Page 82 of Love is Angry

“Don’t be silly,” he says, putting an arm around my shoulders. “A night where I get to see my girl is never a nightruined. But since you heard all that, there’s no reason to tiptoe around this—what’s going on, Maddie?”

I lean into him and take a deep breath. I’ve said it out loud so many times over the last couple weeks—it should be easier, not harder. But my heart is doing flips and my stomach is tying itself in knots, and the words are trying to wind through that maze to make it out of my mouth. Before I manage to say anything at all, the doorbell rings.

“Oh, crap. First, I should have told you already, but Rhue’s meeting me here. That’s probably him.” God, I hope so.

Dad frowns as we walk toward the front door. “Does Rhue have something to do with whatever’s going on?”

“Adjacently,” I say vaguely. “But I’m hoping he’ll have something to do with the solution.”

Rhue looks troubled when we open the door and shoots a glance over his shoulder before he comes inside. I wonder if he’s feeling it, too—that sense of being followed.

“Hey Mr. Willis, Madison,” he says. “How’s it going?”

I shut the door behind him. As soon as it’s closed, his casual tone disappears. “Did you tell him?”

I shake my head. “I just got here.”

“What’s all this about?” Dad asks, alarmed.

“Let’s sit down,” I suggest. “There’s a lot.”

We sit around the table and I close my eyes, willing my words to find my mouth. “Julian Echeveria is about to make your life hell,” I tell him. “And it’s my fault.”

There’s silence for a beat and I open my eyes. Dad is gazing at me pensively. Rhue looks pissed.

“Maybe you should start at the beginning,” Dad says.

I can’t look at him. I can’t bear to see the pain in his eyes when he hears the words. I look into my lap instead, balling my sweater sleeves in my fists.

“Julian raped me last year after a tutoring session,” I tell him quietly. “He told me if I ever told anyone, that he would ruin you and me both. But I’d already told Roxanne—she wrote it in her diary a few days before she died. She said, in the diary, that she was going to do something about it. She said the same thing to me.”

My throat tightens and the silence grows thick with emotion. I press on while I still can. “Laura found the diary. Last week, she showed it to me. Rhue saw it, too.”

Rhue clears his throat. “Sorry to interrupt, Madison—but this is where I may be at fault. I came home yesterday as my father wanted to discuss some business with me. We had a couple disagreements—they got a little out of control—and I called him a rapist. He’s already pissed off that Laura and I are openly spending time with Madison, and that she and I are taking the same classes at school—I’m afraid he put two and two together.”

Dad still hasn’t said anything.

“This morning—after that altercation, I assume—he began texting me from a random number, threatening me. Eventually he gave me an ultimatum: either I sign an NDA and leave school and never talk to his family again, or he destroys you.”

Dad snorts, and the amusement startles me into looking up at him. The passionate fury in his eyes, the tightness of his shoulders—he looks like a different person.

“Dad,” I whisper and he turns to me, his eyes glistening. Without a word, he pulls me to him and just holds me. Somehow, it makes me wish I’d told him sooner because this hug feels like it’s locking some of the broken pieces of my heart back into place.

When he releases me from the hug, I promise that we’ll talk about this more. That this is the last secret I’ll keep. I mean it, too.

The conversation moves back on course, but that ticking anger I see in dad’s jaw remains.

“This feels a lot like a twisted brand of revenge,” dad hisses. “Julian and I, we got off on the wrong foot right from the start. Roxanne and I used to be sweethearts in high school before Julian got his growth spurt. Junior year. Well, I stayed friends with her after the breakup.”

“Ohhh,” Rhue says, his eyes wide. “Oh, that explains a lot.”

“What?” I ask.

“When mom told him that you were going to be tutoring me, he asked a lot of questions. I’d never heard him interested in any of the staff like that before, but he grilled her about your last name and seemed really upset about the whole thing. They kept getting in fights about it until you finally showed up—fights where he kept accusing her of cheating, which is still the most hypocritical bullshit I’ve ever heard.”

Dad nods. “Thing is, Julian could never really let go of the fact that Roxanne and I used to be together, even though we were just kids. He wasn’t outspoken about it, but I could always tell that it bothered him, especially since Roxanne and I kept in touch. We used to meet for coffee every other month. She actually came to your baptism,” Dad says, his gaze dropping as he remembers. “Roxanne and your mom were best friends.”

I don’t know that much about my mother, and I’ve decided that I want things this way. She left. Her career was more important, and we were holding her back. While I may never truly get over the chronic feeling of rejection, I won’t feed it with snippets about her, either.

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