Always There

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two

I see Matt stiffen beside me out of the corner of my eye. He opens his mouth to speak, presumably to defend his mom, but one sharp look from our dad and his mouth snaps shut.

I answer Sierra as calmly as possible. "No, but it doesn't matter. You need to either leave now, or the police will be called."

Sierra's eyes snap to my dad. "Why don't you tell him, Leo? Don't you think that he deserves to know?"

Dad collapses into the chair behind him and pulls Elena down into his lap.

Elena, who is still glaring at Sierra with all of the hatred in the world in her eyes.

Dad's eyes focus firstly on me and then on Matt. "Would the two of you like to hear about just how shitty Caleb and Sierra are?"

I shrug, and Matt glances briefly at his fiancée before doing the same.

Dad looks down at Elena, and after she gives him a small nod of approval, he begins to speak.

"Elena and I had been together for . . . quite some time. We were in love. We wanted to get married and we wanted to start a family together, but when I went to Elena's parents to ask for their blessing to propose, they told me that there is no way in hell they would allow me to marry their daughter. They said that they would disown Elena if she didn't marry a nice Latino man, and I am clearly neither nice nor Latino. I didn't want to destroy Elena's relationship with her parents, so we listened to them and stopped seeing each other.

"Elena got engaged to a man her parents picked for her. His name was Caleb DiLaurentis. He was nice enough to Elena all throughout their engagement, but only a few weeks after their wedding, he began to hit her. And soon after that, Elena found emails between him and other women. It became clear that all those nights he claimed he had to stay at work late, he was really just out with other women.

"Elena got pregnant not too long after her marriage to Caleb. She never wanted to be intimate with him, but any time she said no, he became violent. And the violence never stopped, not even when she told Caleb she was pregnant. Elena came to me, and I let her stay at my apartment whenever she could get away from Caleb so that she was safe and not at risk of losing the pregnancy due to her own abusive husband. We tried to stay away from each other, tried to ignore the pull between us, but we couldn't.

"Elena had the baby, Mateo's older brother. Time passed, Caleb didn't stop hitting her, and so her and I continued to see each other in secret while Caleb continued to sleep with other women behind Elena's back."

Dad's eyes land on Sierra, and he inhales deeply.

"Now this," he begins again, "is where it gets interesting.

I was at a party at an old friend of mine's house one evening, and I was drunk and couldn't drive home, so I decided I would claim one of the spare bedrooms at his place and crash there for the night. Unfortunately, I woke up not too long after I had fallen asleep to find that someone had removed my pants and decided that it was completely fine for her to have her way with me while I was still asleep."

The room is impossibly silent.

My eyes narrow at Sierra. "On top of all the other nasty things you've done, you're also a rapist?"

She rolls her eyes at me. "It's fine. He wanted it."

Leo's fingers dig into the armrest of his chair. "I most certainly did not want it."

Sierra rolls her eyes again and gestures for Leo to continue speaking.

He does.

"I heard from Sierra not too long after she raped me that she was pregnant, and after a paternity test, we were able to confirm that the baby was, in fact, mine. Once I told my parents what had happened, they told me that I had to marry Sierra so that my child would grow up with both parents. For some stupid reason, I did as they requested, and Sierra and I ended up married only a few months into her pregnancy.