I’ve been looking out over the workers who have finished with the chairs and arch. Now I turn toward Damien to find him looking at me, his expression so full of joy that I feel almost weightless.
“Hard to believe that—” he begins, only to be interrupted by the chime of his phone. “Sorry,” he says, passing Bradley to me. “I’ll turn it off closer to the wedding, but until I hear back about this meeting, I—”
“I get it,” I assure him. Damien seeks out new talent the way my best friend Jamie used to stalk cute guys. I don’t know who he’s courting specifically, but I do know that his potential conquest is a genius in the area of applied physics and mechanical engineering.
I bounce Bradley, turning to show him the ocean and the tennis court and whisper that he’s going to take a short nap before the craziness of the ceremony and reception.
That’s when I hear Damien’s sharp curse.
I turn, wondering what could possibly have upset him.
“Damien?” He looks up, and the haunted look in his eye scares me so much I actually take a step backward. “Damien,” I repeat. “What—”
“I got them, too,” Evelyn says, and I glance over Damien’s shoulder to see her standing in the doorway, our part-time nanny, Bree, standing right behind her. “Bree, can you take Bradley?” Evelyn continues.
“Of course.” Bree shoots me a look of confused concern, then comes to get Bradley from me. “Lara and Anne are already in the playroom.”
I nod, grateful the kids are downstairs. I don’t understand what’s going on, but I am absolutely certain I don’t want the children around when I find out.
As Bree heads out with our son, I look between Evelyn and my husband, expecting Damien to speak first.
He doesn’t, though, and it’s Evelyn who meets my eyes. “It’s the Richter photos,” she says, her flatly professional voice belying the horror of those vile images that stand as witness to the abuse Damien suffered. “Apparently there are more, and someone’s threatening to release them.”
2
My stomach twists with both disgust and confusion, and I reach out to take Damien’s hand, only to find his cold and clammy. “I don’t understand,” I say. “Damien released the Richter photos to the press himself. And they were—”
I cut myself off, then swallow. “I mean, how much worse could a few more be? This is a storm we already weathered, right? Damien won. He had the press and the public’s sympathy and they haven’t mentioned the abuse or the photos in ages.”
Damien burst onto the sports scene as a tennis prodigy when he was nine years old, and he won the Junior Grand Slam at fifteen. After that, his career only got better. From the outside, it looked like he had it made, but what the world didn’t know was that his former tennis coach, Merle Richter, had abused Damien for years, even going so far as to force Damien to do horrible things with Sofia, Richter’s daughter, who was even younger than Damien. To make it worse, he’d photographed those vile moments, keeping the pictures and videos as his own sick souvenirs.
After Richter’s death, the pictures disappeared, only to resurface again years later, most recently as a threat—either I walked away from Damien, or the pictures would be made public. It almost worked, too, until Damien had turned the tables and faced the press, standing strong against the horror of his past so that we could move forward together into our future.
The photos were vile. Horrible evidence of the torture through which Richter had put two innocent children, one his own daughter and the other a star athlete that Richter had been hired to mold. And if that weren’t bad enough, Damien confided to me that his own father had known perfectly well what was going on, and he’d never stepped in. Not and risk stifling the cashflow coming in from Damien’s wins and endorsements.
I try to lick my lips, but my mouth is too dry. I’ve been parched by my fear. No one has answered my question, and I still don’t know what these new images show. All I know is that they are bad enough to have knocked the wind out of my husband, and that tells me plenty.
“Damien,” I whisper, but he simply shakes his head, his hand clutching so tightly to mine that I fear he’ll crush bones. His face is a mask of pain and regret. And of failure, too, as if all the progress we’ve made in the years since he went public with those pictures has been completely erased.
“Who sent them?” I ask stupidly, because of course it’s going to be anonymous. “And what are they?”
Evelyn starts to speak, but Damien holds up his free hand. “You know what? It doesn’t matter.” He releases some of the pressure on my hand, his attention on Evelyn. “This is nothing. Not even a blip on the radar. Not today, anyway. This is your day, and you need to enjoy it. Don’t you have a whole hair and makeup thing to do? Isn’t Nikki helping you get dressed?”
He’s right about all of that. Carina, who does hair and make-up for Jamie’s publicity photos, is due here any minute. And Evelyn’s dress is hanging in the guest bedroom, just waiting for me to help her put it on.
“It’s okay,” Damien adds to me, and even though I can see the tension in his body and hear it in his voice, I don’t argue. “Frank’s probably here by now. I should go check on him.”
“Damien…” I draw in a breath as he pulls his hand free of mine.
“I’m fine,” he says, in the cool and controlled corporate voice that I’ve heard him use whenever a meeting isn’t going exactly as he’d planned. “This is an inconvenience. An irritation. But it’s not an immediate problem, and I won’t let it interfere with your day,” he adds fiercely, his gaze hard on Evelyn.
She starts to respond, but he silences her by raising a single finger. “I mean it. Enjoy your girl time. And you,” he adds to me, “stay here and don’t worry about me.” He cuts off my protest with a kiss, then pulls Evelyn into a hug. I hear him whisper, “Don’t let this mar your day,” and then he’s gone, leaving me and Evelyn staring at each other in horror and bewilderment.
I draw in a breath, then shake my head. I want so badly to ask, but Damien’s right. This is Evelyn’s day, and I won’t let some random asshole fuck with it. “Let’s get down to the guest room and get you in your dress. You’ll want to be in it before Carina gets here so you don’t smear.”
She waves my words away. “I’m not wearing white, and I’m not wearing fancy. It may be the dress I’m getting married in, but it’s not my wedding dress. We have time to talk, Texas, and it won’t ruin my wedding day if you need to do that.” She moves to sit on the small chaise that highlights one wall of our bedroom, immediately beneath the painting Damien bought a few years ago. An erotic image that captured my attention that first night at Evelyn’s house.
I know Evelyn well enough to know that she means what she says about taking time to talk; she wouldn’t have offered otherwise. And the truth is, I’m grateful for the offer. Damien might have made a show of brushing the whole thing off, but I know better. Evelyn, I’m sure, does, too.
“Show me the pictures,” I finally say, taking a seat beside her. I don’t want to see them—if they were enough to upset Damien, I know they must be worse than the photos he released himself right before we got engaged. But at the same time, I have to know.