“I’ll get to that.” Julia pulled a small box from her breast pocket. Inside was an ornate diamond ring. “The day I put on this ring, I signed my life away to the devil himself.”
“He abused you.” That wasn’t hard to believe. Russell Moreau definitely had some good ol’ boy skeletons in his 2600 sq. ft. closet.
Julia nodded. “From the first night. I was a virgin. Nothing could have prepared me for what I endured.”
Someone in the room suffered from a sharp intake of breath.Down, Dee.“I’m so sorry.”
Was there a fly in the room? Julia swatted something with her hand.Memories?“I told myself it was worth it. I was Mrs. Moreau. People respected me. I controlled entire properties and had access to hundreds of millions of dollars. On the surface, I was a happy woman. When I found out I was pregnant, I convinced myself that Russell would ignore me and leave me be for most of my life, especially if I gave him a son.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. Once.”
“I don’t understand.” Alicia’s fingers tangled between her legs. “I thought Danica was an only child.”
Another sad sigh echoed in the room. “She is. Shortly after she was born, I found out that Russell would never leave me alone.I was his to control and make suffer. Bad day at work? He took it out on me the moment we were in our chambers. He had a doctor on his payroll who kept me presentable for the public. Russell always knew how to strike me without leaving me with a visible bruise. Anywhere but my thighs, anyway.”
Alicia was going to vomit.
“So, I ended up pregnant again. Danica was still a baby for all of it. She and the child inside of me were the only things that gave me strength. I went through everything for my children. I couldn’t wait to get them away from their father. I told myself…” Julia dabbed her cheek with a handkerchief. “I promised I would raise them right. I wanted them as far away from Russell as possible. Easy enough. He wasn’t interested in them. Only me.”
“Nobody knew?”
“Of course people knew. Everyone working directly beneath him knew. My bodyguard, who was supposed to protect me, knew! Those bastards would stand back and watch as my husband struck me for coming back an hour late from the doctor’s. I’m sure they heard me screaming plenty of times as well.”
Oh, my God, make this stop.
“When Eddie was born, I knew something was wrong. He didn’t cry. He didn’t want to touch anyone. He wouldn’t eat. If the doctors didn’t tell me he was breathing, I would have thought he was dead. Nobody could tell me what was wrong. They kept him in the NICU. I was there when he died. Russell was not.”
Alicia clutched her stomach. Sympathy pains? Sympathy heartbreaks? She wasn’t a mother, but she felt that shock as instinctively as she experienced fear and sadness. “I’m really sorry. That sounds awful.” What else could she say?
“All I understood was that my baby had brain damage. Brain damage! They asked me if I had fallen while pregnant. Yes. Many times. Every time I fell, it was because a man pushed me.”
Alicia didn’t want to hear this anymore. What could she do?
“I was so depressed that I barely functioned. I didn’t care what anyone did to me. They could kill me. The only thing that kept me going was Danica. Someone had to take care of her, and I didn’t trust the nannies Russell hired. He was sleeping with most of them. Treated them better than he treated me.” Julia scoffed. “I didn’t care. I had my daughter.”
“So, what happened?” Alicia had a feeling she would regret asking that.
“I existed on nothing but my daughter for several years. I’ll never forget how old she was the last time we spent a day together. Seven. She was in first grade. Very bright girl. She had always been intelligent.”
“She is intelligent.”
Julia nodded. “I know. I follow her in the news, and from what people tell me about her. I’ve tried many times to contact her, but I can’t bring myself to do it. If Russell knew… our daughter may be a grown woman, but my ex-husband carries the most power. At any rate, I don’t think Danica would believe me. My ex-husband has done everything to turn her against me.”
“I never got that impression,” Alicia said. “She doesn’t speak of you with any malice.”
“Be that as it may, there’s nothing I can do now. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I suppose you want to know what finally led to me leaving that man.”
“Do I?”
“You should know. I came home one day to find Danica back early from school. Russell was there. I didn’t find out about the fight at school until much later. All I saw was my husband threatening my daughter the way he always threatened me.”
Alicia shuddered to imagine anyone threatening her girlfriend like that.Does she even remember?How often did it happen?
“I did what any mother would have done. I intervened. I finally made that useless bodyguard of his calm my husband down and stop terrorizing his daughter! Who has to do that?” Julia pushed the handkerchief across her eyes. “That day, I told him I wanted out. I couldn’t take it anymore. It was one thing for him to hurt me. To hurt my daughter, though? That girl never did anything wrong. Even if she did, how was it right to do that to her? When I tried to take Danica with me, every single body on the security staff got in my way. They cut me off from my daughter that day. I screamed. I called my lawyers. I called my mother. Nobody would help me. Nothing scared me more than leaving my daughter to that monster. Not only what he could do to Danica… but how he would raise her!”
Alicia couldn’t look her in the eye any longer.This explains a lot.Danica never spoke of her father fondly. She thought that was a side-effect of a distant relationship… but now…
