“What do you mean?”
He scratched his head. “Fuck. This is harder to talk about than I expected.” His gaze met mine again. “You know, they say one in every three girls is sexually abused before the age of eighteen.”
No, I didn’t know that. The statistic was staggering, making me wonder if anyone had ever hurt Annie. Surely, she would have told me if they did. Focusing back on what Morse had started to say, I asked, “Mila was sexually abused as a child?”
He nodded. “I think so. There were rumors about the reverend and the girls. It was like some fucked up rite of passage for them once they hit their teen years. But then he… some of them he liked more than others.”
“What the fuck, man?” I asked. If Morse had known Mila was getting sexually abused and didn’t speak up, he and I were going to have a problem. “Didn’t you tell someone? Her parents?”
“You don’t get it, brother. Everyoneknew. Well, we suspected. Nobody really talked about it, but there were hints. Disappearances. Behavior issues. Tears.” His eyes grew haunted. “Meals changed. The only person she stayed close to was Tobias. He was fluff.”
“Fluff?” I asked.
“Yeah. He never talked about anything real. Everything was happy and wonderful. He was like one of those princes in a fairytale. She could pretend with him.”
“I can be whomever I need to be.”
“Holy fuck,” I swore under my breath. Her admission made sense now. That’s how she coped. It was her drug, her addiction. I got it now. She wasn’t trying to deceive me; she was just trying to survive. Rocked by the epiphany, I stared at Morse, waiting for him to continue.
“We used to be so damn close, and then after her thirteenth birthday, she withdrew. I tried to talk to her about it a few times, but she wouldn’t say shit. You gotta understand, the reverend is basically a goddamn king. He does whatever he wants, no laws or rules can touch him, and nobody ever questions him. When I was a kid, there was this nice guy named Mr. Shewsberry. He started talking, making accusations about some shit the reverend had done and saying it wasn’t biblical. The guy disappeared, Hound. Nobody knows what happened to him, but let me tell ya, his rebellion was squashed faster than I can plant a virus in an unprotected system. It’s a whole different world out there. I was just a dumb kid who suspected something was up with my cousin but had no proof. I didn’t even put two and two together and figure out what really must have been going on until after I left. Our parents had to know, though. There’s no way they couldn’t have.”
My mom could be a manipulative, lying hag, but at least she protected Annie. I hoped. “Sounds like a fucked-up place.”
“You don’t know the half of it. After all of that, this Billy the Bastard loser saves her like he’s some sort of messiah, and then basically abandons her with nothing and nobody. She went into survival mode, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t even know how to have a relationship, friend or otherwise.”
And I made her feel like a whore.
My hindsight was twenty-twenty, and after spending all evening altering my conversations with Mila in my head, I was desperate for the chance to try again. Especially now that I was armed with real information. But he was sharing without her consent, which seemed like a shitty thing to do. “Why are you telling me this, Morse?”
He sighed, running a hand through his hair. I got the impression this shit was about as easy for him to tell me as it was for me to hear. “Because my cousin doesn’t let people in. She never has. But she let you get close to her. She told you shit.”
“She didn’t tell me she’d been raped as a child!” And I wished he hadn’t either. I didn’t want to think about Mila getting sexually abused as an adult, much less a kid. The thought of it kept messing with my head and making me want to punch something.
He skewered me with a look, tripping up my spinning thoughts. “I’ve seen the way you look at her. You love her, don’t you?”
I couldn’t even think about that shit. “It’s only been a few weeks.”
“So? Is there some mythical love timeline I don’t know about? Do you have to put in a certain number of days to know how you feel about someone?”
I chuckled, shaking my head at his ridiculous question.
“Would you fight for her?” he asked.
“In a heartbeat.” The answer flew right out of my mouth, surprising even me. Still, I knew it was true. Hearing all this shit about Mila only made me want to help her more. Not that I could, but I sure as hell wanted to. “But what if she’s better off where she is?”
“Pretending to be something she’s not?” Morse scoffed. “You don’t believe that any more than I do. She has feelings for you, too, you know? Whatever happened between the two of you… it really upset her. You could actually help her, brother.”
I shook my head, wondering what he thought I could do for her. I’d done more damage than good. “I’m in no position to help anyone. Jesus, sometimes I’m barely hangin’ on myself.” But that wasn’t quite true. Last night I’d reached for help rather than a fix. That wasn’t weakness, it was progress. “I thought I’d want to use last night, but I didn’t. Her being gone is tearing me up inside, but I refuse to go down that road again.”
“And that, right there, is why.” Morse shot to his feet and circled his desk, leaning against it to face me. “You know the struggle. You don’t pretend to have it all figured out. You would encourage her to seek help, you’d be patient, you wouldn’t judge her, you wouldn’t give up on her because you know what it’s like. That’s what she needs right now.”
I hadn’t thought about it like that before, hadn’t considered how I could actually help her. Morse made good points, and I was all in, but I still had questions. “So, what do I do? How do I convince her to stay? She made it perfectly clear she doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
Morse shrugged. “She’s scared, so she ran. Question is, do you care enough to chase her? To fight for her?”
“Yes.” I didn’t even fucking hesitate. “I already told you I do.”
Reaching behind him, Morse scribbled something down on a Post-It and handed it to me. “Tobias’s address. Go see if you can’t bring our girl home.”
