The Stranger She Loved by Shanna Hogan

Author:Shanna Hogan [Hogan, Shanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466868083
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

26.

The profound grief caused by Michele’s death erased the last twisted shred of pretense remaining in the MacNeill family. The house in Pleasant Grove was in turmoil. Martin was preparing to marry his mistress. The younger children hated their new nanny. Alexis was desperate to get custody of her sisters. And Martin’s daughters suspected their father of murder.

But not everyone in the family had turned on Martin. Damian stuck firmly by his father, eventually becoming his sole defender. By then Alexis’s conviction that her dad was a murderer was absolute. It drove a wedge between the sisters and brother.

“I had talked to him about my concerns, and he didn’t want to believe that my father was capable of killing my mom,” Alexis later said in an interview.

The constant fighting caused Martin’s mood to fluctuate erratically. Even Gypsy found life inside the house insufferable.

“They were fighting all the time,” Gypsy recalled. “It was terrible. It was so hard. And then dealing with Martin was very difficult also. Because everything had to be on his terms.”

Unaware of how to help him combat the stress, Gypsy wanted him to stop fighting with his daughters and just make peace. The adopted girls wanted to be with their older sister—Gypsy told him he should just give up custody to Alexis.

* * *

In July, two months after she had been fondled by her father, Alexis called the Pleasant Grove police. But she still wasn’t ready to file charges. Instead, she inquired about procedures to report abuse.

By then Martin had lost all desire to fight for the adopted children, but he still wasn’t ready to give them to any of his biological daughters.

Late that summer, Martin, Alexis, Rachel, and the younger girls took a trip to California, where they visited with family friends, the Bledsoes—whom Alexis hadn’t seen for sixteen years. Martin told the Bledsoes that following his wife’s death he was having difficulty caring for his young daughters and discussed the possibility that they adopt the girls. Alexis, who had repeatedly expressed desire to take custody of the children, had no idea what her father was proposing until much later.

Alexis would later report that during their trip she was sleeping in her hotel room when she awoke for a second time to find her father fondling her. Disgusted, Alexis shot out of the bed, screaming.

Once again, Martin apologized, claiming he mistook Alexis for his wife. But by then Alexis had no doubt: her father was a sexual predator.

Still, she did not call the police. Her main priority remained the welfare of her sisters. And she worried that if she pressed charges, the tenuous bond she had with her father would dissolve.

After they returned home, Martin made a request of Alexis. Giselle, then sixteen, had long planned on spending the summer in Ukraine with relatives. Martin asked for Alexis to escort the teenager on the trip. “We’ll go get her after the summer,” Martin told Alexis.

At first, Alexis rebuffed him. She and her father argued, and Martin once again threatened to keep her from her sisters.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.