Relentless(47)

The way he says this makes me think my mother knew she wasn’t going to live very long. I’m sure most drug addicts feel this way at some point, but something feels off about this whole situation.

“Are you saying my mom killed herself?”

Henry looks up from the folder looking confused. He thought I already knew this.

“Oh, God,” I whisper as I bury my face in my hands. “I can’t believe this.”

“Your mother loved you, Claire,” Henry insists.

Adam rubs my back as I press the heels of my hands against my eyelids; trying to push back the memory of the hours I spent hiding from my mother’s dead body. I think of how my legs ached as I stood in the crack between the refrigerator and the wall. How I convinced myself more than once that if I came out of my hiding place, this time she would be alive. How I pissed myself because I was too afraid to walk through the living room to go to the restroom. How the policeman who found me cried as he carried me out of the trailer. All this time I thought it was an accident. I thought my mother made a mistake, a miscalculation. Even after everything I went through before that policeman found me and in all the foster homes after that, I never hated my mother. Until now.

I sit up and wipe the tears away from my face. “Who’s the donor?”

The lines at the corners of his eyes deepen as he contemplates the answer to this question. He glances at Adam then back at me. “I think you might want to be alone when you hear this.”

Adam begins to stand and I put my hand on his knee to stop him. “Henry, you just told me my mother committed suicide,” I say incredulously. “Do you really think anything you tell me now is going to be more devastating than that? Who’s the fucking donor?”

Henry looks back and forth nervously between Adam and me as if we’ve just pointed guns at his head and asked him to open the bank vault. “Yes, I do think this news will be quite devastating, but I’ll respect your wishes if you want your friend here with you.” My leg starts bouncing uncontrollably as I wait for Henry’s next words. “Your father is the donor, but—” He puts a hand up to stop me from speaking when I open my mouth. “—before you accuse your mother of keeping you from your father while taking his money, there’s something you need to know.”

The few bites of yogurt I ate three hours ago are swirling in my belly as my stomach twists in knots from the anticipation.

“Claire, your mother was raped when she was seventeen by one of her cousins.”

I knew her uncle repeatedly raped her from age nine to fourteen, but she never told me anything about her cousin.

“Are you sure you don’t mean she was raped by her uncle? Because she told me about that.”

Henry shakes his head. “It was the son of the same uncle. Claire, your mother was a good person. She trusted too many people too much.”

“Until she didn’t trust anybody at all,” I say, beginning to understand why my mother kept me locked away in that trailer and why she was so adamant about teaching me how to stay safe.

Then another realization hits me. We were talking about the donor on the trust account before Henry told me my mother was raped by her cousin.

“Oh, God,” I whisper, and I double over in my chair, suddenly feeling as if a ten-ton slab of concrete is crushing my chest. “He’s my father.”

Adam slides off the chair and kneels in front of me. “I think we should leave.” He lifts my chin and takes my face in his hands. “You don’t need to hear any more of this shit.”

“My mother never told me any of this,” I whisper as he swipes his thumb across my face to brush away the tears. “He raped her and she still took his money.”

I grab Adam’s hands and pull them away from my face, but I hold tight to them as they rest in my lap.

“She did it because she wanted you to be taken care of,” Henry insists.

“Two hundred and seventeen thousand dollars.” Just saying the words aloud makes me feel filthy. “Why would he give her so much money?”

Almost as soon as I speak the words I know the answer. It was hush money to keep her from turning him in. It had to be. She used her pain to extort money from him. She gave up the chance for justice so that I would have a chance at a better life.

“I don’t want that money.”

Adam stares fiercely into my eyes. “You don’t have to take a single penny of it. Let’s get out of here. You don’t need this shit, especially not on your birthday.”

“You know we can’t legally keep this money. The money will just sit here collecting interest,” Henry informs me, as if I care. “She wanted you to have the money.”