After saying his goodbyes to his parents, Sam walked around the desk to Paddy’s office. He could feel Cara’s eyes on him.
Paddy was seated inside with a serious expression on his face. “Come in and close the door.” As soon as he did, Paddy poured a glass of whiskey. “I know it’s early, but Sato suggested you might need this. He also suggested we call a doctor to remove that stick up your dad’s ass, but don’t worry, he did it over a private channel. Nobody else heard.”
Chapter Fifty-One
When Cara’s shift ended, she went looking for Sam. She had sent his parents into town, encouraging them to eat lunch at Margaux’s bakery. Poor Tyrell had transported them, and they treated him with the same finger-snapping scorn as they did Sato.
She knew exactly where to find him. There was a spot up by Lesser Lake near where she and Matteo always scattered ashes. On Mondays, their mutual day off, she and Sam used to hike up there and lay down on a table-sized rock and stare at the clouds. Sam would always bring a picnic, and they’d hang out and relax. He often called it the most peaceful spot on the island.
Even from a distance she recognized him standing on the large flat rock, throwing stones into the water. There was something so sad about his pose, about the slump of his shoulders interrupted by the sudden fury of each throw that made her want to hug him.
“Mind if I join you?”
He glanced at her, and the sadness on his face wrenched her heart. He reached down to the rock pile he had gathered, grabbed another one, and threw it far out over the lake.
“How did you find me?”
“I know you, Sam. Where else would you be? Remember how many times we came up here, so I could teach you how to skip stones?” She picked one up from his pile and threw it, counting five skips before it sank in the lake.
He almost smiled. “I thought I taught you.” He picked up a rock and tossed it as well, counting four skips as it skimmed over the lake’s surface. “That would have been more impressive if I had beaten you. So why are you here? Please don’t tell me my parents want to talk to me.”
“No, don’t worry. They’re gone for a while. Tyrell took them into town to get something to eat. Your father called him boy, and your mother clutched her purse like this.” She imitated holding a purse tightly to her chest with a horrified expression. “And they sat in the very back row of the cart as far from him as possible.”
Ty had rolled his eyes at her before departing, and she left a cookie on the desk for him with an apologetic note. She knew he wouldn’t blame Sam for his parents, but he still shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of treatment.
“Yeah, that sounds like them.” Sam looked embarrassed. “I’ll talk to Ty about it later.” He skipped another rock, then another. Cara waited patiently, thinking that he was steeling himself to speak. Finally, though, she got tired of waiting and put her hand on his arm.
“Stop. Sit and talk to me. I want to know what’s going on with you.” She sat down, and, after a moment, he dropped down next to her.
“Nothing’s going on with me. I’m fine.”
“You’re clearly not. Sam, please. I think I might understand.” She gave him time to respond. He stared out over the lake for a few minutes before sighing deeply.
“I didn’t want my parents to come here. It stirs up too many old memories. You may have noticed, they’re not good people.”
“I definitely noticed.” It was time to be blunt with him. “Sam, they abused you, didn’t they?” The look in his eyes gave her the answer. It was something she had suspected for a long time, actually. There was something about the way he avoided conflict, something about his lack of self-esteem, despite his good looks and career skills, and something about the way he lied to protect himself about trivial issues. All of those were potential signs of a terrible childhood.
“You are the first person that ever guessed that,” he said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Yes, yes they did. Me and my brother both. In fact, my earliest memories are of Nathan trying to protect me from our father. We used to have this pole in the basement, and he made us hold it as he beat us. And if we cried, he’d hit harder.
“Nobody ever believed us though. Nathan even made the mistake of filing a CPS report, and they came and interviewed our parents. I couldn’t stand up straight for a week after that. But nothing was ever done, nobody ever protected us.”
“That’s why you ran away when you were sixteen, wasn’t it?” She had heard that story before, of him getting on a bus and showing up at his brother’s college apartment, of spending the next two years finishing high school while sleeping on a couch and working as a dishwasher. She had assumed he was just a rebellious teen seeking freedom, not someone desperately trying to escape an untenable situation.
“Yep. I came home on my sixteenth birthday, and my dad ordered me to the basement. And I refused to go. I told him I was a man, and I wasn’t going to let him hit me ever again.” He kept his eyes focused on some distant point.
“What happened?” Cara asked when the silence stretched too long.
“He showed me that I wasn’t. It was the only time he ever hit me in the face. I snuck out that night to go to my brother’s, and Nathan didn’t even recognize me when he answered the door. He wanted to take me to the hospital, but I wouldn’t let him. So he called my parents and threatened to call the police. They ended up signing papers to emancipate me.”
“At least they did that.”
“It was to protect my father; it had nothing to do with me. It was the first time we had real evidence against them. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“It’s because they’re here and they’re stirring up all these memories. I understand.”
“Seeing them makes me feel like a terrified child again. I just want to hide under my bed until they’re gone. I fucking hate myself.”
He sounded so bitter and hurt that Cara wanted to cry for him. Instead, she put her arm around his shoulders, leaned in close and said, “Sam, you are stronger than you know.”
