“Did any of those boys who thought you were easy hurt you?” Mitch asked gently and I chanced a glance at him to see he looked his usual alert but otherwise his face was studiously blank.

“In the way you’re thinking, no. But it got physical, that physical was unpleasant but mostly it was what they said to me, the way they looked at me and the way they talked about me afterwards that was not nice. The girls did it too and girls can be way more not nice than boys could ever hope to be.”

“Did your Mom look out for you at all?”

I shrugged. “It would have been better if she thought of me as just an annoying drain on her meager resources but she didn’t. She thought I thought I was too big for my britches and told me so, repeatedly. She thought I was uppity and told me that too. I got good grades but she didn’t think that was something to be proud of. She made fun of me. She had a lot of boyfriends who were really just f**k buddies and she made fun of me in front of them too. When I got older and her special friends realized I was no longer a girl but a girl, they got ideas. Sometimes they acted on them. This ticked her off and then she started to see me as competition. She didn’t protect me from them, she shouted at me, called me a slut then she’d call me a tease. I couldn’t win either way.” I shrugged again and looked away when Mitch’s eyes darkened and not in a sexy way, in an angry way. “I used to slip out at night, especially if she had someone over or she had a lot of someone’s over and she was partying. I’d go to Bill’s trailer, sleep on the floor by his bed or go to Lynette’s. She had a double bed. I thought her bed was huge.” I pulled in a short breath, let it out on a soft sigh and whispered, “I loved her bed.” Then I blinked, pulled myself together and kept talking, “I used to climb in her window. Her parents knew I was doing it but they never said a thing.”

“Let’s go back to the men in your mother’s life trying it on with you,” Mitch demanded in a careful way and I looked back at him.

“It wasn’t that, Mitch. I wasn’t violated or not completely,” I told him without a hint of emotion. “They’d come in my room, be handsy but they were usually drunk or high so I’d get away. Then I learned to get away earlier so they didn’t even get to take a shot. Some of them were even nice. Some of them, I think, knew what it was like being Melbamae’s daughter. A couple of them tried to be like dads to me.” I shook my head and looked away, muttering, “Melbamae hated that most of all.”

I grabbed my drink and took the last sip, setting the glass down and staring at the floor beside our table. Through this, Mitch didn’t speak. Through all of it, Mitch kept hold of my hand. When it hit me he wasn’t talking, just sitting there holding my hand, my eyes drifted to his.

The instant they did, he asked, “You do know she isn’t you?”

“I know,” I whispered.

“And you know that isn’t your life and it really never was.”

I pressed my lips together and shrugged again. My eyes started to slide away but Mitch’s fingers tensed in mine to the point where it almost hurt. It definitely caught my attention. At the same time his hand gave mine a rough jerk, pulling it toward him which meant I had no choice but to lean in and my eyes flew back to his.

“I don’t understand how your mind works, baby,” he said softly, also leaning into me. “How you twist shit around but that was not your life then and it isn’t your life now. Instead of you sitting there looking at anything but me, thinkin’ I’m gonna judge you for shit that was never in your control, you should be sitting there proud in the knowledge that you got the f**k out and made somethin’ of yourself, made somethin’ of your life.”

“I –”

He shook his head, his fingers tensed even deeper in mine and I clamped my mouth shut.

“I’ve told you this before and I’ll say it again. In my job I see a lotta shit, a lot, and it is rare, Mara, unbelievably, f**kin’ rare that any kid is born to a life like yours and has the strength to get the f**k out and make something of themselves.”

“I sell beds, Mitch,” I reminded him. “I’m not the president of the free world. I don’t even have a college education.”

“Who cares?” he asked back, quick as a flash.

“I don’t own a house.”

“Neither do I,” he pointed out.

Hmm. This was true.

“Do you know who your father is?” I asked and his eyes flared.

“Yeah, and you’re gonna know him too because you’re gonna meet him.”

I shook my head. “Don’t you see, Mitch? I don’t even know who my father is.”

“Again, honey, that says nothin’ about you. Again, you were born to that. You didn’t take that away from yourself. Your mother took it away from you.”

I tried a different strategy. “Do you have a college education?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered and my eyes started sliding away again.

That got my hand another jerk.

“Eyes back to me,” he growled in a way my eyes went back to him. “Me havin’ a college degree means I live in a different zone than you?”

“And your mother wears twinsets,” I reminded him.

He blinked. Then he stared at me.

Then he shook his head and his lips twitched before he said, “Sweetheart, do you not see that shit’s whacked?”

“No,” I pointed out the obvious.

“Well, it’s whacked,” he returned.

I leaned deeper toward him and looked him straight in his fathomless, beautiful eyes.

“Two weeks ago, you walked through a window to my world and you lost your mind, Mitch. You took one look at Bill and the state of Billy and Billie’s lives and you lost your mind. That is my family. That is my life. And you don’t understand this because it isn’t your life but there is no way to escape it. There is no way. Because it haunts you. It’s your cousin in jail and facing prison if he survives to his trial. It’s his kids in your house, one worried about her Daddy when he’s done nothing to deserve it, the other worried about everything when he should be worried about getting to the next level on some video game. It knocks on your door and shouts the unit down so your neighbor has to confront it in the breezeway. It’s a beautiful, kind man looking into you and finding you have a juvie file. It never goes away. It’s always there. It isn’t history. It’s in my blood. It’s me.”