“Why not you, Migdalia? Remember when we first met, all we did was talk. There wasn’t a subject we couldn’t discuss.”
“You’re right. And there were a few on which we could never agree.”
“True. But you were the first girl who didn’t bore me to tears. And that made you special.”
“Were there any special ones after me?” she asked.
Ray pressed his head to the back of the chair and closed his eyes, feeling as if he were about to enter the confessional to reveal what he had and hadn’t done. “No, Micky. You were the last woman that I lay with.”
CHAPTER31
Migdalia stared across the space at the man who had changed her inside and out. Watching him gripping the arms of the chair, as if he were girding himself for something he knew was coming but hoped he’d be able to avoid. He hadn’t saidmade love to, butlay with. Was he talking about sleeping with men?
“What happened?” she whispered.
Ray opened his eyes. “I almost lost my life because I slept with you.”
She leaned forward, her heart beating a double-time rhythm. “What are you talking about?”
“I was abducted by your boyfriend and his brother, then beaten and left for dead.”
“No!” She hadn’t realized a primal scream had slipped past her lips until it was out.
“Yes, Micky.”
She listened intently as Ramon told her that while he was walking to a bus stop, someone hit him on the back of his head and shoved him into the rear of a car. Stunned andbleeding, he was bound, gagged, and blindfolded. He lost consciousness, and when he woke up, he was in an abandoned building and beaten repeatedly with bats and pipes.
Migdalia covered her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears when Ramon told her the injuries he sustained were so severe that there had been the possibility he wouldn’t survive. “Why did they do it?” she asked, recovering her voice.
“It was to teach me a lesson for, as your boyfriend put it, ‘fucking with his lady.’ So instead of going to medical school to become a doctor and save lives, I went to seminary to become a priest to save souls. Not knowing it was my soul that needed to be saved.”
“I’m so sorry,” she repeated over and over as guilt enveloped her like a weighted blanket that made it impossible for her to draw a normal breath.
It was because of her that Ramon had become the object of her ex-boyfriend’s vengeance. She’d broken up with Hector once he was arrested and incarcerated, but everything changed once she discovered she was pregnant and Ramon didn’t believe he was the father. If he had married her as she pleaded with him to do, then she never would’ve gone back to the neighborhood to face Hector, who’d been released from jail and saw that her body had changed. And she did what she’d been forced to do to save her life.
She lied to him.
“I lied and told Hector you raped me, because if I didn’t tell him whose baby I was carrying, he threatened to inject me with enough heroin to kill me and your baby.”
“It’s all in the past,” Ray said softly.
“It may be in the past for you, Ramon, but the lie will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
“Are you asking for absolution, because if you are, then I forgive you, Micky. And I need you to forgive me for not believing you when you came to me saying I’d gotten you pregnant.”
“There’s nothing for me to forgive you for, Ramon. You reacted the way you did because you probably felt I was trying to trap you into marriage.”
“I didn’t know what I was thinking at the time. It had nothing to do with you. I was months away from graduating college and going to medical school. Becoming a father at that time was not part of the equation. Meanwhile, you had to deal with a crazy ex who’d threatened your life and my baby’s.”
She stared, tongue-tied when Ramon called Micahmy baby. It had only taken seconds for Ramon to look at the boy waiting to receive the Eucharist for him to acknowledge that Micah was his son. “It was either street justice or karma that paid Hector and his brother a visit they will have to live with for the rest of their lives.”
A slight frown furrowed Ray’s forehead. “What happened?”
“I heard rumors that they were taken somewhere and tortured for days. Word is they were kept in a freezer and hung on meat hooks, where someone pulled out all their teeth, fingernails, broke their kneecaps, and abused them internally. I ran into someone from the old neighborhood a couple of years ago, and they told me Hector has to use a wheelchair to get around, while his brother has crutches to help him walk.”
Ray made the sign of the cross over his chest. “That sounds like mob activity rather than street justice.”
“Why would you say that?” she asked him.
