“WELL, SHE WAS A piece of work,” Jasmine says as she leans back into her blue velvet sofa. The letter dangles in her hand as I sit across from her. “Do you want to go into my kitchen and burn this?” she asks, handing the letter back to me as though it’s laced with poison.
I guess, in a way, it is.
I take a sip of my wine before grabbing hold of it with the tips of my fingers. “Burning this garbage isn’t going to make me feel better.”
“True, but it would make me feel better,” she says as the tears begin to make their way down the sides of my face.
She reaches behind her, grabbing a box of Kleenex from her side table, handing it to me.
“Thanks,” I say, putting my wine on the coffee table, then grabbing a handful of tissues out of the box. “I feel like you have a box of these in every room of your house just for me.”
“I picked up a case this morning,” she says with a slight smirk.
“Thank you.”
“So, did you finally decide what to do with the house? You already know what I propose.”
I lean back into the sofa and let out a soft sigh. “I’m going to sell it, not burn it down. What’s up with you wanting to burn everything?”
“I don’t know. Fire just ensures it doesn’t come back. Who wants the bad stuff back in their life? I sure don’t. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. That’s my motto.”
It seems as if something is hidden in her words, but I can’t put my finger on it.
“Let’s put it on the market. There’s no way I could ever live in it again. Do you have an agent in mind?”
“I do. I met a real estate agent in New York, but he moved here about six months ago. I reached out to him and told him to be on standby. He’s already pulled the comps, so he’s ready to get things started as soon as possible.”
“What would I do without you?”
“I’m glad neither of us has to find out. Now, what are you going to do about yourself?”
My eyebrows rise. “What do you mean?”
“Are you going to try and start writing again?”
I grab my wine glass and take a sip. “I don’t know. Honestly, I’m not sure about anything right now. The only decision I’ve made besides selling the house is to go and see this shrink that the detective referred me to.”
“They do help. If you get the right one, put it that way. Bad ones can screw you up.”
“A bit like men then. Husbands,” I say, attempting a badly timed quip.
I look at her and see something around the corner of her eyes, a pain I’ve never seen before; is it something new or something that I just never noticed before?
“What’s going on with you?”
She stares across the room as if looking into a window of the past.
My hand reaches over, then lies atop her shoulder. “What is it, Jasmine?”
“What do you mean?” She tries to hide it with a smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. And I know Jasmine better than anyone. I know when she is someplace else.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“It’s nothing… I’m fine. Really. I just think it’s a positive step.”
“Come on. No more secrets between us, please.”
Her bottom lip quivers at the words, and for a moment, she just breathes before pulling the revelation from her throat. “I didn’t leave New York just because I wanted to start my own business here, and it was cheaper. I left because I’d been attacked.”
I place my hand over my mouth.
“Raped, actually. I never told anyone, not even my parents or you,” she says, looking over at me. “At first, I don’t know whether it was because I was embarrassed that it happened or because I blamed myself for it happening. I mean, it was my fault somehow. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t know the details, but there’s no way you should take the blame for something as horrific as that. None of us walk around wearing signs saying, ‘hurt me!’”
She fringes a smile, but the tears that fall tell me she’s still struggling with it.
“It was a co-worker,” she says, taking another sip of her wine. “No,” she says, after pausing for a second. “Look, Raine; I’m not going to hide a single thing from you. Because we are friends, right? And you don’t hide things from me but just bear in mind how embarrassed and uncomfortable I am.”
She almost weeps. Almost. “Hey,” I say. “Be strong. Because you can be strong. You’ve been my rock for so long, so I know your strength better than anyone else in the world. But when you need to lean on me, I’m going to be your rock, all right?”
She smiles. A little. Her eyes are watery, filling up.
“The monster who did that to me was more than just a co-worker. It was my boss.”
“Oh, no.”
“And I’m so ashamed…” she says.
“There’s no need. He abused you. Abused his position, everything!” I reassure her.
“Exactly.” She picks up her wine glass and twirls it nervously in her hand. “He had a thing for me and that much was obvious, but I never thought it would come to that. Never thought—”
I reach over again and place my hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to tell me the details.”
She places her glass of wine down and then reaches behind her to grab a few tissues out of the Kleenex box. “I guess you’re not the only one that needs these.”
“You know what they say, misery loves company.”
She nods as she dabs the corners of her eyes.
“It happened so fast.”
“You really don’t have to talk about it, Jasmine.”
“No, I should have told you about it a long time ago. It’d be better to share it.”
I pick up the wine bottle and pour some into our glasses.
“You can fill mine to the top, please.”
“In that case, I’ll fill both of ours up.”
I smile, but as she lifts her glass to the brim of her lips, her hands are trembling.
“Where was I?”
“You were saying that it happened quickly,” I say, picking up my wine glass, and then taking a quick sip.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Her eyes shift downward, and she stares into the wine for a minute or two.
