MICHAEL

“... I’m not fooled by your apparent surrender.…”

“You threatened to carry me out over your shoulder….”

I ignore the comment. “I think about some of the things you’ve seen and experienced; the very worst of human nature. And you’ve come through it, for the most part unscathed. But I know it’s marked you. You have nightmares sometimes, and I see your reactions when you are asked questions about your past. And I know you scare, but you don’t let being scared stop you. You’ve got a core of solid rock….”

She is utterly silent, watching me, wide-eyed….

“…. But then, I compare you to the Charlotte I saw just now, making paper birds. And the Charlotte I first met, that day when James had bought you only the previous day. And you had that look, the same one you’ve got now. James had taken your virginity the day before. You behaved like a young girl who had just surrendered her virginity…. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know exactly how it went with the two of you, but he was satisfied that you were the genuine article, that he was your first man; that you behaved like a girl who’d not been naked with a man before, especially an older man…”

“Don’t you believe me?” she whispers. “After all this time, you think I was lying?”

“No, I don’t think that. Because I met you the very next day, and you were…. so sweet.…” I shake my head. “I’m having trouble matching up Charlotte-the-Almost-a-Virgin that I first met with the Charlotte-Been-Through-Hell that I only learned of much later. I can’t connect the two. You must have seen assault and rape of all kinds when you were trapped in Blessingmoors, and yet, so far as I can see, when James.... took you…. you behaved like an innocent.”

She shrugs, then stares at the ground. “Assault, beating… yes, I saw plenty of that. I was on the receiving end of some of it. Rape? No, actually, I didn’t. As the kids began to grow up, they took them away ….” She pauses, apparently thinking. “I’d never thought about it until you just put it that way….copy right hot novel pub