She shook her head. “That’s not how I see myself. I survived, Jules. I made it out and found a better life. I worked hard to understand what happened wasn’t my fault.”
“It was your fault.”
Stunned by that accusation, Adria’s heart slammed to a halt, then double-timed it in her chest.
Juliana sat up and leaned in close. “You left me there. Alone. Wondering what was happening to you. Not knowing if you’d come back. What would happen to me if you didn’t come back?”
Adria sank into the corner of the couch, needing some space and a second to take that in. “You’re angry that I . . .” It hit her then why Juliana pretended to be her all the time. “When he came for us, I pretended to be you. I made you be quiet and not say a word. I took your turn.”
Juliana hugged herself tight and stared at her lap. “You’d come back and never say what happened. You’d be so quiet and look so hurt and haunted.” Juliana picked at the end of the sweater. “It was my fault. I should have spoken up.”
Adria shook her head, reached over, took her sister’s chin, and made her look up. “No. There’s no way I would have let him touch you. That was never going to happen. I’d have done anything to protect you from him. I did.” Her body trembled as one horrible memory after another assaulted her.
“I wanted to protect you, but I was so scared.” Jules’s voice, though filled with remorse and regret, finally sounded more like the sister she remembered.
“I was, too. Jules, he took me first. I knew what he’d do to you. How it would make you feel . . .”
Dr. Chen broke in. “How, Adria? Explain to her.”
She didn’t know quite how to explain her nine-year-old confusion, humiliation, guilt, and the feeling that somehow she could have stopped him. “I was scared every time he took me. I didn’t know what he’d do. It started off innocent but strange. He’d dress me up in pretty dresses and take pictures of me. He’d pose me in ways that didn’t feel natural. When I got older and looked back at what happened, I understood. He wanted me to look provocative. Each time, the clothes got less and less and the pictures got worse. If I didn’t do what he wanted, he hit me.” Adria lost herself in the nightmares of all the horrible things that man made her do.
Juliana’s hand covered hers. “Adria, was it only the pictures?”
Adria didn’t like talking about it, but Juliana needed to know so she could stop imagining the worst. “Pictures and videos. It got to the point where I wasn’t wearing any clothes anymore. He wanted me to touch myself. Pose. Smile for the ones who loved me and couldn’t get enough of me.” She sucked in a ragged breath. “He was grooming me. He made me touch him. He started touching me.” She squeezed her legs together and concentrated on breathing in and out and not the echo of his horrendous touch or the images in her mind setting off an anxiety attack.
She tried to breathe through the adrenaline and panic rising inside her.
Juliana fell back into the couch and covered her face. “Mom found out he was selling the pictures and stuff online.”
Adria tried to remain centered on the conversation and gave Juliana the cold hard truth. “They’re still being circulated.”
Juliana gasped and stared at her like she was crazy.
It was the sad reality Adria had to learn to live with. But she wanted Juliana to understand that the abuse Adria suffered ended. “Mom may have her own demons and faults, but the second she found out, she got us out of there. We ended up in a shelter.”
“Then Big Mama found us and took us to Wild Rose Ranch.” Juliana finished that chapter of their lives. “And things were better than they’d ever been for us.”
Yet Juliana spiraled the last couple years.
Dr. Chen leaned forward. “Have you gone to the police?”
“The guy is behind bars for molesting another girl and child porn.” Adria regretted not doing something before another girl got hurt, but she was just nine and didn’t know anything except calling the cops meant they’d take her mother away if they came. Then what would happen to her and Juliana? They wouldn’t have anyone. They could be split up in foster care. Their mother always told them as bad as things were, they could always get worse. They needed to stick together.
Their mother used fear to keep her and Juliana from speaking up about just how bad things were for them.
“It’s very frustrating to learn that once something is on the internet, getting it off is near impossible. Pedophiles are prolific sharers. Once you take it down in one place, someone else puts it up again.”
Dr. Chen frowned. “I’m very sorry. That must be difficult and frustrating to live with.”
“I try not to think about it. I don’t recognize that scared, haunted little girl anymore, all dressed up looking pretty but terrified. Even worse are the images of her with nothing in her eyes.” Adria had to think of that little girl as someone else—another part of her—because she had to tuck all that pain and the nightmares away, so they didn’t take over her life like they used to before she got the help she needed to unpack it and put it away.
Juliana hugged her from the side. “So that’s why you hate to shop for clothes and play dress up.”
A chill rippled up her spine. “It is not fun for me. You, Roxy, and Sonya love it. I tried, but all I heard in my head was his voice telling me, ‘Pose pretty. They want you.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but it didn’t sound good. Now I know what he was saying and it creeps me out even more.” Another cold shiver shook her.
“Did he . . .”
Adria gripped her sister’s arm over her chest. “No. He didn’t get that far in grooming me. Mostly because he thought he was dealing with two different girls. Sometimes I was me. Sometimes I was you. Or so he thought.” She didn’t add that eventually he would have taken both of them and put them together in his own sick twin fantasies for his customers.
