“Yeah, it was fucked.” She lowered her voice. “When Cheryl’s dad found out she was pregnant, he left Melbourne that night. Didn’t even say goodbye. Then she got sacked. A bunch of his lawyers talked her into signing all this stuff that meant she wasn’t allowed to sue him or the company for what happened.”
“Jesus. Cheryl never said… never even came close to saying…”
“I didn’t know for years. Like I said, Bernie’s got walls. Big concrete ones with barbed wire on top.” Eden drank the last of her wine. “She has all these brothers and sisters she’s never met. She doesn’t think her dad’s wife even knows she exists.”
“Hang on, so he’s never paid child support?”
“No. He was in London, so Cheryl’s mum couldn’t take him to court. Besides, she couldn’t have afforded a lawyer. After Cheryl was born, they knocked out some deal where if she never contacted him again, he’d pay for Cheryl to go to private school. That’s how she wound up at Franklin Grammar with me.”
He drank, barely tasting the coffee. This explained how Cheryl, who didn’t seem like she was from money, had gone to a fancy girls’ school. It also explained why she didn’t trust anyone. Especially men.
“So, she doesn’t want to date anyone because of her dad?”
Eden smiled sadly. “That didn’t help. But that’s only a little bit of it.”
“Only a little bit!?”
“She’s had a hard life, Patrick. And it’s only getting harder.”
“Harder, how? Her mum being sick?”
Eden’s face closed the same way Willow’s had. “I can’t say.”
“That seems to be the theme of tonight.” He sighed. “It’s okay, I understand.”
“You don’t. And I’m sorry, but it’s Cheryl’s call. I guess all I wanted to tell you was there are reasons why she is the way she is.”
“Thanks.”
They sat quietly side-by-side as Patrick thought about Cheryl’s mother. For her to have been screwed over so badly and then have gotten sick in a way that meant she might need a wheelchair…
“Why is life so shit sometimes?” he asked himself as much as Eden. “Some people have zero big problems and other people—”
“Get fucked over. I know. It sucks. Back at school, I was the biggest dick, and everyone let me get away with it, but Bernie… God, the way people talked about her…”
Patrick’s hands balled into fists. “What people?”
“Girls. Guys. She’s older than me, so I only heard the rumours, but…” She tapped her empty wine glass and Patrick wondered how long it had been since she’d gone back to these memories, even in her mind.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t even want to think about it.” To his surprise, he saw her eyes were wet. “From the minute we were friends, Cheryl protected me. She was always on me not to let guys treat me like shit, but when they did it to her…”
“What fucking guys?”
Eden gave him a look. “You gonna go hit some thirty-nine-year-old real estate lawyer, Psycho? Flush his head down the toilet?”
“Why not?”
“Because it won’t help.” She flicked a tear from her right eye. “I guess that’s what I’m trying to tell you—it sounds victim-blamey and gross, but it’s like Cheryl wanted guys to hurt her… it was her way of testing herself, maybe. Proving no one could really get to her. I don’t know. But she let people—men—do the worst shit to her for a really long time, then it was like she went numb. She stopped dating, stopped hooking up with anyone who wasn’t a million years old. It was like this extreme obstacle course she put herself through until she couldn’t feel anything anymore.”
Patrick felt sick. Ever since they’d started hooking up, he’d assumed Cheryl wanted him to push her sexual boundaries because it was what she was into. But had he just enabled her self-destruction? Let her put him in the same box as all the other men who’d hurt her?
“I’ve fucked everything up.”
“You haven’t,” Eden said quietly.
“You don’t know what I did to her last night! How I treated her…”
