Chapter 26 #2
Petra looks like she might throw up, and the way she swallows makes me think she might actually be choking back bile. She hands me her phone and says, “Start reading from the top.”
The name at the top of the text message is Alicia. No last name.
Alicia
Holy shit. I hope you’re sitting down, cupcake. Because this is not what I expected to find when you asked me to look into TG. I should have known a rich shit like him would have skeletons in his closet.
Petra
The rich ones always do.
Alicia
Truth! Unfortunately his skeletons are of the underage variety.
Petra
***
Alicia
It seems he’s really into sleeping with underage women. Particularly coked-up underage victims of sex trafficking.
Petra
No. Full stop, no!
Alicia
There’s a woman in the East Village who runs a sex trafficking ring. He has regular payments that get sent to her every month from an offshore account.
Petra
That’s sickening. How do you know about payments from an offshore account? And that those payments are for underage girls?
Alicia
You don’t want to know the answer to either of those questions. The thing that matters is that I have evidence, and I need to know what you want me to do with it.
Petra
Give me a day to figure that out.
I lift my eyes from the screen and look at Petra. “What the hell is she talking about?”
“Which part do you need me to explain?” Petra asks flippantly. “The part where Stella’s uncle is a pedophile or the part where he’s regularly cheating on his wife with underage victims of sex trafficking?”
“When they were here for dinner that night, you knew, didn’t you?” I ask her. I knew Tony was making Stella uncomfortable, but my brain didn’t jump to something like this, whereas hers clearly did.
“I knew something was off,” she says as she tucks a dark curl behind her ear and looks up at me with those big, beautiful eyes. “It felt like he was conditioning Stella to accept unwanted sexual attention, which is a big trigger for me.”
“Why?” I try to phrase the question as gently as I can. What has happened to her in the past that makes her able to recognize this behavior so easily?
She takes a deep breath through her nose and raises her chin.
Her lips are pressed together tightly. “Tony reminds me of a lot of my dad’s friends back in Austria, the creepy ones who always liked to refer to themselves as Dyadya So-and-so.
They weren’t my uncles, they weren’t related to me.
But they used their friendship with my dad as an excuse to touch me, to tickle me, to give me attention I didn’t want.
It started happening when I was a little older than Stella, maybe around nine or so.
And my parents would always be like ‘Oh, just give your uncle a kiss,’ and I felt so helpless, like I didn’t have control over my own body. ”
“Shit, Petra, I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know that was happening, but I feel like I should have been there to protect her. Or Viktor, or her dad, or her mom should have stood up for her. It eats at me that she felt so alone even before her mom and Viktor died.
“There was this one friend of my dad’s,” she continues, “who always had his hands on me. He’d come up behind me and rub my back or give my shoulders a massage.
I was thirteen when we passed through a doorway in my house going opposite directions and he openly groped me.
He slid his palm right across my nipple, then squeezed my breast, leaning down to whisper some creepy term of endearment into my ear.
My mom had died a few months earlier, and while she was alive, no one had tried anything that blatantly inappropriate.
I remember thinking ‘I’m the only one who can save me now.
’ So I put syrup of ipecac in his drink that night.
He started vomiting, and when he rushed to our front door to leave, I handed him his coat and said, ‘Don’t ever touch me again.
’ I used that strategy more than once, and pretty soon my dad’s friends stopped spending time at our house. ”
I gaze at her across the couch, noting how her face is triumphant, as it should be, but her eyes are sad. “I’m really sorry that you had to go through that alone. I wish you’d told me back then.”
“So what? You could come over every time my father had friends over and be my bodyguard?” Her laugh carries the notes of bitterness.
“If that’s what it took. I would have done anything to protect you,” I tell her. She shakes her head slightly and her lips curve into a frown. “What is that look?”
“Nothing.”
“Petra, I said I’d have done anything to protect you, and you shook your head and frowned. What. Was. That. Look?” I ask, drawing each word out.
She raises her eyebrows and smiles brightly. “Honestly, it was nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She’s blatantly lying to me, and an uneasy feeling is wrapping itself around my intestines, snaking its way up to my stomach, clawing at my esophagus. “Petra,” I draw out her name slowly, a low warning. “Don’t lie to me.”
