No need. There was every need.
He’d been all alone.
“I can’t imagine facing that by yourself,” I whispered.
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and the room felt suffocating in the thick silence.
“I feel it’s only fair, if I’m answering all these very personal questions, that you answer a few for me.” He looked up and gave me a weak smile. This was heavy. So incredibly heavy, and I felt obligated to give him some answers if it would offer any relief from the weight of this conversation. So I held back my plethora of questions and walked over to him. I leaned against the desk next to him.
“What do you want to know?” I whispered.
“Tell me what happened with your father.”
“It’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through, Jay.”
He shook his head. “Talk to me, Hope. Pain doesn’t have to be equal to be shared.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. “Okay.”
I paused, unsure if I could really lay this all out for him. But with everything he’d just shared with me, I felt like I had no choice but to give him a piece of myself.
In the quiet space of his library between the fortress-like shelves, I felt safe. I felt like I could confess here.
“It’s not exactly what he did; it’s more what he didn’t do.” I shifted, folding my arms over my chest. “As you may know, my father made a name for himself throughout San Diego. He used to work at the dental college on the military base, and he was very popular. He developed his own implant techniques and taught many dentists around the world for a time. And he made lots of friends. When he opened his own clinic, he hired one of his best friends that he’d worked with on the naval base.”
I paused, realizing I had yet to fully tell this story to anyone since it happened.
“After I graduated, I started working at the family clinic, and I was working solely with my father’s best friend.”
I didn’t want to say his name, but I almost needed to. It felt like a dirty word, a sin that had festered in my soul, even though it wasn’t a sin I’d committed.
“Dr. Conrad Pike.”
Jay didn’t say anything; he just looked at me with his dark eyes, his gaze somehow urging me to continue.
“He was a very particular man.” I let out a laugh, but it was a sort of angry laugh. “Any little thing I did wrong, he berated me for.”
My fingers started to tingle as I spoke.
“I’m a perfectionist. I did well in school. I was a great student, and I thought I was a pretty good hygienist. So it was difficult for me to understand why he hated me so much.”
My voice reduced to a whisper. “He hated me. I can truly say that everything I did was never enough. He would pull me into his office and yell at me. The first few times, I told my father. I asked him to move me to work with someone else because Dr. Pike wasn’t the only dentist there.”
Jay’s jaw clenched, as if sensing where the story was headed.
“He didn’t believe me. The idea that his best friend could be berating his daughter at work was just too much for him to handle, I guess. He’d always explain it away, make it seem like I was overreacting.” I swallowed. “Soon, I started having nightmares and panic attacks at work. My hands would go numb, sometimes even my face. Then I’d feel like I couldn’t breathe, and I’d have to sit on the ground with my head between my knees to calm down.”
“Because my father controlled everything, I didn’t feel like I could leave. I had nowhere to go. There was no support outside of him. I’d built everything around him—my future, my career. I once threatened to work for someone else, but he always convinced me to stay. Said it would make him look bad if I left.”
I looked down. “I wanted to leave. But there was always some excuse. Or some fear that was making me stay. Then one day, Dr. Pike’s favorite patient came in. She was some radio host he’d been seeing for years, and I could’ve sworn he was infatuated with her or something.”
I could picture it. The day, the time, what I was wearing. It was so vivid that it felt like I was reliving it.
“I treated her like any other patient. She was a nice lady. We chatted. I cleaned her teeth, and then he came in to do an exam. Before I knew it, the appointment was over. And then, when I came back to my room after checking her out at the front desk, Dr. Pike called me into his office.”
I closed my eyes for a second, gathering the courage to finish. I’d come this far; I might as well.
“He proceeded to tell me that he was disappointed in the way I had treated his favorite patient. I asked him what I had done wrong because I thought the appointment had gone wonderfully. He told me I had dismissed her too soon, that I should’ve taken longer to do her cleaning, and that I was lazy and slacking by not taking the full time.” My teeth ground together. “And guess how early I released her?”
