Read All Fall Down for Free Online

picture of you, the one your mom had framed in her living room.”
    Christopher shook his head, fingers squeezing Liesel’s arm until a glance from her made him let go. “I mean, Trish told me the baby wasn’t mine. She swore to me that she’d been sleeping with that guy she ran away with, that the baby was his. She never told me otherwise, how was I supposed to know? She never came to me for money or help or anything.”
    Trish. Christopher’s first wife, the one he never spoke of, not even in the most casual of ways that Liesel sometimes talked about her college boyfriend. Stories about places they’d gone, things they’d done together, in that time before she met Christopher. It wasn’t that she hadn’t known about Christopher’s brief first marriage. Just that she’d never really had to deal with it. With Trish.
    “She never came back to me, Liesel. Once she left me, that was the last I heard from her. All I knew was that Trish had gone off with that guy, and they were living in that…place.”
    “That cult,” Liesel whispered. “We all know that’s what it is. I mean, they say it’s a church, but you know it isn’t, not really.”
    “A cult is technically a church, I guess.”
    “What, for tax purposes?” Another humorless laugh wormed its way out of her. “You’ve driven past there, the big gates and that fence all around it. I’ve heard that the police have been out there half a dozen times on reports of child abuse and stuff. They don’t send their kids to school or to the hospital if they’re sick or anything.”
    She thought of the marks on Sunny’s back. The thought turned her stomach. “Oh, God, Christopher, do you think those children have been abused?”
    Christopher pulled her close so that her cheek rested against his chest. “I don’t know.”
    She shuddered. “She has marks on her back.”
    “What kind of marks?”
    “Like scars. Like…whip marks.”
    Christopher grimaced. “God.”
    “She says you’re her dad, that her mother told her to come here. If they were being abused it makes sense that she’d send them here.”
    “There has to be a way to find out.”
    “If they were abused? You can’t just…blurt it out. I don’t think you can just ask them.” She shuddered again. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
    “No. I meant a way to find out if she’s really mine.”
    Liesel frowned. “Like what, a DNA test or something?”
    “Sure. Of course. Something like that.”
    Liesel pushed away from him, her frown twisted into a scowl. “How can you say that? Even if she’s not genetically your kid, Christopher, she thinks you’re her dad. Her mother obviously thought so. And you can’t just… What are you going to do? Turn them away? Put them out? Oh, my God, you can’t even think of that!”
    Christopher shook himself and reached for her, though she didn’t let him touch her. “I didn’t say that. What the hell kind of man do you think I am?”
    “Apparently,” Liesel said coldly, “the sort who had a kid almost twenty years ago and never bothered to have anything to do with her.”
    “That’s not fair.” His jaw tightened. He emptied his bottle into the sink and tossed it into the recycling container, where it landed with a clatter. “So not fair.”
    She softened, but didn’t touch him. “I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s not fair. None of this is. You didn’t know. But they’re here now. She came to us. We’re not turning her out, at least not tonight. Not until we find out more about what’s going on.”
    Her husband frowned. “I didn’t say I thought we should turn them out.”
    He didn’t have to say it. She could see it in his face. Still, she let him lie, just this little bit, so that neither of them had to admit he was being a bastard. She nodded once, sharply. Above them, the shower stopped. Silence.
    “I’m sorry,” Christopher said again, no lie in him this time. “I really am.”
    “Can you heat up some soup or