She took a sip of tea, and Aldo did the same. It was soft and floral. A gentleness removed from the ugliness of their conversation. “No. But he did give me hope. Weeks would go by, and things would be fine. He’d be working. We’d have a little money. He’d laugh at my jokes. Then I’d ask him to pick up onions on the way home from work, or I wouldn’t wash his work shirt fast enough. Or he wouldn’t even pretend to come up with an excuse that involved me.”

Aldo suddenly got what true friendship was. As a man who was half in love with the woman bravely telling her story, hearing the details of her abuse was a kind of torture. But for Gloria, it was a cleansing. A healing. And that was more important than his own temper, his own discomfort. “Did he ever hurt you in other ways?”

“You mean rape,” she said flatly.

He nodded.

“Once,” she said quietly. “Though at the time I didn’t recognize it as rape. In recent years, I was more of a live-in housekeeper and cook.”

Aldo forced himself to take another drink to soothe the ache in his throat. He put the tea down and took Gloria’s hand. Squeezed.

“I stayed in hope and fear, in repeating cycles of both. I stayed because it was easier sometimes. Other times because I physically couldn’t leave. And I have to live with that. I have to live with the fact that I wasn’t strong enough to leave him the first time. I’m responsible for my choice to stay.”

“It’s not cut and dried like that, Gloria,” he reminded her. “Brain scans show similarities between victims of abuse and soldiers on the battlefield.”

She shifted to face him on the couch. “Do you wonder if that’s part of our attraction? That we’re both survivors?”

Aldo let go of her hand and squeezed her knee.

“I think our attraction is…complex,” he ventured.

She looked at him, held his gaze. “So, then maybe you get why Mrs. Diller coming at me tonight, airing all of that ugliness, all of my weaknesses in front of everyone I was trying so hard to impress, rocked me.”

He stroked her knee. “You don’t seem rocked.”

“There’s a lot going on beneath the surface,” she admitted.

Aldo shifted and pulled her feet into his lap. He unlaced her shoes, tugged them off. When his thumb pressed into her arch, she let out a long sigh.

“I do get it. I was out there today doing my best to prove that I’m not a victim, to cover up my weaknesses.”

Her fingers touched his shoulder, traced a pattern there as if branding him. “I’m tired of being a victim. That can’t be all anyone sees when they look at me.” Exhaustion colored her words.