“What?”
“That’s what my therapist always tells me. You are stronger than you know, look what you’ve survived.”
“Cara, no offense, but I don’t think you talking to a shrink about your ex’s death is quite the same thing. Shit. I’m sorry, that came out harsher than I meant. I just mean it’s a different issue.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not actually talking to my therapist about that. I’m working through healing from all the times he hit me.”
“Phil hit you?” Sam’s eyes widened incredulously, and his face quickly shifted to fury. “I’m going to kill him.”
“I think he took care of that for you,” she told him, a weak attempt at a joke. But he didn’t laugh. He looked at her, and she felt something shift. It was time; it was time to talk to someone about what Phil had done to her. It was time to stop keeping his secrets.
“The first time he hurt me,” she began slowly, “we had just had an argument, our first real disagreement ever. He backhanded me across the face so hard it left a bruise. He was immediately so sorry. He cried. He begged me to forgive him. He swore it would never happen again. And for some reason, I believed him. I think I was just too shocked by the situation. You know, up until that point he had been perfect, always so kind and so caring, and so concerned about my needs. I guess I just wanted to believe it was an accident, a one-time thing.
“It was right before I came back to the island for the summer, and I didn’t see him for a couple of months. You know how busy it gets here, but he called almost every day; and he was always so sweet and he kept sending me flowers and gifts. It made it easy to dismiss the hit as an isolated event, a mistake.
“Then, that fall, I said something he didn’t like, and he slammed my head into the wall. ‘That’s it’, I said, ‘I’m leaving. You can’t treat me like this.’ And he apologized and told me he loved me, but I did it. I left. I wasn’t going to be one of those women that
puts up with domestic violence. I knew better, or at least, I told myself I did. But that night he overdosed. So I came back to him. I thought I was saving him. I didn’t want him to hit me, but I didn’t want him to die either. I thought I loved him, I really did.
“I always felt on edge, waiting for him to change. Everything would be okay—great, even—and it would seem like he was getting better, like everything was going to go back to the way it was before. But still, I had to be so careful of what I said to him. A lot of our relationship was long distance, and if I didn’t call at the exact right time, he would decide that I must be leaving him and he’d either threaten to commit suicide or he would do some generous romantic gesture, sending me flowers, candy, whatever. I never knew which Phil he would be. And when we were together, sometimes he would be so sweet, and sometimes so possessive and angry. Even last summer, when he came out here, on the night he acted like such a jackass in the restaurant, he hit me later and put his hand on my throat and . . .” She paused to wipe her eyes. This was so painful to say out loud.
“That was our pattern. First, he’d attack me, then I’d try to leave, and the next thing I know, he’s in the hospital. Once he drove his car into a tree because of me, but he walked away without a scratch, thanks to all the airbags. When he proposed, he made it huge and dramatic and very public, so I would look like an asshole if I turned him down. And I knew if I said no he would have killed himself. He even said so. I spent months thinking about how to break off the engagement but still keep him alive. I knew the man I fell in love with was still inside him, somewhere, and that man deserved to live. I guess I just thought that if he got help, if I could make him stay alive long enough to, I don’t know, get therapy, then the real Phil would come back. In my darkest moments, I even resigned myself to actually going through with it and marrying him because I didn’t want him to kill himself. I honestly believed I could somehow save him.”
Cara finished the story with her head down—she didn’t want to see his reaction. When she finally looked up, there was a tear running down his cheek. He hugged her and she pressed her face into his chest. His embrace felt so warm, so solid, and so safe.
“Cara, we used to talk all the time, and I had no idea you were going through that. All those phone calls, and you never said anything. Why? Why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped you. I could have done . . . I don’t know what, but something.”
She pulled back so she could meet his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell anyone about your father? Some secrets are so shameful we have to keep them.”
They studied each other’s faces for a long quiet moment. She had never seen him so open, so vulnerable. This was Sam stripped down to his essence, the part of him he kept hidden from the world.
“Oh, Cara.” He reached out a hand as though he was about to smooth her hair, but then his jaw tightened and something changed in his eyes, and he stopped himself. The openness closed off again, and he turned back to regular Sam. He took a deep breath. “You know what, I gotta go. It’s cardio day.” With that, he abruptly jumped up and took off running.
Cara sat alone in shock. Instead of bringing them closer, apparently, confiding their darkest, most painful secrets drove them further apart. How could he literally run away from her after that?
She started throwing the rest of Sam’s rock pile into the lake. Each stone represented someone who had hurt her. She cast them as far from her as she could. Phil. Sam. Phil. Sam. Phil, Phil, damn Phil. Would she ever escape the poisonous taint of that relationship?
Chapter Fifty-Two
Sam came around a curve in the trail too fast and not only did he startle a group of tourists, but he also scared away the wild turkey they were taking selfies with. Running on the road was preferable, but the nearest path to it would take him past Lesser Lake, and he was afraid Cara might still be there. He couldn’t face her right now.
