by Tiffany Sala
All I could think was that when she said abuse, she was talking about me. Something terrible had happened to me, something far worse than being hit that I would probably never remember—maybe I would never even get Mum to tell me the details of what she’d seen. It made me just want to collapse on the floor, melt, scream… but I couldn’t do any of that. Not now. Not in front of her. And as much as I knew that collapse was the right response, I didn’t feel connected enough to the situation to do it yet.
What I could connect to was anger. “Okay, you protected me, and I will be grateful for that forever… but because you didn’t fight him, he stayed free to hurt Jess.”
Mum put her head down. “Your sister.”
“She got everything I escaped, Mum; I can tell. It would have been me. I don’t know how I can face her knowing that—how could you just walk away knowing there might be another kid related to us who would have to endure things too horrible for your own?”
“Most of us aren’t as bad as him,” Mum said. “But… most of us aren’t as good as we’d like to believe we are, either. It’s not the answer you want, I’m sorry, but it’s honest. I saved the child I knew and loved and I’ve tried not to think of any other. I did try to warn her mother, but I was just as stupid as she is once, I can’t judge.”
It definitely wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, but in a way I needed it. It kept me from getting too caught up in this as a ‘bonding experience’ and telling her everything about Steven… and what Steven had promised to do for me. I wished I could tell her, but I had to remember that even though we’d had this major conversation and she’d admitted all sorts of things I would never have believed she’d ever talk to me about, she was still… well, Mum. She was going to find out about Steven sooner or later, especially since I’d already dropped hints to Mike, but she wasn’t going to be happy for me. We wouldn’t be able to talk about what was going on with Steven in any way that was useful to me.
I needed to get Jess out of her home, as soon as possible… but I needed to get out too. I needed to find a new job and stop listening to my mother’s lectures.
Mum shifted a little closer to me. “I hope you understand now why we can’t have anything to do with him,” she said. Even after everything, she was trying to make sure she got what she wanted out of this.
“I’m glad you told me all of this.” It was an evasion, and she squinted at me like she could damn well see it, but she didn’t challenge me for the moment. She was going to take her time to figure out how to get through to this new Tamara who had managed to draw some of her biggest secrets out of her… but what I wasn’t going to let her find out was that by the time she’d decided, it would be too late.
My mind returned to Steven, this time because I was done with going over the past for the moment. The present was full of many more concerning things. What was his plan to help Jess? Would it work, or was Jess a lost cause and the next time I saw Steven going to involve him behind bars?
There was a little plaque mounted on the wall next to the closets, one of a half a dozen Mum had with the famous ‘serenity prayer’. Mum had put one up on my bedroom wall too, making a big thing of how it was such a tradition between mothers and daughters. Changing what you could, and accepting what you could not… well, Mum had added that one up for herself, hadn’t she.
I wondered if anyone had ever given Jess such a thing. She probably wouldn’t find it as relatable as a lot of girls did.
I still had to work out for myself what I could (and should) change and what I couldn’t, but if there was one thing I knew already it was that I was just going to have to let Steven do what he had planned here. There was nothing I could do to help him.
I wanted things to be different… but life was determined to keep teaching me how futile that was.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Steven
I left a message for Para while she was still offline: Sorry I can’t keep my promise.
It really did eat me, having to invade her life when she’d asked me not to. Even though I knew I was saving her, it was still a violation to me.
But I knew all about crossing the line—and when it came to a girl I was mad for, it was already proven I could go wherever I needed to. In some ways, Tamara might end up being even worse for me than Julia.
I was actually shaking a little, parking outside the address Tamara had given me. I waited until I had that under control before I got out of my car. Confidence was the way to go with this, acting like I wasn’t doing anything wrong so I didn’t have anyone else in the neighbourhood trying to intervene.
Well, as far as I was concerned, what I was doing was exactly right, so that was easy. And the nearest neighbours were a few paddocks away. But still, I was more tense than I’d ever been just walking up to someone’s door before.
A woman with very big dark eyes opened shortly after my knock. She looked all over like a sad puppy expecting a smack.
I turned on all the charm I would have used on Julia’s parents, if she’d ever let me meet them. “I’m sorry for bothering you. Is Brad at home? I’d like to have a chat with him.”
She shook her head in a way that was strange: almost pleading. “He doesn’t talk to salespeople or journalists, sorry—”
I blocked the way as she tried to close the door. I felt like a real thug… and that was both a bad and a good feeling. “He’s going to want to talk. Trust me.”
A flash of another face behind her caught my eye: a girl with dark hair I recognised somehow though I had never seen her before. She looked like her mother and didn’t remind me of Tamara at all, which was a huge fucking relief.
“Please,” Para’s mother said. “Could you just go?”
She sounded almost as terrified as Julia had when I was dragging her off, before she realised I was still the same pathetic fuck I’d always been, and maybe that would have made me weak if not for what I knew about her. She’d known exactly what was happening to Para in the house they both lived in and she did nothing. Fuck her. Fuck any mother who wouldn’t stand up for her own kid.
