What had I been thinking, renting one place for all of us? Had I been planning on living with both my wife and Moira in the same house? The decision seemed incredibly stupid as I pulled off my boots.

I moved down the hallway as quietly as I could, but Moira’s voice still called out from her open bedroom door.

“Trick?”

“I’m back,” I replied quietly, stopping in her doorway for a reason I couldn’t name.

“I didn’t expect ye back for a while yet,” she said sleepily, raising up to her elbow and resting her head on her palm. “Is everyt’in’ alright?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. Was everything alright? No. However, there was no way to explain the situation without being completely insensitive and cruel.

The next words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

“Can I sleep wit’ ye?”

Her eyebrows rose in response, but she didn’t turn me away as she watched me silently. After a few moments, I dropped my hand from the door. It hadn’t been kind of me to ask, especially not after I’d just rode thousands of miles away from her to visit another woman.

“Yes, ye can,” she replied as I began to turn away.

I looked back at her face and nodded once as I pulled off my shirt. I knew that I probably smelled like crap, but I was suddenly so exhausted that I couldn’t even make myself have a shower. I dropped my jeans and climbed in as she moved over to give me room.

I stared at the ceiling for a long time with Moira wrapped around me, sleeping deeply. She was a good woman—built for the life we’d made in the few months we’d been in Oregon. She got on well with everyone, always looked beautiful even as she grew larger, and was genuinely kind to me even when I didn’t deserve it.

I closed my eyes and begged not to dream of my wife.

As far as I was concerned, Amy was dead.

Chapter 41

Amy

That first year was horrible. It took months and months of speaking with a free counselor at a rape crisis center, hours of yoga, and long talks with Peg before I felt anywhere near back to normal, and even then... well, normal was relative.

I’d realized that I had to get my shit together after Patrick had left that day and I’d found Peg crying quietly in the kitchen. She’d suspected that something more had happened to me in Ireland than she’d been told and my insistence that Patrick wasn’t the one who’d gotten me pregnant was the confirmation she’d dreaded. I hated telling her about it, and I’d barely skimmed the details, but she knew enough by the time I was done that she’d been both relieved that I’d finally opened up and completely livid at what I’d gone through.

I understood both emotions. I was angry, too, but life as I knew it would never be the same—not ever. And I realized then that I was going to have to figure out where I went from there. In a little over six months, I was having a baby. I needed to get my shit together.

So I did. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I worked at it. Therapy was work, and it hurt, but I relished it—because with each passing week, things became a little clearer. My fears became a little easier to live with. My nightmares tapered off from every night, to once a week and then once a month.

I learned to think of Malcolm as a man, a very bad man, but not a monster that was hiding around every corner. I learned how to defend myself. I learned how to stop looking over my shoulder every second.

I learned how to live in the new normal I’d created.

And then, out of the ashes of the person I used to be, my son was born.

I named him Phoenix.

***

“I can’t believe how small he is,” I said dreamily to Peg while I watched Phoenix nurse.

Breastfeeding calmed me in a way that therapy and yoga never had. It made me feel connected to something bigger, something more important than myself. It was odd really, because in the month leading up to Nix’s birth I’d been riddled with anxiety about it.

I knew that breasts weren’t purely sexual from a biological standpoint, but that didn’t mean that breastfeeding wasn’t a trigger for me. It was. I didn’t understand why it bothered me so badly, especially since my shirt hadn’t even come off during the rape. I didn’t have to understand the trigger, however, for it to have meaning, and by the time Nix was born, I’d broken out in never-ending hives again at just the thought of trying to feed him anything other than formula.

I was miserable as I tried to think of any excuse I could not to breastfeed my child, and guilt ridden over giving him formula when I was perfectly capable of nursing him myself. My hang-ups filled me with self-loathing and the hormones coursing through my body made everything so much worse.

Eventually, someone noticed my odd behavior, and before I left the hospital one of the nurses walked into the room with a counselor trailing behind her. She was someone I’d seen around the crisis center, and she’d known me immediately by name. I’m not sure if Peg had called them, or if the nurses had, but I’ll never be able to thank that woman enough for the way she helped us.

The first time I nursed Phoenix, I cried the entire time. Not because it felt wrong, but because breastfeeding him was another one of the things that had almost been taken from me as a result of that night. It was freeing. It felt like I was fighting back.

“He’ll be grown before ye know it,” Peg answered with a small smile, folding towels on the couch next to me.

“Have you heard from Patrick yet?” I asked, though I knew she hadn’t.