The Seven Pieces of a Feuilleton

Chapter 34

She had stopped speaking to her father.

He had, quite reluctantly, been honest with her when she asked him what he had told Dylan that had left her boyfriend so broken up in their senior year.

"Brenda," Jim had said. She could easily visualize him in his Minnesota office, pulling at his polka-dotted tie in the way he did when a subject made him uncomfortable.

She, too, was uncomfortable: in what her father would tell her, in her ever-expanding waistline.

"That was a lifetime ago, Brenda. Why are you asking about it now?"

"It came up during therapy, Dad. Whatever you said really affected Dylan to the point that he chose Kelly. You know how much it hurt me when he did that."

She regretted ever agreeing to issue that fucking ultimatum, which had been Kelly's idea.

Brenda had been unaware at the time that Kelly and her own ex-best friend, Tiffany Morgan, had once issued a similar ultimatum to Steve.

She would find that out in later years, through Steve Sanders himself, and that Kelly had lost that one.

"I want to put the past fully behind me and move on to a peaceful life with Dylan and our children, but I can't do that until I know what you told him."

"Brenda," her father stuttered, "you have to understand that you were both so young. Your mother and I love you kids immensely, you know that, but we weren't prepared to have children as early as we did. And we had just graduated from college. You and Dylan had already had one pregnancy scare. You were only sixteen and, at seventeen, you moved in with him. I did what I thought was best for you."

"Dad," she had repeated, "what did you tell him?"

"Dylan hasn't told you?"

"He said it doesn't matter, but it does matter, Dad."

"He's a better man than I," said Jim. "If Cindy's father had told me what I told your husband, I would have unquestionably ran to tell her. Come to think of it, Bill did tell me something similar. Not quite to that extent, but -"

"Dad," said Brenda yet again. "Continuing to leave me in the dark about what happened between you two is just gonna stress me out and you know stress isn't good for your grandchildren."

Yes, she was not above playing that card in her determination to hear what had messed up Dylan to the point that he would do everything possible to try to forget her.

Because that's what he had done, Brenda had realized during therapy. Dylan had chased Kelly, invented a bond with Kelly, to push Brenda out of his mind so that he could slowly release her without hurting himself.

It hadn't worked. She'd been more successful in her forced amnesia of him than he had been in his forgetting of her.

But it had fucked with their relationship, fucked with her ability to trust, fucked with her entire personality. She refused to back down from her insistence that Jim reveal all.

With a deep exhalation of breath, her father confessed.

And Brenda's entire world came crashing down.

"My father threatened you with a statutory rape charge if you didn't talk me into going to Paris?" she practically screamed into Dylan's ear.

"Fuck. He told you?" Dylan had asked, reaching for her hand.

Brenda had jerked it back.

"I can't believe you didn't tell me. It's been thirteen fucking years and you never fucking told me."