“I’ll stay right here until I see Brad Chalmers, please,” I told her.
Finally a hulking brute shoved his way between the two women, going from zero to straight-in-my-face in seconds. He was fucking huge, bigger than all the pictures I’d seen had made me understand, and I would have been terrified if I didn’t know I had something that could knock him flat.
I got in with it fast, before I could think too much about how he might try to knock me flat anyway. “Hi, Brad. I’m going to need you to come for a drive with me, just the two of us and nobody else involved… unless you think you’d like what you’ve been doing to your daughter to become a trivia question on Family Feud.”
Brad backed off right away, his nostrils flaring. I could see a bit of Tamara in him, the way her mind was always working when she had a secret she was trying to work out how to manage, but I shook that thought off and led the way when he came forward.
Para’s mother clutched at his arm as he passed. “Brad…”
“Keep Jess inside, check her work or something, just fucking keep an eye on her,” he told her. “I’ll be back soon.”
I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I just had to keep telling myself this was all for her, even the way I was going about it.
He sauntered along ahead of me happily enough at first, but at the end of his long driveway, out of sight of his wife and Para, he balked. “I’m not getting in a fucking car with you, mate, so whatever you’ve got to—”
I pulled out my little knife then, something I’d nicked from the kitchen drawer that my dad used to cut fruit, and he laughed at me. “You stupid little boy.”
“You want to say that again from the wrong side of a jail cell?” I said, and he got straight in the front seat of the car.
With him inside my own car looked like the last place I wanted to be, but I forced myself to keep moving, maintaining that big dick energy neither of us really believed
I had.
“So here’s the deal.” I stared straight over my steering wheel and tried to avoid seeing any part of him in my peripheral vision. “I don’t need the drama of bringing you down in my life. But I’m willing to do whatever the fuck it takes to protect your daughter. Both your daughters.”
I couldn’t ignore his smirk. “Tamara’s boyfriend, are you? You’ve certainly never had anything to do with Jess.”
Para always spoke low, careful, only doing voice when her father was out of the house. That was part of how I’d missed how young her voice must have sounded in those early days. This fucking overconfident idiot had no idea she’d found a way to reach out to the world through the gaming rig he paid for to keep her docile, that she’d found her voice just enough to tell me what I needed to know to eventually save her. And I was not letting this asshole go until I was certain I’d saved her.
“All you need to know is I’m not going to let you hurt either of them again.”
I was watching him in spite of myself, so I saw the way he made a sudden shift into a more lounging position. He was trying to convince me he didn’t have anything to worry about, the prick. “You know I haven’t had anything to do with Tamara since she was little. Wasn’t even allowed to send her a fucking birthday card in case I tainted her perfect little life away from me. She poisoned my own kids against me, their mother, just because she couldn’t take the fact that I’d been unfaithful—”
The way he went on, if I hadn’t heard the story from Para first, I might have thought there was something to it. “Just shut the fuck up, will you?”
“I love my girls, kid. Make no mistake. I—”
“Yeah mate, it’s the way you chose to express that which really disgusts me.”
“And you think you know everything about that because Tamara spouted some of her mother’s old lies to—”
I couldn’t take it any more. I couldn’t be in that box with him and not explode. I pulled over hard, hopping the side of the road and rolling into a field. “Get the fuck out,” I ordered. “Now.”
He slithered out one leg at a time, which gave me plenty of time to get around the side to meet him. My arm was already swinging backwards; I punched him right in the face, the contact making a sickening smack. What had me on my knees and one hand gagging on the ground though was the pain. My fist felt like a fireball.
I cocked my head up at Brad, standing legs spread, his own fists just fine on his hips. Proud as the champion footy player he never got to be, though from the belly he had on him now it had been a while since he’d worried about staying in form.
“Go on, champion,” he said with a nod. His cheek was swelling, but not nearly as fast as I would have hoped for the effort of nearly breaking my hand. “Have another swing, why don’t you?”
Even if I could have, I could already see my mistake. Trying to take justice into my own hands had a way of leading me into trouble, didn’t it? If I let him goad me into hitting him more, either he’d have the perfect excuse when he knocked my block off with one swing, or I’d get myself into trouble and be no use to Tamara or Para. Brad fucking Chalmers had no idea just how much trouble. I might know everything about him… but I was nothing to him. Never on his radar, or anyone’s.
I got up and put my hands in my pockets. “No, thank you. Actually, I’m feeling pretty guilty over this whole thing, and I’m sure you have your share of demons to purge. How about we go have a chat to the cops? I can own up to my little violation of basic human decency and… you have your own violation you need to account for.”
Brad was breathing hard like he’d just broken out of a proper fistfight. “What do you want from me, then?”
