“How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “I was up late and bored one night, so I started looking stuff up online and kind of got into it.” For a while, he’d thought about buying a telescope, but he didn’t want to take away the magic by making the stars too real; he’d rather just look at them as sparkling pieces of light, clean and untainted.

They lay there in silence for a long time, and the claw was back around his heart when he found the courage to speak. “It happened when I was six years old.”

The shaking threatened to start again.

Nails digging into the palm of the hand he had by his side, he clenched his jaw and breathed short and shallow in an effort to fight it. “My father had this friend.” Noah tried to say the name, but all that came up was choking bile.

He swallowed it down, kept going, aware that he was destroying his future with Kit—what woman would want a man who’d had that done to him? He’d been made less than a man before he even had the chance to grow up.

“My family and the friend’s family used to spend summers together in houses side by side on Cape Cod.” Noah’s chest was so painful now that it was as if his rib cage were crushing his internal organs. “He had a son around my age, so my parents thought it was the perfect arrangement. Emily was only a few weeks old, and she stayed with the nanny, and the other boy and I were sent off to play while the adults socialized.”

Kit curled her fingers around the hand he had beside her head.

He held on tight, knowing he’d soon enough have to let her go forever. “Only it wasn’t always like that. Sometimes my dad wanted to work and my mom wanted to go out for a coffee with the other boy’s mom. So my father’s friend would volunteer to watch us boys.” His breath was a wheeze now.

Oh, don’t coop the kids up with the nanny. She can’t keep up with two growing boys anyway. I’ll make sure they stay busy and out of trouble.

Noah could still hear that voice in his head, so jovial and friendly. He’d trusted that man because his father had trusted him. The man was a dad too. Dads were to be trusted.

“He hurt you and his son,” Kit said softly. “You don’t have to give me details, Noah. I can imagine.”

It was an out, and one he should’ve grabbed on to, but if this was the last night he was to spend with Kit, then why not give her the whole ugly truth? She deserved it after all the crap he’d put her through. “He never touched his own son. Only me.”

Noah forced himself to breathe. “He’d send his son to play in the backyard and then he’d…” The memories threatened to drown Noah in suffocating blackness. Staring up at the brightest star in the sky, he got the rest of it out before he could no longer speak. “He did pretty much everything you can do to a small boy with no defenses.”

He heard a wet sound, realized Kit was crying again.

Curling his arm inward, he held her against him. Again, he’d made her cry and it wasn’t over. Somehow he could still speak, and the words, they came out one by one, each a razor blade slicing his vocal cords. “Afterward, he warned me that if I ever told, he’d cut my parents’ throats in the middle of the night and do the same things to Emily that he’d done to me. He said that even if my parents survived, they’d send me away for bringing the monster to their door.”

“That fucking bastard.” Kit’s hand was a fist on his chest, her voice thick and harsh.

He crushed her closer, the tremors in his body having turned stiff until his muscles and bones felt like those of an eighty-year-old man. “I was only six, and he showed me the knife he’d use to cut my parents’ throats. So I didn’t tell.”

To this day, Noah didn’t know if he’d have been believed if he had told. “That summer, he did it again and again and again.” Noah’s father had brought a lot of work with him, and Noah’s mother had so many friends to see after having been on bed rest for most of her pregnancy; they’d thought nothing of leaving Noah with the man who was thought to be a friend. And the man’s wife had thought him a great guy for offering to babysit so she could accompany Noah’s mom on her visits.

“Even after we returned home,” Noah continued before he couldn’t, “I didn’t tell anyone. He’d convinced me that he was a real monster, that he could get to my family no matter where we lived.” Huddled and shivering under his blankets, he’d barely slept as he waited for evil to crawl through the window. “It was only when my parents started making plans to spend the next summer with the same family that I broke. I had a screaming tantrum, saying I didn’t want to go.”

“What happened?”

“Time out.” He smiled grimly. “My father told me I was too old for such theatrics and left me alone in my room to think it over. What I did instead was go into his study and use the key hidden under his lamp to unlock the drawer in which he kept his gun.”

Kit’s gasp was loud.

“I knew how to use it.” How to load the bullets if it was empty, how to release the safety, how to brace himself for the recoil. “My father’d taught me—we’re all ‘real men’ in the St. John family. Guns and hunting and women.” His father had always had a woman on the side, all part of the proud St. John tradition.

Bitterness in his mouth, Noah fisted his hand in Kit’s hair. “My father walked into my room an hour after he’d left to find me pointing the gun at the window.”

Kit went as if to rise up, but he couldn’t bear to see the disgust on her face, so he used his grip in her hair to keep her down. Not resisting, she stayed.

“To his credit, he didn’t yell. Instead, he asked me why I had the gun. I told him it was to shoot the monster so he couldn’t hurt us.” Noah could still see his father’s face as Noah finally told him about how the monster liked to do “bad things” to Noah: a mix of shock, pain, disgust… and shame.

Noah sometimes liked to imagine the latter two had been directed inward or at the man who’d done the crime, but Robert St. John’s later actions had made it clear the disgust and shame had been directed solely at Noah. “To cut a long story short, my father told me we wouldn’t be going to the Cape, I gave him the gun, and two weeks later, after a discreet medical examination to make sure there was no permanent physical damage, I was shipped off to boarding school.”

This time when Kit jerked up her head, he couldn’t keep her down. Turning his face away, he stared out into the garden.

“What about counseling?” she said, horror in her tone. “Did they even talk to you about—”

“No.” After the medical exam, no one in his family had ever again discussed the events of the summer of his sixth year. “My mother couldn’t even bear going with me to the doctor, and my father… he looked at me and was ashamed of me because I’d allowed it to happen.”

“You were just a child!” Open rage in Kit’s voice as she sat up beside him, her knees brushing his side. “They didn’t report the man, did they?”

“No. I spent my first year at boarding school having nightmares about him hunting me down.” It was after a screaming nightmare that Fox had tried to comfort him and he’d spilled the whole truth. His best friend had responded by putting a chair under the doorknob so no one could get into their room, and together they’d rigged up a noisemaker across the window.

“Tell me they didn’t just let that monster walk free,” Kit pleaded.

“On my eighth birthday, my father gave me a cutting from a newspaper. It was the man’s obituary.” Putting one arm under his head, he chanced looking up at the stars again, Kit in his peripheral vision. “It wasn’t until I was older that I searched online and discovered the man had been found in his study at home, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

“Suicide. He did the world a favor.”

Noah wanted to laugh. “He did nothing. My father used to defend small-time mobsters, did you know that? The kind of men who’d do him a solid, no questions asked.”