“What do you want me to say, Sasha?” She looks away, glancing out the windows at the terrace.
“I want you to explain.”
She straightens her back, sitting up to her full height, and squares her shoulders. Then she slowly turns her head toward me. “Because no one—nothing—ever hurt me more than your leaving did.”
Oh shit. “I thought we talked about this when I was in LA. I thought we were okay?”
“You explained, yes. That doesn’t make it hurt less.”
I wish I could tell her how much it hurt me, to know how she felt about me and to have felt the same way, and to have had to walk away from her to save her.
I want to tell her the truth, but mostly because I want her to see that I was trying to protect her.
I didn’t want her to know that her father had essentially sold her off.
She deserves to know the truth.
But the truth would only hurt her more, it wouldn’t make her feel better. And it would bring up so many more questions and issues, and there’d be no real resolution because both our fathers are dead now. No, telling her would make things worse, not better.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I really am. I did what I thought we both needed me to do at the time.”
“I would have done anything for you, you know?” Her husky voice has that sentence coming out low, like a promise or a threat.
“I know,” I assure her. “And that’s partly why I needed to leave. You needed to go to Switzerland, Petra. You needed to chase your dreams. And I needed to chase mine. We made our way back to each other as adults,” I remind her.
“Yeah, because we were secretly married, and we didn’t know it,” she gives a sad, sarcastic laugh and a knife of guilt twists in my stomach because, in a way, I did know. “We didn’t come back to each other by choice, necessarily.”
“However it happened,” I tell her, “I’m glad it did.”
She waits a beat too long before she says, “Yeah, me too.”
“Where is she?” Stella asks me for at least the fifth time in the last fifteen minutes. She’s swinging her feet under the table and fidgeting with a french fry that now resembles a lump of smashed potato between her fingers.
“She’s on her way,” I assure her. “Traffic is terrible at this time because everyone’s leaving work.
And she has to come from Brooklyn, which is farther away than the Upper East Side.
” Stella has no sense of the city yet, so I arrange our basket of fries, the ketchup, and the salt and pepper shakers to try to explain to her where Times Square is relative to other parts of the city.
Clearly bored by my explanation, Stella says, “I’ve hardly seen Petra since she’s been back.”
“It hasn’t even been two days yet, and you had school today. You saw her last night, and you’ll see her tonight. She’ll be here for the whole weekend.”
“Yeah, but you have that party tomorrow night so you’ll both be gone and I have to stay behind with Raina.”
“I thought you liked Raina?” I’m careful to ask, not to insist, because I want to make sure she’s telling me how she really feels, not saying what she thinks I want to hear.
“I do.” She sighs, then looks at the ceiling in frustration. And we’re officially to the eye rolling years. I had expected we’d at least get to nine or ten before she started in with that. “I just like Petra better. Besides you, she’s my favorite person.”
“Want to know a secret?” I ask, leaning toward her conspiratorially. She nods. “Besides you, she’s my favorite person too.”
Stella’s smile is huge. Petra and I haven’t tried to hide our feelings for each other since she’s been back, and Stella has certainly noticed that there’s something going on between us that she didn’t see when Petra was here before.
Last night when I was sitting on the couch watching a cartoon with Stella before she went to bed, Petra ambled into the den and sat down on my other side.
I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her into me.
I run so hot that I don’t normally like having people and their body heat pressed up against me.
But with one arm around Stella and the other around Petra, and both of them curled into my opposite sides, I realized maybe I didn’t mind when the people pressed up against me are my two favorite people.
“Is that why she’s sleeping in your room now?
” Stella asks, and the feeling of my stomach dropping almost makes me choke on my drink.
I probably should have thought about how I’d answer this question when it came up, since we aren’t trying to hide it this time around.
It seems stupid to put her in the guest room and then for us to sneak around after Stella goes to sleep.
“Yes, because I want to spend as much time with her as possible.”
“Even while you’re sleeping?”
“Yes, I like having her close by even while we’re sleeping.”
Stella nods and I can practically see the wheels turning in her mind. “Can she sleep in my room one night?”