Tell me about it, he thought, but said, “It’s okay. Don’t give it another thought.”

“That’s just it—I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve spent too many years not thinking about those pictures, or at least trying my damnedest not to. I sealed up that little girl and the reality of what happened to her behind an inner wall, but try as I might I couldn’t forget. Knowing those pictures existed, knowing that I was still being passed from one pervert’s grubby hands to another’s sickened me. I was damned if I was going to let that define me, but it sure as hell has haunted me. It’s been a dissonant, ominous background music to my everyday life. But after all these years, last night was the first time I was able to talk about it. And I know it made you uncomfortable.”

“Well… yeah.”

Sexual abuse of a child… hearing about it from the victim… uncomfortable barely touched how something so awful and so wrenchingly intimate made him feel.

“But you’ve got to understand, Jack, that I’ve never been able to share this with another soul. I’ve never had close friends because I never felt I could be honest with them. To tell the truth, I couldn’t bear to hear them talk about their families, especially about the fathers who were so special to them. Every time I heard somebody talk lovingly about their ‘daddy,’ I wanted to scream. Even now, when I think of how this flesh is half his, I want to rip it off my bones. I kept asking myself, why couldn’t I have had a father like theirs, one who cherished me, who would have willingly died protecting me? But you’ve seen the pictures, Jack—”, “Some of them,” he said quickly. “Just a few.”

“Even one was enough. It meant you knew. And everything I’ve been holding back broke free. As I said, I’m sorry.”

“And as I said, it’s okay. I hope it helped.”

“It did. For a while. For a few moments last night as the negatives were going through the shredder, and later as the collection was dropping into the fire, I felt free. It was a… wonderful sensation. But Thomas’s Parthain shot about the Internet brought me back to reality. I see now I’ll never be free.”

“Never is a long time,” Jack said, cringing at his triteness, but not knowing what else to say. He wasn’t a therapist, and he didn’t know how to stop Alicia from going where she was headed.