Public Secrets

colors that spread to cheekbone and hairline.
When she began to speak, they quieted.
She gave them only the facts, and not her feelings. She had learned that much. What she felt inside was hers alone. It was a brief statement, just over eight minutes. As she read, she was grateful that Pete had helped her refine it. She ignored the cameras and the faces that studied her. When she was done, she stepped back from the mike. It had already been established that she would not take questions, but the questions came.
She had turned away, her hand on Michael’s arm when one penetrated.
“If he had abused you all those months, why did you stay?”
She didn’t intend to answer, but she looked back. They were still hurling questions. Only that one lodged in her mind.
“Why did I stay?” she repeated. The room fell silent again. It had been easy to read the statement. She almost knew it by heart. It was just words printed on paper, and they hadn’t touched her. But this, this one simple question drove straight into her heart.
“Why did I stay?” she said again. “I don’t know.” She fumbled, forgetting not to look at the faces, not to see them. It seemed vital that she answer the question. “I don’t know,” she said again. “If, two years ago, anyone had told me that I would allow myself to be brutalized, I would have been furious. I don’t want to believe that I chose to be a victim.” She sent Michael a quick, desperate look. “And yet I stayed. He beat me and humiliated me, but I didn’t leave. There were times when I could see myself walking away. Getting in the elevator, going out to the street and walking away. But I didn’t. I stayed because I was afraid, and I left for the same reason. So it makes no sense. It makes no sense,” she repeated, and turned away. This time she ignored the questions.

“You did fine,” Michael told her. “We’re going to get you out the side here. McCarthy’s got the car waiting.”
They drove to Malibu, to the house on the beach that her father had rented. Emma rode in silence, with that one question echoing over and over in her head.
Why did you stay?

S HE LIKED TO sit on the redwood terrace in the morning, watching the water and listening to the gulls. If she tired of sitting, she could take long walks along the shore. The outward side of abuse had healed. Her ribs still troubled her occasionally and there was a thin scar just under her jawline. It could have been repaired easily enough. But she discarded the idea of a plastic surgeon. It was barely noticeable. And it reminded her.
The nightmares were another legacy. They came with daunting regularity and were a montage of old and new. Sometimes she walked the darkened hallway as a child. Others as an adult. The music always came, but it was cloudy, as if it played underwater. At rimes she heard Darren’s voice clear as a bell, but then Drew’s would layer over it. She would freeze, child or woman, in front of the door. Terrified to open it.
Then as her hand closed over the knob, turned it, pushed, she would wake, sweating.
But the days were calm. There was a breeze off the water, the scent of flowers Bev had planted in tubs and window boxes. And always music.
She’d been given the chance to see her father and Bev start again. That soothed the most raw of her wounds. There was laughter. Bev experimenting in the kitchen, Brian in the shade playing guitar. At night she often lay in bed, thinking of them together. It was as if they had never been apart. How easy it had been once the step had been taken, for them to bridge the gap of twenty years.
And she wanted to weep, for she could never be a child again and fix the mistakes that had been made.
They waited six months, though Emma knew they were both anxious to get back to London. That was their home. She had yet to find hen.

She didn’t miss New York, though she did miss Marianne. The months she had lived there with Drew had spoiled the city for her. She would go back, that she promised herself. But she would never live there again.
She preferred to watch the water, to feel the sun on her face. She’d been alone in New York. She was rarely alone here.
Johnno had visited twice, staying two weeks each time. For her birthday he’d given her a pin, a gold Phoenix rising out of a ruby flame. She wore it often, wishing for the courage to spread her wings again.
P.M. married Lady Annabelle, detouring to L.A. on their way to a honeymoon in the Mexican Caribbean.