That disturbing thought soured her stomach. She swallowed back the bile rising to her throat.
She finally became aware of the tears streaming down her face and wiped them away, but more came. It had been a long time since she cried for the haunted, damaged little girl inside her.
Adria kissed Juliana’s head. “I’d do it all over again to spare you. I love you. I can live with what happened. Stop blaming yourself because it happened to me. Stop blaming yourself because it didn’t happen to you. We may have identical DNA, but we are not the same, Jules. And that’s okay. I don’t need you to hurt the way I hurt. I don’t need you to punish yourself for what happened to me. I need you to be my sister and love me the way I love you. I need you to put this in the past and love yourself. You didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t blame you for what happened.”
Jules covered her hand. “I want you to be happy.”
Adria took that in and appreciated it so much. “Get well. Live your life without what happened dragging you down.” She squeezed Jules’s hand. “Be happy with me.”
“Are you happy?”
“I feel bad saying this because of what you’re going through, but these last weeks have been very happy for me. Drake is amazing. Trinity and I are almost ready to open the business. Things are coming together in my life, but I’m waiting for you to come and share it with me.”
“No you’re not.” Hurt came back into Juliana’s voice. “You made all these plans without me.”
“Juliana, you weren’t interested in culinary school or business. You didn’t know what you wanted to do. That’s okay. You’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. I couldn’t put my life on hold and wait for you. You knew I intended to open my own business.”
“With Trinity. Not me.”
“Jules, you never expressed any interest in Almost Homemade.”
“You never asked. You were so caught up in it that you moved ahead without a thought to it tearing us apart.”
Dr. Chen intervened. “Juliana, do you feel that the closer your sister came to graduating and opening her business, the more you saw her life
becoming separate from yours?”
“I knew it would. It’s happened. She moved to Montana and opened a business. She intends to stay here. Now all of them live here.”
“Jules, just because Roxy, Sonya, and I are here now doesn’t mean we left you or don’t want you with us. I thought we’d talk about it once you were out of here, but I’d love it if you came to work for me until you figure out what you want to do. I have a place for you and everything.”
Juliana’s eyes went wide. “You do?”
“Yes. Of course I do. There will always be a place for you with me.”
Dr. Chen leaned in. “Do you see now, Juliana, how your fears have made you believe things that aren’t true and separated you from Adria and your other sisters?”
Juliana scrunched her lips into a pout. “I guess so.”
Dr. Chen continued. “You used Adria’s past, pretended to be her, so that you could get the attention she received because of what happened to her. You wanted people to know you were hurting, too, and when they didn’t understand that, you acted out even more. You saw her succeeding, got jealous, and acted out.”
“You make me sound like a five-year-old.”
If the shoe fits. Adria squashed the childish thought and tried to focus on Juliana. “When things don’t go your way or you need something, speak up.”
“Use my words, you mean.” Juliana rolled her eyes, defaulting to being stubborn instead of trying to work things out.
“Stop being defensive. We’re trying to help you.”
Juliana rolled her head back and forth on the back of the couch. “I know. I just need time to let it sink in.”
Juliana meant all they’d talked about today. It took Adria years to let the revelations come and sink in about what happened and how it affected her. Talking about it today brought it all up. She’d be dealing with the aftermath for some time to come, but at least she had Drake to distract her. And talk if she needed to later. He’d listen. He’d understand.
He wouldn’t put the fault on her. He’d know she was the victim and that sometimes the hurt little girl inside her needed some love and care.
“Jules, just because I’m working on building a future for myself doesn’t mean I’m leaving you behind. On the contrary. I want you to come along with me, just like we’ve always done. You’re my sister, my other half. Nothing changes that.”
“Not even your new boyfriend?”
“You may not understand this, but Drake is a symbol of progress for me. We’re good together. I can be me with him. I don’t think about the past when I’m with him. He lets me explore being a woman in my own way and in my own time. He knows what happened, but he doesn’t treat me like I’m fragile or I’ll break. I don’t treat him like that because of what he’s been through. We understand each other. I never thought I’d find that. Certainly not with a man.”
Juliana’s eyes softened. “Do you love him?”
She didn’t think, just spoke the truth. “I love so many things about him. I tried so hard not to fall, but it just happened, and I was in his arms and his heart and I felt safe for the first time in my life. Not the kind of safe where I pretend everything is okay. Really safe, Jules.”
“Careful. You let someone in that close, they can hurt you the worst.” Ever skeptical. Juliana needed to smooth out her rough edges.
“Then stop punishing yourself because I made you stay quiet and hide when we were children. It hurts me to see you so reckless and in pain and pushing me away when all I want to do is help you.”
“Maybe now that I know . . . well, I can help myself and stop disappointing you. I want things to be different. I want them to go back to the way they used to be.”
Adria squeezed Juliana’s thigh. “Me, too.”
