Page 79 of The Moment You Know

When he got to the prologue, the hands holding the book started to shake.

The moment you know can refer to many things: silly things, important things, heartbreaking things, life-altering things.

The moment you know you don’t like onions. The moment you know you’re in love. The moment you know a loved one is gone forever. The moment you know you’ve been molested.

I was nine when I knew I didn’t like onions. I was twenty-one when I knew I was in love. I was four when I knew a loved one was gone forever.

The moment I knew I’d been molested came when I was thirty-two years old. And it wrecked me, splitting my life in two. From that moment on, my life was made up of ‘before I knew’ and ‘after I knew’. I learned very quickly that the hardest thing I’d ever face was living in the ‘after’, because in the ‘after’, there’s nowhere to hide from the truth and nowhere to take shelter from it. And there’s no going back to ‘before’, because ‘before’ is gone.

For me, the moment I knew I’d been molested was both the best and worst moment of my life, because I knew—good or bad—that I would never be the same. And it was also the moment that I started the journey to get my life back.

I would learn many things on this painful and unpleasant journey, the most important thing being that it takes a phoenix to rise from the ashes. And I was going to be a phoenix.

Fuck, yeah, I was.

David closed the book and set it down, deciding that he would talk to Paige before he read any more of it. He had questions that needed to be answered first.

He picked up his phone and looked at the dozen unanswered texts that he’d sent her in the past couple of months and frowned. He knew the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but he had no choice.

He typed out a short text, then sent it.

Chapter 29

DAVID: I need to talk to you.

Paige read the text a second time, wondering why David would need to talk to her. The text had come in shortly before midnight the night before, hours after she’d gone to sleep, which gave her pause. She briefly considered it might’ve been a weird, random drunk text, but drunk texts were usually more than a simple I need to talk to you.

She thought of things he might need to talk to her about and her mind immediately went to something related to Ashley. Maybe they’d gotten engaged and were getting married, or they were having another baby, and because of how Paige had been blindsided at Bender’s, he was giving her a heads-up, thinking it was the polite thing to do?

She didn’t want to hear either of those things, to be honest.

With trepidation, she texted him back.

PAIGE: What about?

Given that it was a little after 5 a.m., she figured she wouldn’t get a response for several hours, but when she did finally hear back from, it was late in the afternoon, and she frowned in confusion as she read his response.

DAVID: I was hoping to hear back from you by now, because I really do need to talk to you. It’s important, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking.

She read the text twice and then sent a reply.

PAIGE: Did you not see my response? What do you want to talk to me about?

She kept checking her phone throughout the rest of the afternoon, but hadn’t received any further reply by the time she met Jules after work for dinner and drinks. When Paige told Jules about the texts, she immediately demanded to see them and while she was looking them over, the telltale whoosh sound announced an incoming text.

Jules’s eyebrows rose. “David just texted again.”

“What did he say?”

Jules silently read it and then held it so that Paige could read it, too.

DAVID: I guess you’re ignoring me, so we’ll have to do this in person. I’ll be at the house in about thirty minutes.

“What in the utter hell?” Paige looked at Jules in confusion. “Why would he go to the house? He knows I don’t live there anymore.”

Jules shrugged and then quickly typed a response.

PAIGE: Be sure and tell the new owners I said “Hello.”

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