All Is Not Forgotten: The bestselling gripping thriller you’ll never forget. Wendy Walker
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They were both dead before Charlotte was ten years old. Two years later, Ruthanne finally married. His name was Greg.
This is Charlotte’s first secret, and it was well kept. She did not reveal it to me until I had earned her trust. And that was not an easy task.
I was a beautiful girl. I had blond hair and blue eyes and my body was quite developed around that time. And my face, if you look at pictures, you can definitely see that Jenny is my daughter. My mother became the manager of the candle factory. They ran it twenty-four–seven, rotating the workers on day and night shifts. I guess they had enough customers that they needed to make all those candles. I’m sure it had something to do with the “illegals” they hired as well—maybe they knew there wouldn’t be inspections at night. My mother used to talk about the two payrolls, the one on the books and the one that was cash. Greg worked on and off as a carpenter. He used to tell my mother to keep track of the cash, don’t trust anyone. Especially the “illegals.” He had several tattoos. One of them was on his neck. It was a snake and then some words under it. “Don’t tread on me,” they said. He wasn’t a fan of the government. “The man” he used to call it. Anything that had any authority was “the man,” like some kind of hippie. He was an idiot.
The first night it happened, my mother was at work. I was seventeen. We lived in this little shithole apartment with one bedroom and thin walls. The kitchen was nothing more than an electric burner and microwave. We didn’t even have a proper oven. There was one bathroom with a tiny shower that ran out of hot water every morning because the neighbors were also “illegals”—they must have had six or seven people crammed into that place. Greg disliked “illegals” almost as much as the government. He used to walk around, talking to himself. He and my mother shared the bedroom and I slept on the sofa, so I had nowhere to go when he came out of there. I heard a lot of crazy shit coming from him.
Anyway, I would be lying if I said I didn’t see it coming. Women just know. Maybe men do, too, but I’m not convinced of it. We can tell when there’s a shift, when a man has decided he wants to fuck us. I’ve felt it with guy friends in college. I’ve felt it in crowded bars. I’ve felt it with colleagues at work. And I felt it with Greg. I did my best to ignore him, stay out of his way. I started wearing more clothing, pants instead of skirts, flat shoes, turtlenecks. It didn’t matter. It never does, does it? Like I said, once a man has decided he wants to fuck you, there’s no getting him off that position. So the night it happened, I had come home from work. I was a waitress at a diner a couple of nights a week. I remember being really upset about a customer. I truly can remember every minute of that night—how this customer yelled at me for bringing him pie with ice cream on it when he’d said no ice cream. He was right and I said I was sorry, but he asked to see my manager, kept yelling, wanting his meal for free. I started to cry. I thought I was going to be fired. My boss told me to go home. God, it sounds so stupid now. It turned out the guy did this every time to try to get a free meal.
“That would be upsetting to any seventeen-year-old,” I told her.
I suppose. The point is, I came home crying. Greg was there. We sat on the couch and he listened to me talk for a long time. He got us each a beer. He told me everything would be okay. And I actually felt comforted by him. I let my guard down.
The rest of the story requires some graphic detail, but I believe it is important. I apologize if it is hard to read.
Greg smiled at her and stroked her hair. I imagine he had convinced himself that she wanted him as well, even behind the turtlenecks and the long pants. People believe what they want to believe. Her heart started to pound wildly, but she didn’t move. He stroked her face. He moaned. It sounded like the word “ahhhh.” He studied her eyes like a lover. He reached under her shirt and touched her breast. He moaned again and she felt his hot breath on her face as he leaned in to kiss her.
Charlotte remembers feeling frozen. He had comforted her and she wanted more. Not like this. Not with her body. But that was all that was on the table, so she remained still, frozen between her need to be comforted, to be loved, and her repulsion. She said he looked like a wild animal who had caught its prey. Exactly—the impala and the wolf. He bit her earlobe, hard, and reached his hand inside her pants and between her legs. He leaned her back until they were lying together on the sofa. She could feel his erect penis against her thigh. His finger went inside her. It felt good, like nothing she had ever experienced before. Charlotte had not yet kissed a boy.
You’re wet, he said, laughing. You’re wet, you little whore.
He seemed then to have the strength of two men and the arms of an octopus as he reached for her hair and slid off her pants, so quickly, like he had superhuman abilities. His knees were between hers. His erection on her stomach. And then, slowly, he teased her thighs apart and slid down, his erection running along the inside of her thigh. She remembered the “ahhhhh.” His hip bones pressed into hers as he penetrated her. And when it was over (apparently in a matter of seconds), he pulled out of her and positioned his body so she was up against the back of the couch. He kissed her neck and moaned. Then he manipulated her clitoris with his fingers until she had an orgasm, which happened even through the repulsion. The body is a machine. We forget that sometimes.
They became secret “lovers.” The need in Charlotte that was filled by these encounters eclipsed her conscience, her morality, her will. Greg bought her gifts and took her to the movies. They exchanged looks at dinner and “made love” on the sofa when Ruthanne was working the night shift. Charlotte knew it was wrong, and she was still, in many ways, disgusted by Greg. But, as she explains it, she could not stop herself.
I am ashamed of this. But it’s the truth. Feeling a human body that close to me. Feeling skin against my skin. Being kissed and hugged and held. And then there was the sexual pleasure, which I could not control. I don’t know. Maybe it was about the sex. Maybe I was a little whore. But at the time, it felt like love.
It took about six months for Ruthanne to admit to herself what she was seeing and feeling when she was in their company. By that time, Greg was fully unemployed and reliant on his wife. I imagine there was never any doubt about what would happen, though to Charlotte, it felt like her heart had been torn from her chest.
Ruthanne sent her daughter to live with Aunt Peg in Hartford. Peg was older than Ruthanne by six years and had managed to land a husband in the insurance business. They had three children, all away at boarding school, and they reluctantly agreed to do the same for their niece. Charlotte never went home again.
Tom did not know about her life with her mother and Greg.
You can understand now Charlotte’s need to repair her house. I imagine there are those of you thinking more of this, that perhaps Charlotte’s insistence on giving Jenny the treatment was because she had something in her past that was sexually perverse. But you would be wrong. Charlotte saw that night on the sofa as a seduction, an act of desire and the beginning of a love affair. Still, she understood that her relationship with her stepfather was “unconventional” and “morally questionable.” It is for those reasons that she did not share this story with anyone—not even her husband.
But this is not the secret that Charlotte feared her mother-in law could see.
Getting back to Jenny and the night she sat on her bed—
Tom’s employer was Bob Sullivan. Bob owned twelve car dealerships throughout the state of Connecticut and had a net worth of over twenty million dollars. His face could be seen on any number of billboards on I-95 from Stamford to Mystic, and throughout every town that still allowed them. You would remember seeing him up there, his full head of black hair, determined eyes, big white smile, and rounded nose. Bob Sullivan was a self-made man, the kind whom magazines liked to write about. The kind who was so bursting with himself, it seemed a miracle he didn’t explode like a struck piñata and litter confetti across the sky. Bob Sullivan lived in