From Glowing Embers

  ~ ~ ~

  Gray could feel the warmth of Julianna’s body as he stood behind her. She had been quiet for a long time, but he sensed she wasn’t stubbornly refusing to talk. She was remembering, and he knew how hard it must be.

  “I never had any idea how bad things were at home until my mother told me after Ellie’s death,” he said at last.

  Julianna nodded, not surprised that now he knew. “I tried to tell you in Oxford. You didn’t want to hear it.”

  “The few times I came home after that, you were so withdrawn.”

  “Withdrawing was the way I coped.”

  “By the time I got home after graduation, I was furious. I’d been working so hard for you and the baby, but when I looked out into the crowd, all I saw was my mother and father. You weren’t there.”

  “And you thought I would be?”

  “I’d asked you to come in every letter I wrote you.”

  “I didn’t read your letters.”

  “Why not?”

  “What could you say that wouldn’t hurt me more?”

  Her voice belonged to the eighteen-year-old girl she had been then, wounded and bleeding from the abuse she’d suffered. Gray shuddered. “I didn’t understand. I thought you were just being petulant. I’d spoken to my father after you complained the first time, and he’d admitted he’d been harder on you than he should have been. But he apologized and...”

  “And?”

  “And he told me that pregnant women are always oversensitive. He promised to try to make it up to you. Then you took off for Oxford without even giving him a chance.”

  “Oh, but he got his chance after I went back, Gray. He changed, all right. He got worse. He even gave away your little secret.”

  “Secret?”

  “He told me you were planning to divorce me and get custody as soon as the baby was born.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “I don’t know if I did or not. I didn’t want to, but every time he saw me, he’d ask if I’d heard from you, ask if you’d talked to me about the divorce yet.” She heard Gray’s muttered curse. “I tried to stay out of his way, but sometimes I had to come out of my room, and when I did, he’d be waiting and—”

  “Don’t.” Gray cut her off. “I know now. But I didn’t then. It was all lies. He was a cruel, sick man.”

  “Was?”

  “He died last year.”

  She couldn’t find the words to say she was sorry. “I wonder if he ever found out what it was like to be totally at the mercy of another person.”

  Gray didn’t know. At the end he had gone to his father’s bedside, but it was the first time since Julie Ann had fled that he had been in the same room with the man who had treated her so brutally.

  She continued, and she still sounded as if she were reliving the nightmare of those days in the Sheridan household. “When your mother confessed, did she tell you that he used to come into my room on cold days to turn off the radiator? He would laugh, and then he’d say, ‘Gal, you aren’t worth the money it costs to heat this room.’“ She stopped. “But of course, she wouldn’t have told you that. He tried to hide the full extent of his torture until we were alone.”

  Gray lifted his hands to rest them on her shoulders, then stopped himself. He knew she wouldn’t welcome his touch, even for comfort. “Why didn’t you tell me exactly what he was doing? You never told me anything specific.”

  She let out her breath slowly. It didn’t help. “At first I just didn’t want you to know the things your own father was capable of. Then I began to see that it didn’t matter, because you wouldn’t have believed me, anyway. You didn’t want to believe me. It made your life too difficult.”

  Gray tried to call back the years to see if there was any truth in what she said. “You mattered to me,” he said finally. “I was young and overworked, but I was trying to do what was best for both of us. Maybe I didn’t want to hear the truth, but if you’d told me exactly what was going on, I would have had you out of there in a heartbeat.”

  Julianna lifted her chin. “You knew me better than anybody in the world. You should have known I never would have complained without reason.”

  “I thought you were lonely. You’d had such a hard time with the pregnancy, and you didn’t have any friends in Granger Junction. I even called your doctor to see what he thought, and he said depression was perfectly natural.”

  “Under the circumstances, it certainly was.”

  “He told me something else, too. He said you were in real danger of losing the baby, and that you had to have rest and quiet or you would miscarry for sure.”

  “The man was a prophet.”

  Gray heard the pain in her voice. “I thought that once the baby was born and I was out of school, we’d be able to put everything behind us. I wrote, trying to make you understand.”

  “I understood, all right.”

  “The day I came home after graduation, I couldn’t think about anything except how angry I was. I’d had such plans. I’d even gotten a friend’s apartment so we could spend a few days alone before we went back to Granger Junction. And then you didn’t show up. At first I wanted to shake you. Then I took one look at you and knew something terrible was wrong.”

  Her proud stance altered. Gray saw her sag under the weight of what was to come. “We both know what happened then,” she interrupted. “Please, let’s not go over it now.”

  “My words or yours, Julianna,” he went on relentlessly. When she didn’t—or couldn’t—answer, he began to detail their nightmare.