Never Tell. Alafair Burke

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       CHAPTER ONE

      Second Acts: Confessions of a Former Victim and Current Survivor

      “3:14 IN THE MORNING”

      It has been twenty years, but at three-fourteen this morning I screamed in my sleep. I probably would not have known I had screamed were it not for the nudge from my husband—my patient, sleep-starved husband, who suspects but can never really know the reasons for his wife’s night terrors, because his wife has never truly explained them.

      I could see the uncertainty coloring his face this morning as he sipped his coffee, already going cold, while I poured a fresh cup for myself at the counter, carrying the carafe to the breakfast table to top off his cup. Not uncertainty about my reasons for screaming—that was ever-present—but uncertainty about whether even to raise the subject. Should I ask her? Are some subjects better left in the subconscious?

      I loved him so much in that moment—for loving me enough to care, for caring enough about me to let the unspoken remain so. And so, even though I would have preferred we peruse the newspaper together, sharing headlines with each other before he had to dash to work, I told him.

      I screamed at three-fourteen in my sleep this morning because twenty years ago—more than half my lifetime ago—a man walked into my bedroom and changed my childhood forever. I did not hear him open the door but somehow I knew he was there. Maybe it was the sliver of light that penetrated the room from the hallway along with his footsteps. Or maybe it was simply because I had known for months that this moment—at some point, on some night—would eventually come to pass. When I opened my eyes, he was there, closing the door behind him. Unwelcome, but not unanticipated.

      I remember expecting him to say something, to offer some flimsy excuse for entering my room, or maybe even to try floating some corny, flirtatious line, pretending like we were some kind of illicit couple. But he didn’t say anything. He took the four steps from the door to the foot of my bed in silence. I apparently wasn’t worth the expenditure of words.

      I remember wanting to scream. Wanting to beat the shit out of him until he was dead. But it was as if some other part of my brain had already made the decision for me—no, at the time, it felt more like the decision had been made for us: the me in that room and the real me watching from afar. Neither of us would be screaming. We would not be defending ourselves. We would simply watch the bedside clock and wait for this night to be over.

      I remember looking at the readout of the display, thinking about the squareness of those red numbers, how each digit could be formed by illuminating various combinations of seven straight lines forming two stacked squares. And the numbers on the readout at that one moment read 3:14—three-fourteen in the morning.

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