“A few weeks after I first met her, Elizabeth took me for a ride around the lake in that Spider. Noah was right, at least about her skill. She handled that car with the precision of a world-class race car driver. I don’t know where she got her instincts, but they were sharp as a knife. She knew perfectly well she was scaring the hell out of me that day, driving as fast as she did.” He paused and shook his head. “But she’d just smile and accelerate through the next twist in the road.”
“She didn’t just scare you. She excited you.”
“She did. I’ll admit it. My only excuse is that I was a child in the beginning. By the time we married, I was almost twenty-three. By then, some of her glamour had started to fade. I’d begun to see her complexi
ties and vulnerabilities. Her many scars.”
“What, Evan?” I prodded when he paused, a shadow crossing his face.
“Unfortunately, understanding her complexities and her pain only made her more attractive to me. I wanted to protect her. Worse, I wanted to save her,” he admitted, his harsh tone telling me that he recognized this as a personal shortcoming, a deep flaw in his character.
“It was a new hold she had over me, an even stronger one than my desire for her. And she knew how to use this hold to her advantage every bit as well as she knew how to manipulate for attention and sex.”
My stomach burned at what I heard in his voice at that moment. Not just bitterness.
Hopelessness.
“Why did she need to be saved?” I asked.
“She needed saving from her father,” Evan stated bluntly. “At first, I just thought it was his unhealthy hold over her, a grip that Elizabeth both fought against and seemed to relish at the same time. Later, I understood it was much more.”
He glanced up, and saw my confusion. He grimaced.
“Noah had been abusing Elizabeth. Since she was nine years old,” he said.
“Sexually?” I asked, not really sure I wanted to know.
“Sexually. Emotionally. Physically. He regularly drugged her, all for the sake of his sick ‘research.’ What he did to that girl… that woman…” The muscle in his cheek flickered again. “It was diabolical. It was torture. I can’t think of any other way to describe Noah and his intentions. He didn’t want to just control Elizabeth. He wanted to own her. Body and soul. Every thought she had. Every desire. Every dream, he wanted to stamp himself on it. He even wanted to own her occasional rebellion against him.”
“I don’t understand,” I told him honestly.
“No,” Evan said dully. “I wouldn’t expect that you would. And I’m not sure I want to tell you, now that the time has come.”
I stared at his gray face, a visage of bottled misery.
“You brought me here, Evan. You brought me here and made me part of this story. You owe me the truth. Make me understand about Noah Madaster. Make me understand Elizabeth. Make me understand why you did this to me,” I demanded. I was a little taken aback by the authority in my voice, but it seemed to cut through the cloud of misery that surrounded us in that moment.
“I’m not sure I want you to understand, Anna. The cost might be too high.” He noticed my angry, determined expression and exhaled in defeat before he continued.
“Noah Madaster was an intimidating giant of a man. When I was a kid, he scared the hell out of me. As I got older, I realized he scared and manipulated nearly everyone he met, adult or child. With most people, he was charming at first. Smooth. Sophisticated. But he was never that way for me. He seemed to sense something special in my relationship with Elizabeth, something innocent maybe… somewhere he wasn’t allowed to tread. Somewhere he had no authority. It threatened him.
“He was strict and controlling with Elizabeth when she was a teenager, but also strangely permissive, as well. It was like he constantly swung between spoiling her, and then punishing her for enjoying herself and escaping his authority. He monitored her interactions with boys and men obsessively while at country club parties or events, for instance. He wouldn’t allow her to date anyone unless he approved of him first, although he rarely granted his approval. But Madaster also gave Elizabeth that ridiculously expensive Ferrari when she was only fifteen. He supplied her with plenty of cash and credit cards. Elizabeth used them to escape his net of control, but he knew what he was doing all along. Because he’d given her those things—the car and the money—he always retained ultimate control. They were his tools, not hers. He seemed to enjoy seeing her push at the confines of her invisible prison. He seemed to love the moment when he reeled her back within his grip.”
“And Elizabeth’s relationship with you? Was that an attempt by Elizabeth to escape her father’s influence?”
“Yes, I suppose it was. But our relationship was unique, too. Innocent. Or maybe it wasn’t. That was the thing with Elizabeth. Just when you thought you understood her, just when you thought the connection between you was sound and genuine, she would turn around and do something completely inexplicable. She’d break the link willfully. Spitefully. Grotesquely. I used to think that our initial connection to each other was special. But as in all things, Elizabeth left you swimming in doubt. I still doubt, even today. Who really knew what she thought or wanted? Her desires had been forged and culled by her father, meticulously fashioned into the shape of his desire. Can the slave ever truly break free of the slave master? I don’t know. That was the problem. I never truly knew. I still don’t.
“But all those doubts only came later. I was in awe of her in the beginning. I didn’t understand why she chose me, out of all the other boys and men who constantly surrounded her. But after we’d spent some time together, the layers of her—that outer cold, hard armor she wore—seemed to peel away. It was like my youth and inexperience rubbed off on her. Instead of seeming like fifteen going on forty, she started to act like a teenage girl: funny, impulsive, painfully insecure at times. Sweet.”
He uttered the last gruffly. The look in his eyes brought a hard lump to my throat.
“The first summer we met, we would hike out to this overlook a few miles from my house and talk about stupid things. Kids’ things. Or so I’d thought at the time. We’d play this game: wish upon a star, where we’d pick a star for the other person. If it was a bright star, you could make a big, important wish, if it was a small, dim one, you could only wish for a little thing… a passing fancy, like that when you got home, you found out that your mom had gotten all the stuff for ice cream sundaes, or that when I joined Elizabeth at Tahoe Shores High School in a year, we’d have the same lunch hour. Stuff like that.
“I remember once, I picked the brightest object in the sky for her, even though it wasn’t a star. I picked the full moon. And I waited, wondering what Elizabeth Madaster’s biggest wish in the world could possibly be, the one that surpassed every other.”
“What did she say?” I asked breathlessly when he paused.
“She said that she wished she belonged to another family… a boring, regular family,” Evan said quietly, his expression grim. “She’d live in Kansas, or Iowa, or anywhere, really, as long as people didn’t look at her with so much expectation. Some place anonymous. Some place safe. She wished she could be invisible, for the most part. That she could blend into the landscape whenever she chose.”