Page 62 of For Always
“I don’t…I mean, I never told anyone in the family about Austin.”
Monica nodded. “That’s the first sign.”
“I don’t get what you’re trying to say, Monica.”
She tilted her head and stared at Gabriella a moment and then clasped her hands together in her lap. This was the most serene Gabriella had ever seen Monica look.
“His name was Yates Hinton. I found out much later that wasn’t his real name, but that’s what I knew him as. I met him when I was in college. He swept me off my feet and I fell deliriously in love with him. And then his wife found out,” Monica spoke quietly.
Gabriella didn’t know what to say.
“I broke it off with him. He grew angry and he raped me. I blamed myself, graduated from college, went home and decided to never look back. I didn’t tell anyone and I did nothing to stop Yates from doing it again to someone else. Or, as it turns out, for coming after me again. Years later, he stalked me, harassed me and finally, forced me to stab him. And only after all that did I tell my story, before walking away from your brother.”
“Monica,” Gabriella said with tears brimming in her eyes. “I had no idea something like that had happened to you.”
She nodded. “Just like no one in your family realized anything traumatic had happened to you. But I did, Gabriella. I saw it in your eyes the moment you opened them after we pulled you out of your car. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have all the facts. And I wasn’t sure if this ranch had something to do with it too. But then we arrived here and I met Tyler. I saw how he looked at you and how you looked and him and my past played before me like a movie.”
Monica let out a little chuckle. “My mother always said that our lessons learned should be told in order to guide someone else who might be fighting that same battle. You are where I was five years ago and Tyler is Alex, trying to love a woman who’s been broken by another man. Austin is your Yates.”
“You don’t know the whole story,” Gabriella began, but Monica stopped her.
“And I don’t need to know it. Not unless you want to tell me. But Gabriella, while your details may be different from mine, the pain and despair that you’ve suffered is the same. I know it. I see it in your eyes right now. I feel it in my heart as I did so long ago.”
Damn she was tired of crying. Lifting her hands to wipe her face, Gabriella shook her head.
“I couldn’t tell,” she said. “It hurt so badly and I felt so stupid, I just couldn’t tell.”
Monica came to the end of the chair. She reached out to take Gabriella’s hands.
“That pain will pass, once you stand up to him. Don’t believe that it will go away, that you can outrun it. You can’t. He’s sick in his mind and no rational thought will stop him, but the police tossing his ass in a cell will. Don’t let him take any more of your life, Gabriella.”
Gabriella, nodded. She knew that what Monica was saying was right. She knew she had to face Austin. She had to stop him once and for all.
“I won’t,” she said. “I know what I have to do.”
Monica stood and pulled Gabriella up for a hug. “I’ll stand with you if you want me to. I’ll be there every step of the way.”
“Thank you.” Gabriella held her tight. “Thank you so much for these words and for being here today and for putting up with Alex.”
To that, Monica laughed and when they broke free of the hug shook her head.
“It was a close call for us,” she told Gabriella. “I walked away from him because I didn’t know if I could rebuild myself after admitting everything about Yates. But I came to my senses and it all worked out. These have been the best five years of my life.”
“He loves you so much,” Gabriella said. “We all see it in everything he does. And when you finally marry him, it’ll be such a big celebration. We’ll have fireworks and a parade or something grand.” She joked.
“Everybody’s path in life is different,” Monica said. “There are some patches that are similar, some roads that lead you around in circles, and some that drop you right into a dead end. But eventually, I believe, everybody gets to where they are supposed to be.”
Gabriella took those words with her as they moved downstairs to smell the scent of breakfast cooking.
Tyler looked around the table in the dining room and for a moment felt like he was taken back twenty-five years, to a time when his parents were alive and well and entertained friends. They would often have dinner parties or outdoor barbeques. Their closest friends would come and sometimes people that they did business with, but there would be lots of guests and laughter and a sense of home and belonging.
He didn’t know when that had stopped for him, but sitting here this morning, he knew he definitely wanted to get that feeling back on a more permanent basis. Picking up his glass to finish the last of the orange juice Dessie had insisted he drink—regardless of how much sugar he told her it contained—Tyler listened as Alex finished telling a story and Gabriella laughed.
It was a rich, full-bodied sound, which had that feeling of constriction in his chest rising again. Tyler didn’t bother to question the sensation this time—because he knew what it was. And when she reached out to take his hand that was sitting in his lap, he looked over to her and smiled. Aside from that bandage on her forehead that pissed him off each time he looked at it, she was as beautiful as ever, sitting beside him with her hair out and around her shoulders. This was exactly where he wanted to be and who he wanted to be with.
“Don’t listen to him,” Gabriella said as she continued to grin at him. “I wasn’t that bad.”
“She was worse,” Alex added. “Everything my parents told her not to do, she did. And she did it so badly that they had no choice but to find out. Like the time she was sixteen and snuck out of the house to go to some party with her friends. When she tried to sneak back into the house at almost five the next morning, she managed to get into her room safely but then one of her friends called to make sure she was home and my mother answered the phone. Gabriella didn’t know Mom was on the other line and she proceeded to talk to her friend about all the fun they’d had and how excited they’d been when the college boys showed up at the party.”
