EPILOGUE
A MAN NAMED NOAH
THREE MONTHS LATER
I thought about Mom and the things she'd endured a lot during the weeks and months after the torture I went gone through inside Benjamin Nolan's dungeon. And I talked about her often with the therapist I’d finally succumbed to needing.
***
AGE SEVENTEEN
It felt awkward to sit alone with my mom now after knowing what I knew about my conception.
It was even more so after having multiple parts of my body inside a girl’s mouth.
I was afraid she could glance at me and sense my knowledge and new experiences radiating from my skin, and every time she looked at me from across the couch, I wished I could burrow deeper between the cushions and retreat without my absence being noticed.
“You’re quiet,” she commented finally after twenty minutes of the most uncomfortable silence I’d ever experienced. “You okay?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
Dad was still at work, and Miles was at a friend’s house. Neither of them was expected to be home for another couple of hours, but that didn’t stop me from hoping they’d walk through the door early, just to relieve me from this torture of sitting with Mom.
I should’ve gone upstairs, I thought, tightening my hold on a throw pillow. Maybe I can run up there now. I could say I have homework or something.
She pulled in a deep breath, twisting her lips to the side.
Her attention was hardly on the show we were supposed to be watching, and I knew she was going to say something.
I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want this moment to become any more uncomfortable than it already was.
But it’d been two weeks since my talk with Dad, a week since Ashley had used her mouth on me, and there hadn’t been an opportunity in this whole time for Mom to talk to me about anything.
I knew it was driving her crazy. I could tell from the way she forced her smiles and dropped her gaze whenever I looked at her.
I hated it.
Our relationship had never been a bad one. I had always been able to talk to her. But something had happened along the way. Or maybe it’d been a bunch of tiny somethings that piled up until our easy bond became something more strained and … weird.
And I really hated it.
But how was I supposed to fix it when I didn’t even know what was wrong?
Maybe it’s me.
“So, um …”
My stomach knotted with trepidation as she began to speak reluctantly.
Here we go.
“Dad …”
“What about him?” I asked, glancing at her sidelong.
She blew out a breath, keeping her eyes on the TV. “He told me he talked to you … about something, um … regarding how … you were, um …”
She let her words fade, unable to finish the sentence. But she didn't need to. I knew what she meant.
My conception.
My beginning.
I cleared my throat and pulled the pillow against my chest, burying my chin against it. Then I grunted a half-assed sound of acknowledgment.
“Did you …” She sighed, then continued, “Did you have any questions? Anything, um … anything you wanted to ask me?”
I didn’t mean to laugh. It wasn’t funny. Nothing about it was. But I couldn’t help it as I asked, “Like what?”
“Well, I just figured … it must’ve been hard for you to … learn that—”
“What? That I started my life as a mistake?”
She turned to look at me, a forlorn scowl on her face. “Who ever said you were a mistake?”
I huffed, squeezing the life out of that pillow now as I bit my bottom lip. “Come on, Mom,” I muttered, my voice barely an audible croak. “At some point, you must've thought that—”
“I have never … ever, not once, thought of you as a mistake,” she pressed, emphasizing every word.
“But Seth—”
“Noah, Seth was an evil, awful piece of shit,” she interjected harshly. “He got what he deserved.”
I turned to her fully, looking into her emerald-green eyes.
It hit me then that she and I had never talked about any of these things throughout the years.
Not once after Seth's visits had she talked to me about the things I'd heard, things I'd seen.
Life just simply continued as the horrors he'd inflicted upon us were swept under some proverbial rug.
“What about what we deserved? What about you?” I asked in a breathless whisper.
“You didn't deserve any of that shit. You didn't deserve to be hurt. And … I wish …” My throat clenched around a burst of emotion threatening to choke the life out of me. I blinked away from her, fixing my watery gaze on the rug at my feet. “I wish … I wish it’d never happened. None of it.” My life included, but I wouldn't say it.
I let my voice fade as I swallowed the thoughts of regret, keeping them inside. And it wasn't that I wished to die. But I simply wished it had never happened at all to spare my mother the torment she'd endured.
She shifted on the couch, moving closer until her thigh touched mine.
