Page 75 of His Wounded Heart

I look up and see Trenda watching me. I hold up my hands.

“Look at me, Trenda. I’m just as deadly as Drake is.”

“I can see that,” she agrees as she pulls my hands back down to the table and places hers on top of them.

“If I had been any sort of big brother, I would have known what was going on. I would have gotten her out of there and killed that motherfucker. How could I have missed this? But then again, why didn’t she come to me? I don’t understand this. Why did she hide this?” I choke out the last few words.

Trenda turns my hands over so that the palms are up, then she places her palms on top of mine.

“I don’t know your sister, so I can’t speak for her,” she says softly. “What I can do is speak for me when our whole family hid what was happening with our father, then when we hid what was going on with Wanda and then later when I hid what had happened with me and Brantley.”

I had to strain to hear her words, but her painful laughter comes through clearly.

“You know, Simon, I never looked at this pattern of hiding. I don’t much like looking at it now.”

“Honey, that’s not it at all. Think about everything you’ve managed to accomplish. You’ve bragged to me about your sisters. You told me how the four youngest have all made it to college, and that’s thanks to you and Drake.”

“And Evie. Never forget Evie.”

“And Evie,” I nod. “The three of you managed to protect those girls and give them a fighting chance at a good life when they had reprehensible parents. You three did that, and if I had to guess, you were the mother to the five of them, and I’m not forgetting Evie this time,” I smile.

“But we hid,” she says sadly.

“Can you tell me why?”

Now it all makes sense. He had really been getting under my skin with all the questions. But now I get it.

His question is so full of anguish. Yes, there’s frustration under it, but mostly just agonizing pain. I think of Chloe and how, even though we have all offered her so much love and support, she is still struggling. I can’t imagine how much worse it is for Simon. To be an alpha male who is built to protect, especially his loved ones, and finding out that one of his tribe was being hurt so badly and he failed to protect her. The word devastating doesn’t come close to describing it.

“We were scared as kids to say anything, because we knew, we knew down to the bottom of our souls, that the punishment would be hideous if we were to ever tell someone about what went on at home.”

He nodded. He was listening with every fiber of his being. “But Simon, that was as a kid. That doesn’t begin to explain what was going on with your sister.”

“But it hurts so badly for you and your family,” Simon commiserates. “It also opens my eyes to how many other kids are going through the same thing right this very minute.”

“So many more than you could ever imagine.” I nod.

“And later?” he asks me.

“You were right. After Norville was locked up and Drake was forced into the Navy, Evie and I still took steps to hide what was really going on, like I told you before. Heck, this time we were even hiding it from Drake, so he didn’t know how bad it was with Wanda.”

“So now you’re hiding this untenable situation, not just from the town and CPS, you’re hiding it from Drake. Why?”

“Drake is easy to explain. He left still believing in our mother. After helping put our father behind bars, I didn’t think he could handle hearing about another parent abusing her children.”

Simon nods. “Okay, I get that. How about the town? Somebody could have helped you. They saw you going to the food bank. They had to have known your mother was off drinking and gambling in Mississippi when you’d pick up Piper from school day after day. Why didn’t you reach out to somebody like Pearl? You’ve told me about her, so has Bernie.”

“Pearl would have absolutely helped us. I know that now. Back then I didn’t. You’re absolutely right. I thought people knew what was going on, but Evie and I did the best we could to hide it. We’d sober Wanda up to go to a parent teacher conference, or when one of our little sisters had to go to the doctor’s.”

“But why? Why not get some help? Some people wouldn’t have gone to CPS.”

“For me, it was a toxic mixture of pride and shame. I hated the idea of people judging me or my sisters with the same brush as our parents. That’s why I applied to work for Mr. Fortnum. If I could work for him, it added an air of respectability to us.”

“Why shame? None of this was your fault.”

“But it felt like it was. Do you know how many times we hid Wanda’s bottles? Do you know how many times I talked to her when she was sober and begged her not to gamble our money away, to think of Piper, Chloe, and Zoe? Sometimes she’d stay sober for a whole month, but then she’d fall back to her old ways. I always failed to find the right words. If only I could have found the right words.” My voice trails off.

“So even if I was living right next door, it’s possible she wouldn’t have reached out for help, she still might have tried to hide things, is that what you’re saying?”