Page 46 of The Moment You Know

“Good point.”

Lauren smiled mischievously. “You could also send Claire a copy. She deserves a ‘Fuck You’ letter, too. Maybe even more so,” she said, then quoted, “‘None so blind as those that will not see’.”

Paige nodded, liking both of those suggestions. She liked them a lot.

She left that session with a mission and from that moment on, every spare second was spent typing pertinent parts of her journals onto her laptop. When that was completed, she started adding the parts Lauren had suggested, like pieces of her marriage and the divorce, even including the double-decker shit sandwich encounter with her mother in brutal detail.

It took Paige six months to finish a first draft and when she was satisfied with it, she emailed it to Lauren to read.

She called four hours later. “This is fantastic,” she told Paige.

“Wait. You finished it already?”

“I only stopped reading to pee. And to be honest, I took my laptop into the bathroom with me,” Lauren said. “Anyway, I have a friend who edits books for a living and I want her to look at it.”

Paige swallowed, unable to say anything for a moment.

“Paige?” Lauren prompted.

“I’m here.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think … okay.”

Carole, Lauren’s editor friend, loved the book and the three of them met to discuss it over lunch.

“Do you think anyone will really want to read this?” Paige asked, still not completely convinced.

“I think a lot of people will want to read it. I think it’s really inspirational, to be honest,” Carole told her. “Anyone who reads this, whether they were abused or not, will be moved by your journey through hell. You survived long-term sexual abuse and came out on the other side.”

“She’s right.” Lauren’s voice was soft, but firm. “Not everyone does. You know this from group therapy.”

Paige thought about some of the women she’d seen in group sessions—ones who engaged in extreme sexual activities with strangers, ones who struggled with various addictions and suicidal tendencies, and the ones who became sexless and closed off—and nodded.

“I’m incredibly proud of you,” Lauren added, which almost brought Paige to tears.

“Thank you. I’m proud of myself, too.”

Lauren reached over and squeezed Paige’s hand. “You should be. You’ve done a lot of work and now it’s time to go live your best life. Experience things in a new way, because everything from here on out will be new and you will own it all. And you should. You’veearnedit.”

“There is one more thing,” Carole said.

Paige looked over at her. “What?”

“A lot of autobiographies and memoirs have pictures in them. I think it would add a lot to your book if you included a spread of maybe twenty-five pictures in it.”

Paige slowly nodded, warming to the idea. “All right.”

Later that night, Paige got out all of her childhood ‘picture’ books and looked through them. She’d taken them after getting married—which was a damn good thing, because she probably wouldn’t have been able to get them from her mother, now that they were no longer on speaking terms.

She hadn’t looked through the books in years, so she started from the beginning. She was looking for two things: general pictures for the spread inside the book, as well as a picture for the cover. She knew she wanted the cover to be a photograph of her and Carter and figured she’d know it when she saw it.

The pictures of her father made her sad in a vague way—she barely remembered him, since he’d died when she was four, so her sadness was more along the lines of ‘what could have been’ than anything else.

How different would her life have been if Douglas Clemons hadn’t died? So different, she couldn’t even fathom it.

At the point where pictures of Paige and her father stopped, pictures of Paige and Carter started. She looked over each one carefully, noticing things that were so obvious now that her blinders were off. He was always holding her a little too tightly and she was usually very stiff, as if trying to pull away. She also rarely smiled—and when she did, it never reached her eyes.

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