“You need to let P—Jess go. We all know she wants to get away from you but you’ve been convincing her she has nowhere to go. Turn that around—today. She has somewhere to go.”
With his eye a darkening mess, he could still laugh at me. “Tamara can’t look after her, boy. She’s still a baby herself. And if you think you’re going to get anywhere with her when she’s got a spoiled fourteen-year-old to parent… you two think you’re going to be her mummy and daddy huh?”
My fist moved without input from my common sense. I fell over again, nearly biting through my own lip from the pain, but so did he. Hadn’t been expecting me to cut right past his bullshit like that. He sat up, but didn’t stand. Didn’t speak. He was waiting for me, finally.
Maybe sometimes you had to take things into your own hands a little.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “Either you kill me and get rid of my body right now—and trust me, plenty of people know where I am right now—or I am going to drive to the nearest police station with what I know, with or without you… or we’re going to drive back to your house, and I’m taking Jess with me.”
He was up again. “Sounds like kidnapping to—”
“Not if she wants to go. How about you give her the option, asshole? Or if you’re still not convinced, I guess we could have professionals come in and discuss things.”
I could see him trying to process how much harder it was to get to someone who hadn’t suffered years of being worked on already, who wasn’t going to be charmed by him. The awful thing was that I had been charmable for a while. When I thought he should still have been a champion. When I thought he and I might have some things in common. I wasn’t so far gone as to believe that any more.
He slumped a little, and got back in the car.
“I’m going to expect you to contribute towards her upkeep as well,” I said once I got in. “You keep worrying about how we’ll take care of her: well, this is your chance to do something about that. I’ll let you know where you can send the money as soon as possible… so long as you’re okay with that, of course, and you wouldn’t prefer to handle this through more official channels.”
Brad’s eyes lit up. “That sounds a lot like blackmail.”
“Contributing money towards the support of your underage daughter who is going to be under the guardianship of her sister from now on?” I shrugged. “Sounds like the only right thing to do if you ask me.”
The fucker didn’t say anything else for the whole ride back. I was so fucking glad. If he’d tried to connect with me over how he really wanted to stop, how much he actually cared about his girls… well maybe I’d surprise myself and Tamara, and prove I was able to kill him.
I did speak up once myself, though. “You know, if you’d been able to keep going, I could have idolised you. If you’d done things differently… who knows where both of us would be now?”
Even to that, he couldn’t say a word.
Back at the happy Chalmers home, Brad got out and stomped back up the driveway without another word to me. “I’ll just wait here,” I called after him through my cracked-open window. Once he was inside I started driving around the entire block that was their property, just to make sure he didn’t have any ideas of sneaking Para out the back.
I thought I might have done about fifty laps and was starting to think about the state of my fuel tank by the time I saw a little figure stomping down the driveway, swaying a little under the weight of a gigantic camping-style backpack I was pretty certain she’d never gone camping with. I pulled up where I’d stopped before and waited for her to reach me.
She stopped in front of my window and dropped her pack. “Hi, Jess,” I said, grinning up at her. “My name’s Steven.”
It was strange hearing her voice coming to me directly through the air rather than through my headphones. “You arsehole. I can’t even take my computer with me. What if he sells it?”
I jerked my head backwards. “Chuck your stuff in the back and get in please. I’m pretty sure I can get him to send your damn computer on.”
Para slid into the back seat next to her bag. I was going to call her on it, make a joke of it, but then I realised it wasn’t so funny. Even though she ‘knew’ me, was she really going to want to sit close to me on this ride?
I wa
s too busy focusing on driving out of there without trouble to pay attention to what she was doing, but I heard a hint of a laugh in her voice when she spoke up again. “What did you say to him? I’ve never seen him slobbering with rage like that before.”
“Actually I ‘let my fists do the talking’, as they say.” And my chatty fist was still throbbing. When I looked from one to the other gripping my steering wheel, there was a definite difference in size there.
“Well I’m pissed,” Para said. Was I supposed to call her Jess now? I could barely make sense of the voice of my friend in this tiny girl. “And I’m fucking terrified about what my future will hold now, so that’s great… but still. Thank you, I think.”
I felt my lips quivering. “You watch your fucking mouth,” I said, and she busted out in a giggle. “Let’s take you to your sister.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Tamara
Whatever I’d been expecting, it was not for Steven’s car to pull up outside my house, and for Jess to be getting out of it by the time Mum dragged me out to look.
“I’m calling the police this time,” she said. “He can’t just come and—”
I put my hand up to stop her. “Mum… that’s my sister.”
That started her off on another round of gabbling. “He’s bringing her here? Does he think she’s going to stay here? He can’t—”
I left her to her manic objections and went out to meet them. “Hi again, Jess.” She was looking around her like she was still trying to figure out why she was there—which made two of us, actually. I focused on the man with all the answers. “Steven…?” Any line of questioning I’d been about to take with him died when I saw how his right hand was bruised. I didn’t need any guesses to know whose face was matching right now.
