“You were a child.” Gabriel gained his feet and towered over her. He heaved her up to stand, and she hung limply in his grasp. She watched him, defeated, broken. “You were a child, damn him. He used you!”

The shame burst out of her, a bitter torrent. “I let him use me! I gave him everything, and I didn’t have the sense to try and walk away. After I left linguistics, he convinced me to let him use my ideas. We’d have weekly sessions where I’d tell him about my concepts and he’d tear them apart. Then he’d refine them and publish them under his name. I didn’t fight him because he said he needed me. I needed him to need me.”

“He stole from you.”

“I let him. I let him take everything.” She couldn’t look at him as she spoke. “A few years after the plane crash, Sebastian hitchhiked from New York to California to see me. We hadn’t talked for a while.” Again, humiliation suffused her skin, and she dropped her head down lower. “He knocked on the door to Nathan’s house. Nathan told me to send him away. That Sebastian would only remind me of my parents. He told me that Sebastian would try to take me away, to exploit me for my parents’ money. Seventeen years of friendship versus two years of subjugation. I told Sebastian to go away. That he and his mother had ridden on my coattails. I told him to never contact me again.”

“Erin—”

“I hadn’t known I could be cruel. Not until Nathan.” Her shoulders quivered, like her voice, but her eyes remained tearless. She wanted the tears to come, but they remained hidden, unwilling to give her relief.

Gabriel sat in the chair and cradled her taut form. The grief, the self-loathing, tore at him, but he understood the need to purge the wound that festered. Tenderly, he skimmed his hands over her. “You’re not cruel. You’re not a coward. You’re a strong, determined, brilliant woman who saved herself.”

When she tried to shake loose, he tightened his hold. “Finish it, Erin.”

She didn’t speak for several moments. “After Sebastian, there was no one else. Just the two of us. Nathan said I could finish my degree. I started grad school, but he didn’t like it if I talked to the other graduate students. To my professors. He always knew. But since I’d always been peculiar, they thought nothing of it. I finished my dissertation, but Nathan wouldn’t allow me to teach. I took care of his house and played hostess to his friends. Gave him theories to test and prove right.”

“He never tried to—” Gabriel searched her face for an answer to the question he couldn’t ask. Had no right to ask.