The Wedding Dress (40 page)

“It’s not like I don’t have cause for concern. Can’t you see how upset he is?”

“Davey, you love Beth and she loves you back,” Emma said, ignoring Jared’s retort. “Do you have any idea what a miracle that is? How precious? You’re an amazing young man, David Harrison. With a huge heart brimming with passion for work that both you and Beth love.”

“She doesn’t…doesn’t know…who I am. If she did…she wouldn’t want me.”

“She
does
know you,” Emma insisted, touching Davey’s cheek. “She knows she can trust you. Knows you would never hurt her.”

“No!” Davey protested. “Nobody here really knows me. Not even Dr. Butler. I’ve made sure of that after what happened ten years ago. You don’t know what it was like, the way people looked at me. I couldn’t bear it if Beth ever looked at me that way. I’d want to die.”

Jared’s muscles clenched at the boy’s words. He was more aware than ever of the scars on Davey’s wrists, the life those wounds had almost cost him. “Davey, you’re the finest young man I’ve ever taught,” Jared said. “Just tell me what’s troubling you. We can work it out.” Christ, how bad could it be? And yet, whatever it was, it was eating Davey up inside. “Just tell me what happened that’s upsetting you so.”

“The accident. But it wasn’t an accident. He did it on purpose.”

“Who did what, Davey? I don’t understand.” Emma looked from Jared to Davey in confusion.

“Mum tried to stop him. But he beat her and—and I was so scared. I thought he’d killed her!”

Jared’s throat closed. Images flashed through him—the one time he’d met with Mrs. Harrison, the scars that marked her face. It was from an accident, Davey had later explained, obviously unnerved by them. Now Jared suspected that she hadn’t run into another car. She’d run into Davey’s father’s fists.

“Who hurt your mom?” Emma asked.

“My father. He…oh, God. Her face!”

Jared broke in. “You said your mother tried to stop him. From what?”

“He took the car…they were getting off work. People crowded on the corner at Fulsom Street, waiting for the light. When his boss walked out, my dad…he floored the accelerator and ran the car into the crowd to reach him. All those people, six hurt, eight dead.”

Jared couldn’t breathe. Headlines ten years old flashed into his mind, the sensational case that had horrified all of Britain.

“Your father was Ralph Dempsey?” Jared tried to wrap his head around it—studious, gentle Davey Harrison the son of the roaring monster who’d reveled in the carnage he’d caused, gloating before the cameras as he was dragged away.

“See?” Davey grieved. “Even after all these years you know who he was, what he did! In court, he said he was glad he did it! Hoped when I grew up I’d be man enough to…to stand up for myself and…do the same thing if some sodding rag head tried to rob me of the promotion I’d earned. I shouted that I never would hurt anybody like that, but he laughed in my face as they dragged him away. Said not to be so sure. I was his son. His blood would be in my veins forever.”

Davey paced the small space. “And he was right. The blood of a monster! Who beat my mum…and killed all those other people…people he didn’t even know…He didn’t care if they died, as long as—as his boss died, too.”

Jared ached for him. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want it to change the way you look at me. Have it make you sick at your stomach…every time you looked at me, thinking about all those bodies he left broken on the street.”

What the hell could Jared say? His stomach
was
churning, the thought of Davey carrying such a burden repulsive, unthinkable.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Davey said, gazing, helpless, into Jared’s eyes. “The way you’re looking at me right now.”

“I just…I hate knowing you have to carry this with you. I want to fix it.”

“I did, too. Wanted to fix things for Mum. I tried to be perfect for her,” Davey continued, sorrowful. “I tried not to let him be…inside of me.
That’s
why I cut my wrists the first time…I was trying to get his…his blood out.” Davey’s voice cracked. “Stupid, wasn’t it?”

“I’m only glad you stopped yourself before it was too late.” If the brutal man hadn’t been killed in prison, Jared would have hunted Ralph Dempsey down and beaten him to death for leaving such a legacy for his wife and the boy Jared loved like his own.

“So now you know,” Davey said. “The whole awful truth. Can’t you just leave me alone?”

Davey made to leave but Emma cut the boy off, blocking the open door. She grabbed him by the arms, held on tight. “No,” she said. “I’m not going to leave you alone. I know exactly how you feel.”

