E I G H T E E N

LOS ANGELES, CA

          As I sit in my father's office, feeling less and less like his daughter with each passing second, I realize how big of a miracle it is that I'm even there in the first place.

          Having that awkward and difficult conversation with Michelle was one thing, as she knew there's something boiling between me and Adam, even if she was horrendously mistaken about what it was at first. With my father, it was my entire sense of self that was at stake; I was a little girl all over again, building her personality and learning her worth by basing it on external validation.

          I'm nothing if I'm unable to make my father proud of me. I'm nothing if I can't make him love me. The second he finds out the truth about me, the seconds he uncovers every dirty little secret I've spent six years of my life hiding away from him, I fear all that supposed unconditional love will vanish. It's not something one gets over or is able to fully ignore; I sure as hell have been fighting for years to come to terms with what happened, and sometimes have trouble fully processing I'm the same girl those things were done to.

          Even if I want to distance myself from Rebecca Kane, she'll always be a part of me, whether I want to or not. Adam will always be around with varying intensity and danger level, and it's something I must learn how to live with. I need to live around that fact.

          Sadie moves from standing by the door to standing next to me, appearing to be much taller than she actually is thanks to a combination of her Miu Miu heels (which I'm forever jealous of) and to the way she conducts herself. I've rarely ever seen her hunched forward in relaxed settings, let alone in professional ones, and, though it's usually frightening to witness, this is one of the times I need her to be the calm and collected one while I internally freak out. I feel minuscule there, especially with the steady hand she keeps on my shoulder, and I know I'll have to speak up at some point, but my throat has dried up. Nothing comes out of my mouth.

          To her credit, Sadie is surprisingly delicate and wise with the way she approaches the subject. She doesn't want to paint a portrait of me where I'm utterly defenseless, just a small child with nowhere else or no one else to turn to, but she knows I'm the victim in this situation.

          She dances around the main point, often glancing down at me to check whether I've finally grown a pair and have decided to be honest with my father, but that's the one thing I don't know how to be around him when being honest will very likely ruin whatever is left of our relationship. It's painful to even think about how my mind constantly circles back to that point, choosing to focus on a single outcome without any concrete evidence that will happen, but it's no surprise to have my brain jump the gun and skip several steps in the meantime. 

          The therapeutic process I subjected myself to has made me considerably more self-aware than most people, modesty aside, and I have the presence of mind necessary to identify what it is that I'm doing—self-sabotaging, allowing my anxiety to overpower my rational thoughts, returning my father to a pedestal I'd knocked him down from years ago.

          If he loves me, he'll believe me. If he loves me, he'll understand. Why am I working so hard to convince myself this isn't the man I know?

          Believing me involves not believing a single thing that Adam has said about me while I've been gone. I don't want to consider the possibility of him and my father having grown close since then, particularly when taking into consideration that he had been clawing his way into Michelle's brain and succeeded, and I know my father would protect Michelle unconditionally—simply because she'd let him, no questions asked. I'm always a lot more skeptical, a lot less eager to accept a hand outstretched towards me without baring my teeth to bite it.

          Men like me when I'm weak and miserable because it makes me submissive and easy. Men like me when I'm strong because it gives them an excuse to try and break me. In a world ruled by men, I can never win.

          Boys will be boys, after all. I've had to be a woman ever since I grew breasts.

          Then, both of them go quiet, after a while of back and forth, and my father turns to me. My brain had disconnected from the conversation a while ago, choosing to obsess over whether I deserve forgiveness for something that wasn't my fault or not, and that's the kind of obsession that doesn't quite go away with time or leave much room for other types of thoughts. It's just there, eating you alive from the inside out, and it slowly but surely starts making you question your reality and how you experience it.

          Questioning the intrinsic quality of your character isn't as straightforward and cut and dry as taking an online quiz or letting the term's board campaign determine your moral alignment for you. It's something that forces you to identify and, sometimes, challenge an entire system of beliefs that has been the framework of your entire life for as long as you've been acknowledging your existence in this world as a person that is influenced by and influences it. They're called core beliefs for a reason and, if you can't trust them, if you can't rely on them to position yourself facing pre-built concepts of what is good and what isn't, then what are you supposed to do? What are you supposed to do when something traumatic happens and forces you to change everything you once believed to be real?