He kept going, feet pounding, trying to see if he could run faster than his thoughts, further than his anger. The rage churned inside of him, directed at so many people. His parents, for showing up here and destroying his peace; Phil for being an abusive asshole; and Cara, oh, Cara, he was so angry at her for having chosen Phil over him.
He met the guy last summer and hated him on sight. Some small part of him had actually wanted to like Phil, so he could honestly say that a better man won, that Cara had found the kind of partner she deserved. But Phil acted so possessive. Sam saw how he looked at Cara; how carefully he watched her; how he sized up all the men in the room. And when they were introduced, Phil did that ridiculous alpha-male handshake thing, asserting dominance through crushing. Too bad for him Sam worked as a professional chef. He squeezed back until he saw Phil wince and then just a little longer for effect before grinning and releasing his hand. Now, when he thought back on it, all he could think about was Phil’s same hand on Cara’s vulnerable throat. He wished he could travel back in time and kill the bastard while he had the chance.
Listening to Cara describe the abuse she suffered had triggered a desire to comfort her. When he held her, he wanted to whisper in her ear that he would protect her forever, exactly the response the broken-child version of himself had always craved. For a moment, seeing his own old wounds reflected in her eyes connected them, deepened their bond, and showed him he had finally found someone he could share the ugliness of his past with, someone who understood.
But that only lasted for a moment.
Because then he realized that their experiences were so very different. Sam had been a child, a child who always lived with violence and knew no other way. His life seemed normal to him; not good, but normal. He didn’t know other kids didn’t have whipping posts in their houses, that they weren’t terrified of their parents. And if he had known, it didn’t matter; he was just a kid. He couldn’t escape. He couldn’t pack his things and move. He couldn’t change his number and start over in a new city. He couldn’t run away until he was sixteen and even then his survival depended on his older brother.
Cara’s situation was completely different. She was abused as an adult. Hell, she didn’t even live in the same state as Phil for part of the year. How hard would it have been to leave him? If she really wanted to, she could have dumped him easily. And why did she care so much if Phil killed himself? Why was she still grieving for that monster? Shouldn’t she have been relieved by his death?
His footsteps stirred up pine needles on the trail, sending their scent into the air, and reminding him of how last year he had stood under a tree in these very woods and confessed his love. He told the only woman he ever cared about exactly how he felt, and what did she do? Reminded him about her engagement and ran away. Knowing he loved her, knowing he was the kind of man who would never hurt her, knowing he could protect her, she still chose Phil. She chose the man who beat her. She chose to stay with the man who abused her.
What did that say about her? And what did that say about how she felt about Sam? Maybe what his father had told him his entire life was true. Maybe Sam was worthless after all. He was clearly worth less than Phil, less than a manipulative girlfriend-beating son of a bitch.
He ran until he couldn’t breathe and then he ran some more. But he still couldn’t escape the vicious cycle of his thoughts. She still wasn’t choosing him.
Chapter Fifty-Three
It was bad luck that his parents arrived on a Tuesday. On Tuesdays, his restaurant only opened for breakfast, and he had the rest of the day off. He delayed as long as he could, but he finally mustered a level of either courage or resignation sufficient to face them.
They begrudgingly agreed to Sam’s suggestion of dinner at the Village Diner. He was confident they’d find something on the menu they were willing to eat, and he guaranteed the food would be delicious—two of his cooks worked at the diner when they weren’t working for him.
“First a coffee shop, now a diner? How quaint,” his mother commented, and he knew she didn’t mean it as a compliment.
As soon as they
walked in, they were welcomed by Wayne, the diner’s owner and Sam’s occasional rival. The two of them engaged in friendly competitions at town events, and every time Sam entered the building, Wayne would accuse him of spying. ‘You can eat here, but only if you aren’t facing the kitchen,’ or ‘you can eat here, but don’t talk to my employees; and you can’t write anything down.’ It was all in fun. If they ran into each other at the bar, they’d take turns buying rounds of drinks and spend hours talking about spice combinations and debating the best way to cook fresh fish.
This time though, Wayne skipped all the usual jokes and greeted Sam with a hearty clap on the back. “Chef Vervaine, so wonderful to see you. Please sit anywhere. I’ve been developing a new sauce recipe I’d love to get your opinion on.”
“Sure, I can do that.” Sam tried not to sound suspicious. After he and his parents sat at a table (and then moved to a different one because the one Sam chose wasn’t good enough), Tim approached them. Sam could tell by the cheerful look on his face that he had not yet spoken to his boyfriend.
“Hey, Chef Vervaine, it’s so great to run into you.” Tim shook Sam’s hand enthusiastically. He turned to Sam’s parents. “This guy is amazing. We’re so lucky to have him here on our island. If I were picking a last meal, he would be the one I’d beg to prepare it.” As he walked away, he looked back and winked at Sam and mouthed the words Cara called.
“Well, Samuel, now I know why you come back here every year,” William Vervaine remarked. “At first, I thought it was for those attractive twins who work the front desk.”
“William, that’s not appropriate,” Linda interrupted with a warning tone.
That Last Summer (Whispering Pines Island Book 1) Page 22