“Sure you do.” A hopeless laugh rose from the boy’s throat. “I hate when people say that, as if—as if everybody in the world knows how it feels to have a father who did something so terrible you want to throw up every time you think of him.”

Jared waited for Emma to resort to any platitude she could think of to make the kid feel better, that poor baby sympathy shite that in the end proved simply worthless. Instead she looked into Davey’s face, her eyes suddenly grown old.

“Everybody in the world
doesn’t
know,” she said. “But I do. Just as sure as I know that you’re nothing like your father.”

Something in Emma’s voice stopped Jared cold. It was as if he were standing on the opposite side of a wall only Emma and Davey could see, cut off from their pain, their touch.

“What happened on that street corner is
your father’s
crime,” Emma insisted. “
His
anger.
His fault.
Not yours. You don’t have to pay for the rest of your life for what that man did.”

“Right, Emma,” Davey scoffed, too caught in the claws of his own anguish to see pain in anyone else. “That’s what the counselor the court assigned me tried to say. Just add your bill to his. Maybe you can use all this angst crap in your next role.”

“Watch it, lad,” Jared cut in, brows lowering in warning. “She’s trying to help.”

Emma laid a hand on Jared’s arm. “No, Jared. Really, it’s okay. I don’t blame him for thinking I’m just bullshitting him, trying to make him feel better. But I’m not.”

“Then what—?” Jared started to ask, then stopped when Emma pressed her fingers to his lips to silence him. He surrendered and she gave him a heartbreaking smile.

“Davey, sit down,” she said, turning back to the boy, and indicated Jared’s chair. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else in the world. Not once in my whole life.”

Davey sat as she asked. He peered up at her, held by the spell of her voice.

“It’s a secret my family discovered when I was sixteen. And Drew…you know, my ex-husband? He was at this…this class reunion thing when it…well…”

She hesitated, biting her lip.

“When it what?” Davey asked. Jared could feel the kid’s fragile hope.

“When the secret blew up in my family’s face.” Emma’s features tightened with pain, with old horror, the secrets that put the shadows in her eyes. “You know that my mom raised me alone.”

“Like me and Mum. We talked about it before.”

“That’s right.”

Davey was responding to Emma’s honesty. Jared could feel the boy hanging on her every word.

“She was just a kid herself when I was born,” Emma confided. “Everybody in Whitewater thought she’d gotten what she deserved. They labeled her the town slut. You know how nasty kids can be.”

Davey nodded, and Jared wondered what cruelties he’d endured at the hands of children after the crime his father had committed. Far more often than adults wanted to admit, the
Lord Of The Flies
gang won over a classroom’s better nature. The biological microcosm that proved only the strong survived.

“Not even my grandpa or my uncle guessed that Mom wasn’t nearly as tough as she looked,” Emma said. “Not only wasn’t she the town slut, she’d never had sex in her life until the night she got pregnant with me.”

Jared sensed where the story was heading. Wished he could stop her. Stop her from talking about it, stop her from knowing what had happened.

“My father was some big-deal jock. The captain of the football team. He took her out on a date, then up to this make-out place back home and she thought…well. She thought he loved her. He wanted sex. She wasn’t ready. When she said no, he raped her.”

Jared couldn’t breathe, imagining Emma at sixteen, so innocent, so loving, hearing about how she’d come to be. An incident so brutal, so full of betrayal it had to brand itself forever in her darkest dreams. She glanced up at him, as if she’d heard his thoughts, as if she knew how much he hurt for her.

“Sometimes I still have nightmares about my mom trapped in that car, trying to fight him, get him off of her.” Emma swallowed hard. Jared could almost feel her gorge rise. “I can feel him…hurting her,” she said. “And then, how scared she must have been when she felt me growing inside her.”

Davey stared at her, anguish and understanding stark in his face. Silent. Why the hell wouldn’t he be? Jared thought. There wasn’t a damned comforting thing to say.

“It hurts so bad, you know?” Emma confided, looking from one to the other. “I wish…wish I could just wipe all Mom’s pain away. I still wonder how she could ever love me so fiercely in spite of all that.”

Jared didn’t wonder at all. How could anyone not love Emma, down to the last atom of their heart?