Dr. Chen took them both in. “You two have made a lot of progress today. You should be proud of yourselves for sharing so openly and honestly about this terrible thing you shared. I hope you both see that a shared event can be experienced in very different ways by the individuals involved. It doesn’t make what happened to either of you any less traumatic because of how you experienced it. Juliana, you hurt for your sister and carried the guilt of feeling inadequate to stop it. You resented her for taking on the burden she did when you felt you deserved it more because you were spared. You thought you deserved to hurt as much as she did. Those are all valid responses. I hope we can work on accepting your new perspective of your sister’s experience and forgiving yourself and letting this go.”
Juliana nodded, accepting that one conversation didn’t make everything better. She stood and raked her fingers through her hair. “I need some air.” Juliana walked away.
Dr. Chen held a hand up to stop Adria from following her out. “I just want to say how brave it was for you to talk about what happened. She needed to hear it from you. Are you okay?”
She raked her fingers through her hair the identical way Juliana had done before she left. Some things never change. “It seems I’ve been confronted a lot about my past these last few weeks.”
“Because of Juliana’s overdose, or because of your new boyfriend?”
“Both. But just like this was good for Juliana, it’s been good for me. I’ve dealt with many aspects of what happened, but I still had a few things to unpack. Like how I protected Jules and that it became a virus in her system lying dormant until she couldn’t hold it off any longer.”
“Nothing ever stays buried forever.”
Adria nodded her agreement. “With Drake, I needed to confront the way I keep men at arm’s length and think they’re only out to use me.”
“I see why you’d think that with a mother who is a prostitute and what happened with that disgusting pedophile. Not good examples of men acting admirably.”
“And yet, Drake in his pain and rage and loneliness and desolation showed me a man who was good. He desperately wanted to love. His family. Himself.”
“You?”
“Yes. Not at first. He wanted a partner in his life. Someone who saw the man he used to be, the one he is now, and the man he’d become as he learned to live and dream again.”
“Has he?”
“It’s been amazing to watch him work so hard and change so much. He’s allowed me the space to do the same. We kept things casual until both of us realized we’d changed and wanted more from each other.”
Dr. Chen reached out and Adria took her hand. “You’ve been through a lot of trauma. That man. Saving your sister. I hope you find happiness with Drake. Your sister needs time to heal. She’s just beginning to understand how her past has affected her. Whatever you do, don’t sacrifice the progress you’ve made or the happiness you’ve found for her. She may find it difficult to see your success is not her failure. You’re twins. I imagine it’s difficult to not compare yourselves, especially when others are bound to do that, too. You’ve done well, separating your life from hers. She needs time to do the same.”
“Thank you for taking care of her. Today was hard, but if it helps her, I’m willing to come back and talk about it some more.”
“I’m hoping now that she knows your part we can work on her part. The last thing I want to do is traumatize you again by asking you to relive it over and over.”
“I’ll be okay.” In time. It always took a little more work to pack the past back up and tuck it away again.
“Take care of yourself. Treat yourself with something special.”
“He’s waiting outside.” And just like every time she thought about Drake, she smiled.
Dr. Chen squeezed her hand. “Then go get him.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Drake slapped his hand down on Chase’s shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re doing better.”
“Not as good as you. Your girlfriend”—he nodded, his lips drawn into an approving grin—“she’s a knockout. Her sister though, that one is messed up. All she wants is attention.”
“Adria’s not like that. She loves her sister. She misses her. I hope for he
r sake, Juliana gets better.”
Chase settled back into the patio chair. “How did you two get together?”
“Well, first I held her hostage during one of my blackouts.”
Chase’s eyes went wide. “Uh, that’s one way to do it, I guess.”
Drake chuckled. “She should have had my ass arrested. Instead, she surprised the hell out of me by deciphering what happened and why. She read me like a book. She called me out on all my shit and dared me to get better. She showed me that the lies I was telling myself weren’t true at all.”
“Yeah, we like to tell ourselves all kinds of lies. We repeat them over and over until we think they’re the God’s honest truth.”
Drake nodded and said out loud what he knew Chase grappled with since returning home, too. “Yeah, like ‘I should have died over there.’”
“If you did, who would have saved my life?” Chase held his gaze. “You saved me, man. You have no idea how low I was when you found me. I was ready to . . .” Chase glanced up at the sky.
“But you didn’t.” Drake had looked deeper into Chase’s random texts and figured out that he was sinking fast. He went to Wyoming and confronted his friend. Drake may not have been able to save himself, but he’d been determined to save Chase from himself.
“I promised you and myself I’d give this place a shot. My sixty days is almost up and I’m looking forward to going home.”
Juliana agreed to the thirty-day program. Chase knew he’d needed more to deal with his addiction and PTSD symptoms.
“Back to Wyoming and your brothers?”
“Back to real life.” Chase had lost himself at the bottom of a prescription bottle. It started off innocently enough. A pill three or four times a day during his recovery to get through the worst of the pain. That turned into five, six, ten pills and more a day even after his injuries healed. He numbed the pain and drowned out the nightmares and, like Drake, put off dealing with his mental health. Because guys like them didn’t have a problem. They just needed to suck it up and move on.
Easier said than done.
Just another lie you tell yourself to get by.
Tough Talking Cowboy Page 18
