crying openly beside me now, Dad’s arm tight around her.
I don’t realize I’m crying too until Dad, without a word, presses a folded tissue into my free hand.
I want to be too proud to use it. I use it.
My girl is thirty feet away turning herself inside out in front of the man who did all of it, and I can’t do a single thing but sit here and leak like a fucking faucet and hold my mother’s hand.
“What happened after your father left the room?”
“Mom took care of us. Tobias was crying, I was hurt, she was hurt worse than either of us, and she still—“ Ally’s voice catches. “She still took care of us first. That’s what she always did.” She wipes her cheek. “And while she was helping me, my shirt shifted, and she saw.”
“Saw what?”
“That I was pregnant.”
“Had you told her?”
“No. I’d been hiding it from everyone. But she saw enough to know, and she asked me straight out, and I—“ Ally’s hand comes to rest over the baby again, and this time it stays. “I told her the truth.”
“Did you tell her who the father was?”
“Yes.”
Arthur doesn’t make her say my name again just to make everyone hear it. He asks the thing that matters. “What was Jane’s reaction?”
“She cried.” Ally is crying too now, quiet and steady. “She wasn’t angry. I thought she’d be angry, or scared of what Dad would do, and she was scared — but not the way I expected. She kept saying we had to get out. Me and Tobias. That we couldn’t wait anymore.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That she was coming with us.” Ally presses her lips together, hard, and when she speaks again her voice barely holds. “And she started apologizing.”
“For what?”
“For not leaving before. For not getting us out years ago. For all of it.” The whole room has gone silent, the kind of silence that has weight to it.
“And I told her to stop. I told her she didn’t have to apologize to me for being scared of him too.
Because I finally understood — she wasn’t weak.
She’d been surviving him the exact same way I had, the whole time, and neither of us ever knew the other one was doing it. ”
Roman looks down at the table. Good. I hope he never looks up again. I do not have a word big enough for how much I hate him, and I have spent three weeks trying to find one.