Emma hugged herself tight. Jared wanted to slip his own arms around her, knew he didn’t dare. She was drawing on every bit of her strength, reliving her private hell for Davey’s sake. She had to stand through this alone.

“Mom says she loves me, not
in spite
of what I did to her life,” Emma said, “but
because
of it. She had to fight for survival for both of us. She told me the most beautiful thing, Davey, the day all hell broke loose and she had to tell me about the rape. The bright thing, the real thing I take out and hold when the dark of my father gets too heavy to bear. Mom said…” Emma’s voice hitched. “She said I was the making of her. The magic of it is that I can look back over all those years Mom and I struggled and survived and I know it’s true.”

Davey scraped the back of his arm across his eyes. “My mum loves me. But she’s scared for me. I see it, sometimes. She doesn’t want me to hope for too much out of life. That’s what made my dad angry, she said. Wanting things he could never have.”

Jared thought of Angus Butler’s rugged face, his callused, laborer’s hands that had never been too busy to untangle a fishing line, never lashed out in anger at a child or a woman. Angus, who loved and hoped and dreamed in the face of all the world had done to harden his heart.

Jared’s eyes burned. How many times had professors and colleagues called him brilliant—Dr. Jared Butler, a master in his field? So why had he been too damned brainless to realize how damned lucky he was to have a father like that?

“You know what I used to do?” Davey whispered, reaching for Emma’s hand. Emma enclosed it tenderly in hers, feathering her healing touch over the scar on the boy’s pale wrist, evidence of Davey’s quiet despair.

“What?” she asked.

“I’d pretend I was Dr. Butler’s son. In the summer it almost seemed real. But then, when I started loving Beth…it all came back. You know? My real dad, with his fists like hammers and…I couldn’t pretend anymore. I had to see things for real, and know how…how bad it would be if she found out the truth. That’s when I knew what Mum meant…about wanting something…too much. I can’t have her, Emma. Not ever. She’d find out someday and…”

“And what?”

“She wouldn’t want me. How could she want me?” Davey pulled away from her, clenched his hands into fists, misery gray in his face.

“You don’t know that,” Emma said. “She loves you.”

“They’re only nineteen,” Jared protested, not even sure that he meant it as an excuse anymore.

“That doesn’t mean their love isn’t real,” Emma said. She took the boy in her arms, hugged him tight, then drew away, gazing into his eyes with pure love, utter faith. “Davey, I can’t promise you Beth will be strong enough or wise enough to know how lucky she is to have won a heart like yours. But sometime you’re going to have to take a chance. Tell someone you love the truth or else your father wins.”

Jared winced. Damn her for being right.

“Talk to Beth,” Emma said.

“It’s too late. I acted like…like such a jerk. Emma, I shoved her away from me in front of everybody, made her cry.”

“Your boss here has made me cry a time or two.” Emma flashed Jared a glance. “Not when he was looking, of course.”

“Of course,” Jared said, hating the fact that it was true.

“What will I tell her?”

“Do you love her?” Emma asked.

“I do.”

“Then tell her all of it,” Emma urged.

“Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” Jared began but his protest was lost in Davey’s reply.

“No! I can’t! Not yet…” Panic flared in the boy’s eyes. “Just thinking of people here knowing…” He shuddered, looking so damned young, so damned brittle it scared the hell out of Jared.

Emma just hugged the boy closer. “You don’t have to tell Beth right now if you aren’t ready. Your secret’s safe for as long as you need it to be.”

“Safe? It’s never safe. Not for Mum or me. It’s always there, on the edges, waiting to come out…”

Emma’s gaze darkened with understanding. And Jared thought of the weight she’d carried all these years. The dread that must always haunt her, that scavenging pigs like Joel Feeny might stumble onto the truth about her own father and make it front-page news.

“No one here knows about your father but Emma and I,” Jared said. “And we’ll never tell a soul.”

“Never,” Emma said, giving Jared a solemn smile. “Can I give you just one more bit of advice, Davey? Because I love you so much?”

She did love the boy, Jared knew, a lump in his throat. It was in every line and curve of her beautiful face. Davey flushed, nodded.

“Just make sure that when the truth
does
come out to the woman you love, it comes straight from you. My mom’s courage in revealing her secret to me is something I’ll never forget.”