Chapter 18 #2
“I’ll look into that, thank you,” Jordyn said as she pocketed the card. “But when you wanted to arrange a time to speak confidentially, I had the impression you had something specific you wanted to share.”
Lauren lifted one of the water glasses and took a small sip before nodding. “Tara had been on a quest to recover her memories. You know that since she reached out to you after she remembered more about her time in foster care.”
“She told me she had dissociative amnesia. Something happened to make her lose most of the details from two full years of her life.”
Jordyn was not proud to admit that when Tara had first confided this the day they reconnected she had briefly wondered if Tara was trying to make excuses for the fact that she hadn’t contacted her for a decade and a half.
But the longer they spoke, the more Jordyn could hear the sincerity of the friend she’d once known beneath the more refined speech and pretty social manners.
Tara wouldn’t lie to her about forgetting a portion of her past.
“Precisely. She seemed to recover memories in the reverse order from the point of trauma. The oldest first, and then as time went by she gained more memories closer to the … episode.”
Jordyn felt her eyebrows shoot up, surprised.
“Have you known all along what caused the memory loss?”
Lauren’s chin notched up a fraction. “I did. And I honestly believed that allowing her to forget was the kindest possible way of dealing with a horrible, traumatic memory.”
“What happened?”
Sighing deeply, Lauren closed her eyes for a moment. “When we first brought Tara home, my then eighteen-year-old stepson, Evander, attempted to touch her … inappropriately.”
A ringing started in Jordyn’s ears. A warning system that was useless now since she hadn’t been around to protect her friend.
“When she was fourteen?” Jordyn’s blood simmered, anger twisting her insides.
Why the hell was this the first she’d heard about it? She knew for a fact that Randall Hughes’s heir had no criminal record. Far from it. The articles she’d read about the family all said Evander Hughes was now the CEO of the pharmaceutical company his father had helped to grow.
“Yes. But before you get the wrong idea, he didn’t exactly get away with it.”
“That you know of.” Jordyn bolted upright out of her chair, unable to sit still to hear a story that made her want to punch a wall. “How many times do you think he assaulted her after that when you weren’t around to intervene? How could you—”
“Jordyn. Please.” Lauren stood too, inserting herself into the path that Jordyn was attempting to pace. “Listen to me. He didn’t get away with it because she … stabbed him.”
Jordyn’s feet stumbled to a faltering stop. “Excuse me?”
“It was awful.” Lauren stepped away from her and leaned a shoulder against the window looking out over the park. “She picked up a letter opener from Randall’s desk and stuck it right through the little shit’s hand. She cut herself too since Evander’s palm was on her leg when she stabbed him.”
“Oh my God.” Jordan struggled to take it in. This is what caused the dissociative episode. A horrific encounter with someone in her wealthy, glamorous adoptive family.
Nothing at all to do with her time in the foster home.
“She was traumatized. I knew it from the second I looked at her face that she was … I don’t know.
Going into shock maybe? Evander screamed like he was getting slaughtered, bleeding all over Tara.
I had to …” She stopped. Her fingers went briefly to her mouth for a moment before she seemed to regain control again and continued.
“I had to pry her fingers off the letter opener.”
A string of soft curses floated from Jordyn’s lips while she pictured her friend having to defend herself so brutally. Just when she must have thought she was finally going to have a happy, secure life. Her stepbrother had disabused her of any such notion.
“Poor, poor Tara.” Jordyn let the revelation sink in, not quite ready to figure out how the incident connected to her friend’s death.
All she could do was empathize. Wish she’d been there to help.
“But how could she possibly have forgotten it happened for all that time? Her bastard step sibling must have reminded her—”
“What kind of mother do you think I am? I never allowed him to be alone near my daughter again. That’s what prompted my move out of the city to Saratoga, just a few weeks after we adopted her. I wouldn’t let her in the same zip code as him without constant supervision.”
But what about all the other girls he could have gone on to harm with predatory behavior? By not reporting him, Lauren had allowed him to continue endangering others. Jordyn stuffed down her anger, needing to keep Lauren talking.
“And in all those years, Evander never brought it up?”
“Randall made sure of that. While I lobbied for my husband to go to the police to file a complaint, that was never going to happen to his precious son. But Randall let Evander know his trust fund was contingent on staying away from Tara.” Lauren tore her attention from whatever she’d been staring at out the window.
Her lips lifted slightly in a crooked smile.
“The scar she gave him is something to behold. His grip never did return to normal.”
Jordyn guessed that would have been a small consolation for what Tara had gone through, even if she had recalled inflicting that wound on him. Someone from her new, adoptive family tried to assault her. And she’d been so emotionally devastated that she’d had to block it out for nearly two decades.
“So did Tara ever remember what happened to her?” Jordyn recalled how hard her friend had worked with her therapist to regain her memories from the time she’d spent in the foster home. Unraveling her past had been important to her.
“She did. Just a day before her death.” A visible shiver went through Lauren, her slender form shuddering.
“Do you think that’s related in any way? Maybe she confronted her stepbrother. Could Evander have been the one behind the hit-and-run?”
“No. He and Randall were both on a flight to Singapore that night to meet with potential clients.”
Jordyn made a mental note to verify that. She didn’t trust Lauren to share the whole truth. Just because the woman seemed protective of her daughter didn’t mean she’d made good choices.
“Then why do you think all of this is related to her death? How could recalling the truth about her past possibly get her killed, if her former tormentor had nothing to do with it?”
Jordyn felt like she’d been spinning in circles trying to figure out what had happened to her foster sister.
It still amazed her that one of the kindest people she’d ever met could have so many potential enemies.
For years before they’d reconnected, Jordyn had just assumed that Tara must have gone on to a great life after she left foster care.
But if anything, being adopted by the Hughes had only landed her in a pit of vipers.
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Lauren admitted. “Tara called me after the therapy session that unlocked the memory for her and she sounded so … different.”
“How? I don’t understand.” She needed to squeeze every possible detail from this woman, to absorb any maternal insight she had about what happened to Tara.
Based on how long it had taken Lauren to come forward in the first place, Jordyn suspected today would be her one and only opportunity to glean information from the woman.
Lauren tapped a manicured fingernail on the windowsill.
Tapping and thinking. “The news freed her somehow. She’d always been such a people pleaser and then, all of a sudden, she remembered this warrior side of herself.
It was like it gave her permission to take on the world.
Confront anyone and everyone who ever slighted her. ”
“Including you?” Jordyn wondered what kind of relationship Tara and her mother had really had.
She knew Tara had never felt like a full-fledged Hughes, but then again, she didn’t seem to openly dislike her adoptive parents either.
“Hardly. Don’t forget, I always knew that side of her was buried in her subconscious, and I respected it.
I worked hard to make her feel safe under my roof.
To give her a worry-free life.” Lauren smiled sadly.
“Looking back, I can see now that I tried to create a mini-me when I adopted her. She just wasn’t interested in shopping and traveling the world.
I thought briefly I might have influenced her decision to go to design school, but I think that was a direction she took just to please me because she never pursued fashion for a career. ”
Lauren spoke a little more about Tara’s seemingly aimless career, taking marketing work and fashion merchandising jobs when she could have done “so much more.” But Jordyn’s focus remained firmly on what Lauren had said about Tara recovering the traumatic event that had caused dissociative amnesia.
A new picture of Tara’s last days solidified in Jordyn’s mind. Pieces of the murky puzzle began sliding into place, becoming clearer.
A very different Tara Hughes had attended that last book club meeting before her death. If what Lauren had said was true, then Tara hadn’t been interested in people pleasing on that final night of her life. Far from it.
She’d gone to the meeting with scores to settle.