Agent Out of Time

"I suppose you'd like to hear the rest of the story?" Ella asked softly.

"Only if it helps you. I don't need to know otherwise."

She nodded and I thought that was the end of it. She surprised me by speaking up though.

"I sort of rushed into marriage against my parents wishes, but I was young and I thought I knew better. Things were good for the first years of marriage and then things began to change between Robert and me. He lost his job, but after a while he got another one. It took him away on business though quite often. By that time we had both realized that we hadn't really married for love, but rather an infatuation of youth. We began drifting apart from each other. Robert came from a big family and he had many fond memories of growing up with his siblings. He thought us having children together would help mend the divide that had grown between us. Then, as I still do now, I believe divorce to be wrong in most instances, so I was eager to change the way things were going. We tried to have children for two long years. I never had so much as a miscarriage or sign of pregnancy. Robert's family were big progenitors and both he and his family came to blame me for the lack of offspring. Eventually I consented to do medical testing to see what was wrong. Turns out there was nothing wrong with me, it was him that was the problem. The doctor said he was infertile. Robert took it hard. Another year went by and I put forward the idea of adoption. He wouldn't hear of it and got very angry about it. A month went by and he left for a five day business trip. That night I woke up in bed to find a man over top of me pressing an ether scented cloth to my face. I passed out. When I woke up it was to discover myself tied and blindfolded to the bed. The man raped me many times over the next several days. He didn't beat me and as rape goes it wasn't particularly vicious. To my everlasting shame he even made me enjoy some of it. He left me abruptly and several hours later Robert found me still tied to the bed and blindfolded. I was a mess! I wanted to go to the police! I wanted justice! But Robert was worried about what people would think of me, of him. He said he might lose his job, if I came forward and said anything about the incident. He worked for a PR company that monitored their employees personal lives quite stringently so in part I understood his position. Besides, he said what did I really have to put forward, as evidence of rape that would lead to the capture of the perpetrator. I only had some light bruising, I'd never seen the man, and he'd never spoke more than to grunt. Against my better judgment I listened to Robert and tried to go on, as if nothing had happened. A month passed and I missed my period. I panicked, after I did a test that showed I was pregnant. I told Robert in tears and his reaction was not what I had expected. He said that perhaps this was a way to make a positive out of the whole situation. I thought he'd gone crazy. He wanted to make my rape into a positive. I hated him then, as much as I hated the little growing life inside of me, but I obeyed and to the world, most notably his family it appeared that we were finally on tract as a young couple. Something changed in me at Trent's birth. My hate turned to love and I treasured him. Robert never got ever being distant from me, especially after the rape. My marriage was lousy, but at least I had a little life to pour myself into. Robert never had intimacy with me again and treated both me and Trent as lepers, while he was at home. But around his family he acted like we were the All-American family. I couldn't understand it. I had done everything he wanted or asked of me. When Trent was two we went to a family reunion on Robert's side of the family. Robert had an older brother in the Army that I had never met. I knew. I just knew when I saw him what had happened. I'd already been having wild speculative thoughts, as to the possibility of what I found out, upon seeing Robert's brother. Trent's baby pictures looked so identical trait wise to Robert's family that it was uncanny that he wasn't somehow related to them. I confronted Robert. At first he denied it and then he broke down crying and admitted that he'd set the whole thing up. I demanded he come forward and admit his wrongdoing and testify against his brother, but he refused saying it would kill his parents. It probably would have, they weren't bad people, but all their sense of self-worth was rooted in their family. I left him then taking Trent with me. I went to my parents and told them everything. They took me in and helped me get back on my feet. A couple years later I heard that Robert committed suicide. I changed my name back to my maiden name and continued on making a life for Trent and me. When Trent was twenty I heard that Robert's older brother died in a car crash and I felt it was safe to tell Trent what had happened and how he had come to be and who his father had been. He didn't take it well and it was a good thing his father was already dead. He changed his name back to my maiden name and other than for my parents, who are dead now and Trent you're the only one that knows the whole story."