“We were both working late one night. Trying to put together a last-minute marketing strategy for a book that wasn’t doing well. One minute, I was talking about how I thought the book just needed a little more time in the market, and the next minute, he was—”
Her glass begins to shake.
“That night is forever etched into my memory. Even today, at this very second, I can tell you what kind of stinking cologne he had on that day, and while the darkness doesn’t visit me as much as it used to after it first happened, I can still feel it in the corners of my mind.”
We both take a couple more sips of wine.
“Jasmine?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever report it?”
She doesn’t say anything. Her eyes have this haze over them.
“Jasmine?”
She shakes her head slowly as I stare at her in disbelief.
“Don’t look at me like that. Don’t judge me.”
“I’m not judging you. I’m just surprised. He could do it to someone else. Every attack needs to be reported.”
She raises her glass, but then stops. “He did do it to someone else. It happened about six years later. Maybe a touch longer.”
“How do you know? That he attacked someone else, I mean?”
“By then, I was working for another PR agency, but the case had made it into the paper. The lady he attacked not only brought charges against him, but she also sued the publishing company. Apparently, there’d been other complaints against him, but the company failed to investigate.”
“I remember that. I remember she won that case and a boatload of money because an ex-employee had stepped forward as well. Was that you?”
Jasmine nods.
“It wasn’t easy. Seeing him in court every day was like reliving that day over and over again. When the trial ended, I moved here and opened up my PR agency. But the hardest part of all wasn’t being in that courtroom with him. No, the hardest part had come way before the trial or the case against him, for that matter.”
I sit up. “How so?”
“I’d gotten pregnant.”
I try not to gasp as she takes a big sip of her wine.
“Before you ask, I put the baby up for adoption. It was a boy.”
“After I gave birth to him, they tried to bring him to me, but I wouldn’t let them. I wasn’t trying to be cruel; it wasn’t his fault, but I just couldn’t go there. At that time, the pain was still too fresh. I’d lived with it for nine months, and to be honest, I thought that after I had the baby, after he was no longer in my life, the pain would go away but it didn’t. That’s when I went to see a therapist.” She releases a deep, shaky breath. “My company paid for it, and I went for about three years.”
“I’m so sorry, Jasmine. I hate that I wasn’t there for you when you needed me most.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I really wish I had known. I can’t imagine anyone going through all of that by themselves. I mean, look at me. I wouldn’t have been able to deal with everything that’s happening to me right now if I didn’t have my best friend by my side.”
“We’ve both been through so much, haven’t we?”
I nod my head. “Yeah, we have.”
“Good thing I have more wine. And tissues. Let’s not forget those.”
We both laugh, but the tears haven’t cleared completely for either of us.
“What was it like seeing the shrink?” I ask after a few minutes pass.
She sits up. “It was scary at first. It’s hard to tell someone, especially a stranger, the things that you can’t tell anyone else. Things that you can’t even discuss with your best friend. The things you don’t want to admit to yourself even. But after time, it gets easier to open up. They have a way of easing you into trusting them.”
“What didn’t you want to admit to yourself?”
She lets out a long sigh. “That I hated him.”
“Your boss? That’s understandable surely.”
“The baby.”
She looks over at me to see if I have a reaction to her revelation, but I don’t. How could I? While my situation is tragic, her story is a different kind of tragedy altogether and one she’s hidden so well. Hers is the kind of tragedy who’ll grow up one day and wonder who his real parents are. Not that I’m calling her son a tragedy—no child is that—but he was born as a result of one, and he’ll have to carry this all the days of his life.
“Do you still hate him?”
She looks pensive, perhaps a little distant.
“It took a long time for me to direct my hatred toward the person who really deserved it. When I was pregnant, I did everything the doctor told me to do, and I prayed the baby didn’t feel my hatred, and if he did, I hoped that he’d forgive me. I know that sounds weird.”
I shake my head no. “Not at all.”
“In my mind, he didn’t deserve it. He deserved a beautiful life, but I couldn’t give that to him. Even if I wanted to do so, it just wasn’t in me to give because of the association and damage that man caused to me. It was going to take me years to work through it.”
“Do you ever think about looking for him?”
“I’ve had my moments over the years. I would see a little boy while walking and think to myself, he should be about that age. Or there’d be a father playing with his son, and I would hope that my son had plenty of moments like that. And just when you feel something like regret, you remember. And just like that, the moment is gone. Sounds harsh, doesn’t it?”
“No. It sounds truthful to me.”
“There’s always that chance the child I gave birth to will come looking for me, and if that happens, I can only hope that I’d have the courage to face him.”
“Will you tell him, do you think? I know that’s hard to answer because—”
She cuts me off mid-flow. “I won’t tell him, no! I know how hard it is to deal with a situation like that. I wouldn’t put him through it.”
“What if he insists?”
“Then I’ll lie.”