Selena Kitt - Grace

“But how?” She felt like crying, but her eyes were dry as a bone. Her mouth too. She could barely get words out, like her tongue was trapped in spider webs.

“Donald Highbrow,” Rob replied. “His father’s firm served as the executor of Susan’s will and trust. He helped us with the birth certificates. And Patty’s marriage license of course.”

She looked at him, incredulous. His revelation had gone off like a nuclear bomb in her head. Leah had been reduced to dust in its wake. There was nothing left of her.

“After Susan died, we talked about telling you.”

Rob’s words were far, far away. Like an echo.

“We talked about getting married, making a little family unit, and I considered it, for your sake and Erica’s. She may not always know how to show it, but Patty really does love you both in her own way. I think my wife was the only person she ever let her guard down with completely.”

“I probably would have married your mother after Susan died if I hadn’t gotten involved in… this.” He nodded toward the cabinet filled with film reels. “But once I found out about the Mary Magdalenes, about what Father Patrick had done to my wife, to your mother, and then to my daughter…”

“What, Rob?” Leah croaked, her anger surfacing like molten lava from a volcano. “What did you do? Nothing! You did nothing! Absolutely fucking nothing!”

Rob caught her wrists as Leah flew at him, avoiding her intended blows, twisting her around while at the same time pulling her close, enfolding her so she couldn’t do anything but struggle against the circle of his arms. She couldn’t even bite him-he had turned her to the wall-although she tried, her teeth bared like a wounded animal at a perceived threat, snapping at the air.

“You have every right to be angry.” Rob’s voice was calm, soothing, a fact that made Leah struggle even more in his arms. “And when I’m done telling you what I have to tell you, I promise, you can do whatever you like. You can hit me. You can walk out that door and never come back. I will write you a blank check. You can go anywhere in the world.”

“Let me go!” she cried, but it was impossible to break the hold he had on her. She was folded up like a pretzel in them.

“When I’m done.”

“There’s more?” She looked over her shoulder at him, incredulous, like a child whose parents had informed them that no, the doctor wasn’t going to hurt you, while they stood there and watched the needle being prepped. It was always for your own good, wasn’t it, Leah thought. They always said it was for your own good.

“The only think I will not allow you to do is throw away five years of my life. I’m so close to putting that bastard away for the rest of his life, I can almost taste it. Father Patrick is going to pay for what he’s done. I’m going to make sure of that, or die trying.”

She relaxed in his arms, feeling his body trembling with emotion, tense with fury.

“Tell me the rest.” She whispered the words, her throat hot and raw. “Just tell me.”

“Father Patrick came to me,” he began. “He came to throw me a bone, like I was some milksop pantywaist groveling at his feet. He mistook me for one of his bootlicking parasites.”

Leah felt Rob’s heart beating hard, his chest against her back.

“That degenerate pervert had the audacity to come into my own home and brand me a cuckold. Here I thought my wife had been faithful to me, aside from her liaisons with Patty. And those, well… those were filling a need I couldn’t. But in the end, I discovered my wife had been unfaithful to me not one time but a hundred. And she’d been in love with another man all along.”

Leah made a soft, wounded sound, feeling his pain. “Father Patrick?”

“She’d told him everything.”

She wiggled in his arms, his grip like a vise. “Owww, Rob, it hurts.”

He let her go instantly and she turned to face him.

“Susan had betrayed all of us. The way her will was structured, Erica was her sole heir, and Father Patrick the trustee. I was her father in name only. All Susan’s money was tied up in the church.”

He pressed his lips together, looking at the wall.

“But you make so much as a photographer!” Leah exclaimed. “You’d already photographed Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe! Couldn’t you have made a living on that? You could have taken me and… my mother…”

The realization that her mother was also Erica’s stopped her words, her train of thought. It was still too much of a shock to her system.

“I didn’t stay for the money.” Rob smiled grimly. “I stayed for the revenge. I wanted to put that sick motherfucker away for the rest of his life. That’s why I stayed.”

“How?”

“He thought he had me dead to rights. After he gleefully informed me that he had ritually fucked my wife for the entire duration of our marriage, he then told me he not only held my purse strings, but he intended to ritually rape my daughter too.”

“Oh my God.”

“He then told me he had already laid the groundwork for this by having her sterilized at the tender age of seven.” Rob rubbed his eyes again with his palms, as if he still couldn’t quite believe the images his mind was showing him. “And if I didn’t agree to this, he would remove Erica from care, cut me off from Susan’s trust fund, and he would show the world this.”

Rob reached into the box, producing a yellowed newspaper clipping, handing it to her. Leah took it with trepidation, unfolding it and staring at the photograph.

“That’s you?”

Leah could barely breathe. She had been young during WWII, but she was old enough to remember the oppressive feeling of the era, as if the entire world were being strangled by one madman, his boot on the throat of the very notion of freedom. She remembered kids at school calling each other “Nazis” and getting in trouble for even saying such things. And she was looking at a picture of her husband in full Nazi uniform, hand raised in Hitler’s salute, standing amidst a full line of similarly attired and at-attention soldiers.

“My parents were German immigrants to this country.” Rob took the article from her trembling hands. “They came over in 1899. They were in their early twenties, newly married. They settled in with the Poles and other German immigrants in Detroit and my father opened a meat market. They thought they couldn’t have children until I came along in 1915. My mother was almost forty. They were both gone, Dad of a heart attack and Mom from complications of pneumonia, by the time I graduated from college.”

“Oh Rob…”

He held up his hand, shaking his head. “I was raised speaking German. When I was drafted-I wanted to enlist, but Susan wouldn’t let me-the U.S. Army found my ability to speak German immensely useful and they sent me over to this new little unit they had called the Office of Strategic Service. Their job was intelligence.”

“You were a…spy?”

“You could say that.” He nodded. “Unfortunately, Father Patrick had a Xerox of this article.”

Leah shook her head. “How?”

“Susan.” He grimaced, putting it back in the box. “She gave it to him before she died and told him if I didn’t agree to raise Erica in the Mary Magdalenes, he should come to me with that photograph. She knew, even if the truth came out, that it would ruin my professional reputation. I’d never work anywhere again.”

“My god.” Leah glanced down at the pictures still spread out on the bed between them. “What kind of monster was she?”

“She’d been raised in it. She didn’t know anything else. She looked at that charlatan like he was some sort of God walking around on earth.”

“So what did you do?”