          "Your father wants to hear it from you," Sadie explains. There's a softer twinge to her voice now, like the one she uses when she's speaking to children, and there's something incredibly insulting about it even if it's not deliberate. It's frustrating, to say the least, how I have to either be infantilized for my trauma to be more palatable and adequate for discussion or have entire years of my life erased like nothing ever mattered. It's frustrating to never be enough at the exact stage of my life I am. "Maybe it's easier for me to explain and keep a certain distance, but I also believe it will be more helpful going forward if you use your own words and explain everything at your pace."

          "If it helps you process things better, yeah," my father agrees, comically missing the point.

          "I've processed things just fine on my own, thank you," I dryly retort, failing to ignore the murderous glare Sadie shoots his way. If this was a normal conversation, I'd bring it up, defend him like my life depends on the little version of him that lives in my mind remaining untarnished, but I can't. Like Michelle, he has no tact. "I know exactly what happened, and I don't need to rethink it. Going through it once was hard, dealing with it in therapy and every single day of my life has been even worse. Please don't underestimate me."

          His lips press together into a thin line. "I'm sorry. I really am just trying to understand what's going on."

          I want him to understand—have been silently begging the universe for him to magically read my mind and figure it out without me having to explain a thing for years at this point, in fact—but, while I know no SVU comment will come out of his mouth, the overwhelming guilt for having abandoned him over what Adam did and the threats his team of lawyers (empty threats, I know now) threw my way is overpowering my desire to be honest.

          Before I abandoned him, however, even years before that, he abandoned me. That thought is what keeps me grounded and gives me the strength to beat the illusion of the perfect daughter I've fought my whole life to be.

          "I've spent a long time at war with what happened and there was a time right after it that I almost let myself be convinced I was wrong," I begin, wringing my hands around each other. Sadie's thumb grazes my shoulder. "I know it's not my fault, but being back here has triggered all these . . . negative, harmful emotions and brought back memories I've tried so hard to keep buried. I don't regret leaving, even though I was coerced into doing it, but I need you to understand it was what I had to do to survive. Even if I hadn't been threatened to keep things under wraps, no NDA, I still would've weaseled out of this place. I couldn't stay here and deal with the person who ruined my life, day after day."

          "Your mother?"

          "Adam." He shifts in his seat like he, too, has noticed there's something not quite right between me and Adam, something that goes far deeper than just a mutual dislike or simple annoyance, but I appreciate that he's not immediately jumping into conclusions about why that is. Maybe I'm still shaken up by Michelle's initial accusation. Maybe I want to cling to the bare minimum of decency that's shown to me in Los Angeles after having been deprived of it for so long. "There's something that man did to me and that no one knew about until the moment I decided to press charges and was kindly shown a way out of the state because they terrified me enough. Those people got into my head, twisted everything until they made me start doubting myself, and I was so convinced I'd ruin whatever was left of my life if I kept pursuing those charges. It was easier to leave. It wasn't easy to leave you."

          "Honey." His hand reaches out towards me and, unlike with Michelle, the urge to move away, to run away from this place isn't as instinctive. It's different with him, when he's always been my safe place, my go-to person, and it's hard to remember just how much everything has changed and how I can't depend on him for every little thing anymore. "Whatever happened that made you leave, I know it was not your fault. I could never hate you for doing what was best for you."

          "But you understand why I can't stay." He reluctantly nods, and my heart shatters for this man for the millionth time. He'll never have to stop letting me go. "It's not just because of what Adam did; it's everything else that's associated with him and that event. It's all the places that remind me of it all. It's Michelle. It's my mother. I'd bring you along with me back to New York, but you have your whole life here, and these are two separate sides of me that can't coexist if I want to move on from what happened. It's processed, whatever, but I'll never be able to make peace with it. That was my whole life—gone, just like that. I needed to move on and start anew."

          "Bec—"

          "Harley," I correct, in a whisper. A tremor runs through me when he looks away, looking so shattered I can't imagine we look any different.

         "Harley, then. That's the name I chose for you when you were born." Indeed it is. "If you want to tell me what . . . what Adam did to you, if you want me to help, you know I'm here for you. There's nothing I won't do to protect my girls."

          There are, realistically, many things that could have been done to protect me back in the day, but I can't give into the urge of dwelling into what I can't change. This was years ago and there's no use in looking back and wishing it had developed differently, so it does me no good to even consider hypothetical scenarios regarding my past. It is what it is; it sucked, but it happened, and it's there. It's a part of my life. I can try to wipe it away from my memory and, in the greater scheme of things, no one really cares about it besides me and Adam for two opposite reasons, but there's still a battle for control at the epicenter. Controlling the narrative and being believed means winning the war.

