Page 54 of Shake the Habit

He did help me into the truck, which seemed to be higher than before, and offered water from a bottle he happened to be carrying. I’d gotten some plants for his new office, so maybe he was prepping to care for them. We were all quiet on the ride home and when we got there, I saw that someone—Caleb and my family—had cleaned up everything.

“My Lord,” I sighed.

“Are you worried about how you’ll get up the stairs?”

Yes, I was, but that wasn’t why I felt so ashamed. “I ruined Sir’s party.”

“He doesn’t seem to mind.”

“I do. I mind a lot, for him and for everyone else. Especially for you. You put in so much work and you bought all this nice furniture.” I put my hand over my mouth and cleared my throat.

“Kayleigh, I don’t mind, either. We have a lot of leftovers for next week and we needed more places to sit, anyway.” He walked to me, hesitated, and then loosely looped his arms around me.

“No, I’m really gross,” I protested.

“I also don’t mind that.”

I did, but this felt very nice. He was strong and I was very tired, so I needed to lean against him.

“Was everyone mad when they left?” I asked.

“No, nobody was.”

“Cassidy and Jack came all this way for my dumb party and then I ruined it.”

“Aunt Paula’s taking the blame on this one. She feels terrible, and she’s too ashamed to text or call you so she keeps telling me instead. She wants you to know how sorry she is and she hopes that one day you’ll talk to her again.”

I would talk to her later, when I wasn’t so mad. I knew that she hadn’t done anything maliciously, but I wished that she hadn’t done anything at all.

We stood together for a few more moments before I gathered the courage to ask. “Did you already know?”

“She explained what happened when I was over at her house,” Caleb answered quietly. “She cried as she said it and I could hardly stand to hear it.”

“I wish she hadn’t done that, either.”

“She thought that I would understand you better if I knew,” he told me. “She said it happened to you and to Aria and she’s furious at your uncle. She wants to dig him up and put a stake through his heart.”

“We called him ‘Uncle Terrance,’” I said, “but he wasn’t really one of our relations. He was a friend of my grandmother’s cousin, the woman we called Aunt Harlene. She didn’t have a family of our own and she was always included in everything we did, and she always brought him.”

“Paula said she never liked him.”

“That’s what everyone said after they found out. But for years, they just considered him to be a sad old man. Maybe kind of strange, but harmless.”

“You don’t have to tell me any more.”

“Aunt Paula probably got it wrong,” I said. “I never told anybody the whole story. I never told my parents, not for years, not until I almost died of alcohol poisoning and I was in the hospital. I wasn’t sure whether I’d drunk that much on purpose or not and they wanted to know why. Why did I act that way, like I didn’t care about myself at all? It was because I didn’t,” I answered. “That was when I admitted that Uncle Terrance had touched me when I was a little girl, but I didn’t tell them everything. It would kill them to know how far it went.”

He didn’t ask me any questions, and we stood for a moment more as I pulled myself back together.

“If I had said something, he wouldn’t have done it to Aria. I was terrified of him because he promised that if I told, he would hurt her and Cassidy.”

“He was a son of a bitch.” Caleb’s voice sounded rough. “No, that’s not strong enough for what he was.”

“I used to wonder why it happened,” I said.

“Because he was sick and terrible.”

“I mean, why us?” I asked. “Why not any of the other girls in our family? Now I understand why he picked Ari. It was because her father had been killed in the line of duty and her mom was a mess afterwards, so she was vulnerable. I know why he picked me, too.”

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