Page 36 of I Will Ruin You

“Those goddamn trucks,” Bonnie said, then got up from the table and left the room.

I found her upstairs later, sitting on the edge of our bed, dabbing her eye with a tissue. I sat down next to her. Neither of us spoke for a minute. I finally went first.

“That wasn’t fair,” I said. “She doesn’t understand.”

“Maybe she does,” Bonnie said. “All too well.” A pause, and then, “I’m sorry.”

I reached down and took her hand. “Don’t apologize. This is what I do. I jump into things I shouldn’t, make things more tense around here.”

Another period of silence. This time, Bonnie broke it. “Her teacher called me today.”

I waited.

“We might have sent her back too soon. She described Rachel as sullen.”

“Sullen. Well, this household underwent a traumatic incident this week. Maybe we’re getting off lightly with sullen.”

“She said it’s not new. Rachel is distracted lately, unfocused. Not finishing her exercises. She said she seems... kind of flat.” Bonnie pressed her lips together, as though debating whether to say what she was really thinking. “I think it’s rubbing off from us.”

I considered her words. “It’s been a little tense lately.” I drew in a breath. “I take the blame for that.”

“That’s not what I’m say—”

I raised a hand. “No, I’ve tried to be the good guy once too often. Going the extra mile with students and getting bitten in the ass for it. Thinking I can solve everyone’s problems. You know how they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’ve been on that road for a while now, and I need to find an exit ramp.”

“Being kind isn’t a failing.”

“It is when it comes at the expense of those closest to you.”

Bonnie said, “We’re all products of our upbringing.”

A reference, I knew, to my parents, who sought perfection in their kids while rarely achieving it themselves. My elder by eight years sister, Alicia, who left home when I was ten, fled because she’d grown weary of trying, without success, to please them. Wise enough to know it was hopeless, she fled to Europe, met a man, and never came back. She lived in Brussels. The burden to be flawless fell to me when she left, and I wasn’t up to it.

All of which made me think we had to be better for Rachel. And that meant I couldn’t draw this household into another crisis.

I was going to have to find a way to deal with my blackmailer on my own.

I suggested Bonnie run herself a hot bath and see if a long soak would relieve some of the day’s tensions. She didn’t need much persuading.

“If I slide under, don’t rescue me,” she said.

That gave me time to do what I needed to do. Before darkness fell, I wanted to take some pictures of the boat. I would need them for any online ad I would post.

I had decided, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I needed to pull that ten thousand dollars together. Did that mean I was going to pay my blackmailer? It meant that I knew I might have to. But it did not mean that I was prepared for him to get away with it. I was trying to come up with a plan. Maybe I was going to have to find out who might really have abused him. Persuade him he had the wrong guy, but if he’d let me, help him determine the identity of the true culprit.

Fuck, I just didn’t know.

There was still enough light to get a few decent snaps. The boat wasn’t some fancy cabin cruiser or speedboat, but it still ran me close to seventeen thousand when I bought it more than ten years earlier. An eighteen-footer with a fifty-horsepower Mercury outboard motor strapped to the transom. A fishing boat, primarily, but it was fun to take Bonnie and Rachel cruising around Candlewood Lake, up north of Danbury, when we weren’t sitting still trying to hook into some smallmouth bass.

The boat and the trailer it sat on were usually left at a marina on the lake, but I had brought it back home a few weeks ago to give it its annual going-over. Clean it out, change the oil in the Merc, that kind of thing.

I got out my phone and was preparing to take several shots when someone said, “Hey, Richard.”

Our neighbor Jack. He’d stepped out front, as he often did just before the sun dropped beyond the horizon, for a smoke. His wife, Jill, didn’t like him to smoke in the house. She didn’t like him smoking, period, but she’d given up years ago trying to get him to quit.

“Hey, Jack,” I said.

“How you doing?”