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Show Moon - 110 said, "There's nothing to worry about. James loves you, and maybe he got carried away a little. He's a good man. He's your father." That the man I called Daddy became a man to fend off was a long confusion and a gift. Mother, I tell you it was a gift, because I want you to keep listening and also because it was true. Out of my tropical torpor I became alert, awake to survival, a hero in my own mind: Jane Eyre saying, "I care for myself," and, like her, taking nothing, stealing away in the night. What else could I do? What was left but to see my life as a Victorian romance, to make myself into a hero? Laugh if you will, but a romantic sense of tragedy can allow a person to be brave, can save a life or two. I wasn't at all sure I did care for myself the way Jane did, but I said it, acted it, did what I thought was Right. Daddy was telling me I was the great love of his life. And he had a wife in the attic who was also you, my mother, in no position to see what was going on. There was a terrible beauty in this, the mantle of hardship to wear in silence and in secrecy. No illusion of safety here. I was frightened and I was freer than most, all chin up and leave the nest and don't tell anyone why. If I am meant to stay with Josh, should I tell him this story? Will he be able to hear me as you could not? Telling him seems like a terrible risk, but it might make it easier for him to keep on loving me, if that's what he really wants to do. Maybe he'll see why sometimes when his eyes get pleading and sad in that wanting way I need to fight myself to keep from pushing him out of my bed. I think he should know that it's sometimes important to let me take the lead. When I can't control the pacing, I get afraid. I get afraid when Josh says |