          So, I tell my father what happened.

          Sirens blare in my head as I speak, warning me about every single potential danger, but I still keep going. I don't get into much detail as I did yesterday with Michelle, as there are aspects of it he doesn't need to know (and I want to protect my dignity at least the slightest bit; it's different when you explain it to a woman, which is why I chose a female therapist back in the day), but I also find myself watching his reactions a lot more closely.

          With Michelle, I allowed myself to be mechanical, robotic when speaking, finding it's easier to talk about it when I'm not actively thinking about it, but opening up to my father about the biggest trauma of my life has a way of getting me emotionally involved even when I don't want to.

          I'm exhausted by the time I finish the explanation, and don't feel any lighter. Finally letting it all out into the world means I'll have to deal with the consequences of something I never thought I'd do, not even after the conversation with Michelle, and the evil voice in my head resents me for letting her talk me into this. I want to believe I'm stronger than that, strong enough to not let myself be influenced into doing all these emotionally dangerous and damaging things just because someone I haven't been close to in over half a decade doesn't want to get sued for breaching confidential information.

          I am stronger than that. I know I am. However, I'm also my father's daughter at heart, and I soften when he's involved. I want to have a relationship with him, even if it will never go back to being how it used to be when we were all innocent and my worldview wasn't tainted by cruel men.

          Sometimes they're strangers. Sometimes they're people you've known your whole life. That's the worst part, I think; you never know who you can trust, and life teaches you to not trust anyone.

          "You didn't sign anything, right?" my father questions, voice clogged, and I nod, stuffing my face with the delicious cookies I've been ignoring this whole time. I'm famished, desperately craving something sweet, and I don't even want to think about having to compensate for what I'm eating right now. It's something I need. "So there's no legal weight behind their threats. It was coercion."

          "She was terrified," Sadie reminds him. She's been quiet for so long I only remembered she's in the room thanks to the hand steadying me. "They weaponized all her words, used them against her, and made her believe she'd be sued for defamation if she chose to move forward with the process. It's what people like Adam do; they threaten, they manipulate, they gaslight. How long will they be allowed to get away with it? How long will they be allowed to take advantage of others and tell them they're the ones who need to leave? Why are people like that allowed to be around your own daughters?"

          He raises his chin, a sign of both defense and defiance. "I didn't know. Had I known, I never would've—"

          "—like you allowed your daughters to be within the same vicinity as your narcissist ex-wife for over a decade?"

          "Sadie," I warn. She backs off for now, focused on the immediate task at hand. "Dad, I'm sorry, but we need you to sign that NDA. I don't think you're about to run your mouth, or anything, but . . . it's a career thing. I can't risk anything about this getting out without my knowledge or permission." His eyes dart towards Sadie the second I mention my career, a harsh reminder he isn't a fan of my career of choice and is, most likely, blaming Sadie for every rash decision I've been making. I still think the NDAs are excessive, even if the fear of having my personal life and trauma splashed on the front page of some gossip website is hauntingly real. "Michelle was hit with one, too."

          He sighs, but reaches out for his favorite pen, navy blue with golden accents, as Sadie opens the manila folder she brought along with her. It freaks me out how overly prepared she is for this, how quick she has jumped to my defense, and it's only then that I realize I've never had someone be there for me like she has.

          "And when can we get started on ruining this clown's life right back?"

⊹˚. ♡

sometimes these conversations end up being what is known as "anticlimactic", but they don't NEED to be earth shattering and quotable. they don't have to be inspiring. sometimes, difficult conversations are just difficult conversations, and this isn't a therapy session. harley has gone through that already, and that has never been what she was looking for out of this particular conversation with her father. she wants a father, not a lawyer or a therapist, and this isn't a court drama book. we're nearing the end of the book anyway, and it's obvious by now we won't be getting into that. 

whatever harley chooses to do won't be an easy decision, and i've said this so many times across so many books—it doesn't have to build character. shitty stuff happens to everyone, and it's not meant to make you stronger. sometimes, shitty things are just shitty, and you have to deal with them. there are many, many instances of SA survivors never fully getting the justice they deserve (see: chanel miller) thanks to faults in the justice system and society's way of thinking, and it's not something that just happens in dystopias, unfortunately. it's real, it happens more often that anyone would like, and no one is happy about it.

tl;dr: be kind. believe victims.