In the Woods

He shook his head. "He always said if she told he'd kill her. I was the first person she ever trusted enough to tell." There was something like wonder in his voice, wonder and pride, and under the tears and snot and redness his face lit up with a faint, awed radiance. He looked, for a second, like some young knight setting off in search of the Holy Grail.

"And when did she tell you?" Sam asked.

"Sort of in pieces. Like you said, it was hard for her. She didn't say anything till like May…" Damien flushed an even deeper red. "When we stayed in that B amp;B. We were, um, we were kissing? And I tried to touch her…her chest. Rosalind got sort of mad and pushed me away and said she wasn't like that, and I was I guess kind of surprised-I hadn't expected it to be that big of a deal, you know? We'd been going out for like a month-I mean, I know that didn't give me any right to…but…Anyway I was just startled, but Rosalind got all worried that I was mad at her. So she…she told me what her dad had been doing to her. To explain why she'd got so freaked out."

"And what did you say?" Cassie asked.

"I said she should move out! I wanted us to get a flat together, we could've got the money-I had this dig coming up and Rosalind could've got modeling jobs, this guy from a really big model agency had spotted her and he kept saying she could be a supermodel, only her father wouldn't let her… I didn't want her to ever go back to that house. But Rosalind wouldn't. She said she wouldn't leave Jessica. Can you imagine what kind of person it takes to do that? She went back to that just to protect her sister. I've never known anyone that brave."

If he had been just a couple of years older, the story would have sent him lunging for the phone to ring the police, Childline, anyone. But he was only nineteen; adults were still bossy aliens who didn't understand, to be told nothing because they would charge in and ruin everything. It had probably never even occurred to him to ask for help.

"She even said…" Damien looked away. He was tearing up again. I thought, vindictively, that he was going to be in big trouble in jail if he kept bawling at the drop of a hat. "She told me she might never be able to, to make love with me. Because of the bad associations. She didn't know if she could ever trust anyone that much. So she said, if I wanted to break up with her and find a normal girlfriend-she actually said that, normal-then she'd understand. The only thing she asked for was, if I was going to go, I should go right away, before she started to care too much about me…"

"But you didn't want to do that," Cassie said softly.

"Course not," Damien said simply. "I love her." There was something in his face, some reckless and consuming purity that, believe it or not, I envied.

Sam gave him another tissue. "There's only one thing I don't understand," he said, an easy, soothing rumble. "You wanted to protect Rosalind-that's fair enough, sure, any man would have felt the same. But why get rid of Katy? Why not Jonathan? I'd have been going after him, myself."

"I said that, too," Damien said, and then stopped, his mouth open, as if he had said something incriminating. Cassie and Sam looked blandly back at him and waited.

"Um," he said, after a moment. "See, this one night Rosalind's stomach was hurting and finally I got it out of her-she didn't want to tell me, but he'd…he'd punched her in the stomach. Like four times. Just because Katy told him Rosalind wouldn't let her change the channel to watch some ballet thing on TV-and it wasn't even true,

she would've changed it if Katy had asked… I just-I couldn't stand it any more. I was thinking about it every night, what she was going through, I couldn't sleep-I couldn't just let it keep happening!"

He took a breath, got his voice back under control. Cassie and Sam nodded understandingly.

"I said, um, I said, 'I'm gonna kill him.' Rosalind…she couldn't believe I would really do that for her. And yeah, I guess I was sort of-not joking, but like not totally serious about actually doing it. I'd never even thought about doing anything like that in my whole life. But when I saw how much it meant to her that I would even say it-nobody had ever tried to protect her before… She was almost crying, and she's not the kind of girl who cries, she's a really strong person."

"I'm sure she is," Cassie said. "So why didn't you go after Jonathan Devlin, once you'd got your head round the idea?"