An hour later, sobbing and barely coherent, she’d cornered Bert in his study, where he’d gone to fetch one of his Cuban cigars. She still remembered his disbelief as he’d run his fingers through his steel gray crew cut and studied her. She stood before him in the baggy gray sweat suit she’d climbed into when she got out of the tub, and she had never felt more vulnerable.

“You want me to believe a boy like Craig Jenkins was so hard up for a woman that he had to rape you?”

“It’s true,” she whispered, barely able to squeeze the words through her constricted throat.

Cigar smoke had coiled like a soiled ribbon around his head. He drew his shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows together. “This is another one of your pathetic attempts to get my sympathy, isn’t it? Do you really believe I’m going to ruin that boy’s football career just because you want some attention.”

“It’s not like that! He raped me!”

Bert had made a sound of disgust and stuck his head out the door to send someone after Craig, who had arrived minutes later accompanied by Reed. Phoebe had begged her father to send Reed away, but he hadn’t done it, and her cousin stood at the side of the room sipping from a bottle of beer and listening as she haltingly repeated her story.

Craig had hotly denied Phoebe’s accusations, speaking so convincingly that she would have believed him herself if she hadn’t known differently. Even without looking at her father, she realized that she had lost, and when he ordered her not ever to repeat the story again, some part of her had died.

She’d run away the next day, trying to flee from what had become her shame. Her college checking account contained enough money for her to get to Paris, the place where she’d met Arturo Flores, and her life had been changed forever.

Her father’s flunkies had visited her several times during her years with Arturo to deliver Bert’s threats and order her home. She had been disinherited when the first of the nude portraits had gone on display.

She rested her head against the back of the couch and drew Pooh closer. Bert had finally bent her to his will. If she didn’t do as he had dictated, she wouldn’t receive the one hundred thousand dollars, money that would let her open a small art gallery of her own.

You’re my only failure, Phoebe. My only goddamn failure.

Right then, she set her jaw in a stubborn line. Her father, his one hundred thousand dollars, and the Chicago Stars could go to hell. Just because Bert had set up the game didn’t mean she had to play. She’d find another way to raise the money to open her gallery. She decided to take Viktor up on his offer to spend some time at his vacation cottage near Montauk. There, next to the ocean, she would finally put the ghosts of her past to rest.