Quote:
TW: Roundabout, gaslighty discussion of child sexual abuse and felony statutory rape
TW: Gaslighting, holy s**t, there is gaslighting
Please read with caution!


Quote:
As he stepped out of the conference room and checked his phone for the first time in an hour, Luke Rodham had nine missed calls and another incoming. Nine missed calls and another incoming from his daughter.

He picked up before it could become ten missed calls. “Elanor,” he said coolly. “I was in a budget meeting. This had better be life or death.”

He suspected it wasn’t. She’d been nothing but trouble lately.


Nell had spent probably about two hours trying to psyche herself up for this. She hadn’t called her mother yet. Wouldn’t call her until… she didn’t know. She just kind of wanted to hear her dad admit the flavor of skeezeball he was. Or tell her she was wrong, because Nell had never wanted to be wrong so bad in her life. She would give her eyeteeth to be wrong.

“If it was life or death,” started Nell--but she stopped herself--took a deep, audible breath. No snark, not right now. (Even if the line was really good: If it were life or death, I’d already be dead, wouldn’t I?)

Her voice was subdued. “Yeah, it’s… kind of important. Can you talk now?”

Quote:
Luke suspected that he and Nell had different definitions of important - hers tended to revolve around her allowance, petty feuds with other teenagers, and charitable causes that he found frankly distasteful. “I have another meeting in fifteen minutes,” he sighed, “So yes, if you can speak quickly. None of those ums or likes you’re so fond of.”


Fifteen minutes. She could do this in two, if she had to, she suspected. It was one thing to think about calling her father out on being a rapist, but it was another entirely separate and completely awful thing to do it. “Carson said you raped him when he was a kid,” she blurted, all in one breath. Please say he was lying, please have proof, please have some kind of explanation that makes this all better. There wouldn’t be an explanation, but she wanted one so badly there weren’t even words. If her heart were torn out of her chest and on the floor and she were bleeding to death, she would want her heart back less than she would want Carson to just be wrong.

There was silence on the other end of the line. Nell waffled over breaking it, until she couldn’t any longer. “Dad? Are you there?”

Quote:
Luke was very quiet for a moment, mostly because he was trained in risk management and knew not to say anything incriminating. So what if it was true - there was no proof. His word against Carson’s, and Carson’s PTSD diagnosis could very easily be blamed for any… false memories.

“Carson is a very troubled young man,” he said evenly, “and I hope that someday he’ll get the help he so desperately needs.”

It wasn’t a lie.


“But I saw,” started Nell, and then she stopped again, because she was seventeen and stupid and nowhere near on her father’s level. There’d be reasons, justifications, and it would all sound good but there’d be no proof. She had to think this through, had to be smart. “Can you just, tell me you didn’t do it? Or something?”

The big flaw here, the thing she hadn’t thought out, was that she didn’t know what a satisfactory outcome for her would be. Carson was lying or her dad was even worse than she’d thought. A binary choice, a switch in the code: one or the other. “I’m your daughter,” she said. “I’m not a reporter. Can you just, I don’t know, be real for a minute? You said you had fifteen of them.”

Quote:
“Thirteen, now,” replied Luke, glancing at his watch. This was a tiresome conversation, though he was admittedly curious as to how Nell had gotten wind of all this. He’d never known Carson to be at all loose-lipped.

“You need to learn to take everything your brother says with a grain of salt,” he continued, walking quickly. “I know you love Carson. We all do. But his illness affects his memory. He sees his past through a fun-house mirror.”

Lowering his voice, he added, “As for whatever you think you saw, allow me to remind you of the consequences for recording people without their permission.”


“I can’t record things with my eyes, Dad!” Okay, so, a shitty comeback, and she wasn’t even supposed to be coming up with witty retorts. Nell could have punched herself in the face, except Luke would probably laugh.

It all just sounded so reasonable. “Those laws don’t apply to photos taken during the commission of a felony, anyway,” she continued, lowering her voice reflexively. “Which it was, ‘cause Sean’s a year younger than me. And I don’t have a mental illness.”

She wasn’t hearing a no, though. Why wasn’t she hearing a no?

Quote:
“Considering that he has given no indication that he plans to press charges,” Luke hissed into the phone, “I hardly see how that’s relevant.” Had he been sloppy? Yes. Under different circumstances, he would have been pickier about the time and the place, but he’d picked his partner well.

Now, where the hell had he gone wrong with his daughter?

He would chalk it up to Jenn’s influence.

“Carson had problems long before your mother and I adopted him,” he said. “We have done the best we can for him - now please, before you waste my time again, remember that he lies.”


Nell could have said anything there. He doesn’t have to--Sean’s parents would do it--or maybe it’ll be relevant when Mama divorces you--but Nell couldn’t be sure of what Mom would do before she did it.

She blinked quickly, took three quiet breaths, and said, “I’m sorry for wasting your time.” In a normal family, they might have said I love you--goodbye. But her family had never been normal, so…

Nell hung up the phone and threw it, hard as she could, at the wall.