She wrapped an arm around me and gave my body a tug until I relented and allowed her to press my head against her shoulder.
Her palm held to my temple, brushing my hair off my forehead the way she always used to when I had been a little kid, and I closed my eyes, putting myself back to a place where it was just her and me against the bogeyman.
“Baby,” she said, resting her cheek against the top of my head, “you are the greatest thing to ever happen to my life.”
“I don't understand how you can say that,” I admitted.
She shifted beneath me, and I lifted my head for her to frame my face with her palms. She held on to my gaze with the intensity in hers.
“You gave me every bit of strength I needed to get through it all,” she said.
“I survived because I needed you to live.
And I know I wasn't perfect. I know I could've done better.
I know there are things I did that other people probably wouldn't have done. But I did what I thought was best, and I did it for you. To keep you safe … with me. I thought that, as long as you were with me … you were safe.”
Then she laughed as a tear worked its way from her eye to slip down her cheek. She caught it, using her palm to wipe it away as she said, “But it was you who saved me.”
“Dad saved you,” I muttered with a huff and a weak smile.
She returned the smile, her eyes dancing within mine for a moment. Then she asked, “And who was brave enough to talk to him in the first place?”
***
As Meg's belly grew alongside my mounting PTSD, I’d accepted reluctantly that I was never going to be the father our baby needed me to be if I couldn't fight against the demon in my head.
The one who haunted my dreams, the one who lurked in the corner of every dark room the moment the lights were turned off.
So, I went back to therapy for the second time in my life, this time of my own accord, and although I was reluctant to open up to Stephen—a nice old guy recommended by Dad's friend Harry—I eventually did.
I told him about Seth. The hell he'd put my mom and me through during the first thirteen years of my life.
I told him about Tommy's house and the boy I'd struggled to forget.
I told him about the man who'd saved our lives and become the dad I'd always deserved. The years of foolish jealousy toward my little brother. The resentment I'd once held toward my mom and the things she'd inadvertently put me through by simply allowing me to live.
Then, after a month of regular sessions, I finally told him about the week I'd spent locked away in a room somewhere still unbeknownst to me.
I couldn't look into the eyes of the older man before me as I uttered the words I hadn't yet spoken to anyone.
Not to my fiancée. Not to my father and certainly not my mother.
None of them knew the extent of what I'd been through, and though I silently vowed to tell them sooner or later, I wasn’t ready.
But I told Stephen, and he listened to every word without interruption.
He gave me the stage I needed to air every filthy, degrading detail, with my eyes on the floor and my hands stuffed deep into my sweatshirt pockets, until it was all out in the open.
My horrifying truth, now resting upon the shoulders of someone else, and you know what?
It didn't make it any easier to have lived it. But somehow, I was able to sit a little taller without its entire weight pinning me down.
“Has it impacted your relationship at all?” Stephen asked me. “Physically? Emotionally?”
I shrugged, then shook my head. “No, not really,” I admitted truthfully. “I mean, it took me a little while to feel at all okay with trying to … you know, have sex, but that was more about me not wanting her to see the bruises and cuts and whatever … you know, the physical evidence.”
He responded with a contemplative hum.
“I think I just didn't want her to see me as broken, even though …
I mean—let's be real—I am,” I said, unable to keep myself from emitting a bitter chuckle.
“But once I was okay physically, for the most part, I, um …
yeah, no, I never had a problem with sex with her.
And I guess that's because, with her, it's for both of us, right?
It's not about power or, um … revenge or … inflicting pain … um …”
I swallowed as I was suddenly sent back in time to a dimly lit room, where the pressure on my back wasn't that of the chair I sat in, but Ben. His body, weighing against mine. His sweat, dripping into my eyes. A wave of nausea rolled over me as I fought for the ability to breathe.
“Come back to me, Noah,” Stephen said through the fog. “Listen to my voice. You're okay. You're safe.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and gave my head a quick shake, pulling in a deep breath and releasing it slowly.
“What about emotionally?”
My eyes opened to look at him again with a questioning lift of my brows, and he smiled kindly.
“With your fiancée, did you experience any emotional impact after what you went through?”