My Daughter's Secret Quotes

“am in agony but I take deep breaths. I slow my racing heart. I am ready to tell Joel the truth. ‘Do I need to call the doctor?’ Joel asks when I am calm. ‘No,’ I answer. ‘But you need to see something.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“I stop thinking anything at all. I launch myself at Adrian. I throw myself at him, scratching and punching and hitting. ‘My daughter, my baby,’ I hear myself screaming over and over again. My nails pull away flesh on his cheeks, my fingers pull out a chunk of hair and the car swerves all over the road. The noise of other cars hooting fills my head and Adrian speeds up as he tries to lift his arms to fend off my attack. Blood trickles down the side of his face, thick and red. He turns to me, his eyes show real fear. He is looking at me as though he has discovered a wild animal inside his car. He’s right. I am all animal now, I am the mother lion and I am attacking the man who hurt my cub. He slams on the brake, veering the car sideways. The wheezing scream of his brakes invade my ears as they jolt the car to a full stop in the middle of the road. I take a deep breath because my lungs have run out of air and turn to look at him, just as another car comes straight for us, hitting us on the driver-side door. There is no slowing down of those last few moments, no watching of my life passing before my eyes. Instead the car hits us at exactly the same time our car stops. The smell of burning rubber seeps in through my window as smoke from desperate brakes fills the air. I catch a glance of the driver as his car hits us. His mouth is open as he screams, shock and despair written across his face. I feel, rather than hear, the crunch of metal and the shattering of glass. Then I hear noise everywhere. I think I am screaming and there are other screams and then lights and then I close my eyes. I need to get out of the car, I think, but I need a minute. I just need a minute.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“Because maybe he hurt her or broke her heart and that’s what made her do it.’ ‘Oh, Claire, oh, sweetheart,’ my sister says and she comes to stand next to me at the kettle, wrapping her soft arms around me and simply holding me tight. The move is so unexpected that I can’t help sobbing in her arms and soon my mother, my sister and I are wrapped in a bizarre group hug, tears flowing and noses running. I am not alone, I realise, I am surrounded by my family, by those who loved Julia as I did. After a few minutes I let go of Emily and we all part.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“Dear Ms Brusso, I can only imagine how difficult yesterday was for you. I wanted to again convey my sympathy for you and your family on the terrible loss of Julia. Please know that in the short time we knew her we all found her to be an intelligent and lovely young woman. I hesitate to give you this information but my wife insisted I text you. She feels that, as a mother of daughters herself, she understands your desire to know all that you can about your daughter’s life. This may mean nothing at all but I did see Julia with an older man over lunch one day. It wasn’t on a day she was working for us, but rather a Sunday. She was in the city for lunch with the man and my wife and I happened to run into her near the restaurant where we were meeting friends. I assumed the man was her father but Julia introduced him to us as her former high-school drama teacher. I’m sure it was just a friendly visit but I thought I would let you know about it. Best wishes, Colin Rider I knew it, I knew it, I think, feeling fury course through my body. I had been right all along.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“I bite down on my lip, preventing hurtful words escaping. Losing a parent is completely different to losing a child but I don’t want to dismiss Adrian’s feelings. I know that after my father died my grief scraped my skin red raw and I felt like I was exposed to the world and without protection. But as the months passed that faded and I was able to remember the wonderful lessons he taught me and the compassion he’d always shown me. He went too soon but he’d lived a life where he’d had children and grandchildren, found time for retirement and travel. He helped raise me and sent me out into the world so I could live my own life, but always know he was there for me. But this, this grief is different. My body is changed. I listen to my breath going in and out and it doesn’t sound the same, it doesn’t feel the same. I don’t remember the woman I was before Mia’s screams and I don’t recognise the woman I see in the mirror now. My life will be forever divided into two distinct parts. My heart aches and my soul aches but I don’t know how to explain this to Adrian, who has never had children of his own.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“The words I had flung at my young son haunted me for weeks. I reminded myself every day to be conscious of the way I spoke to both my boys, to see them as not simply extensions of their awful father, but as my beautiful boys who only wanted to protect and love me.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“Claire, yesterday you yelled at Nicholas for forgetting to take out the garbage. Do you remember what you said to him?’ ‘I said he has to take responsibility for some things around the house – which is the truth, Mum.’ ‘I’m not debating that but you ended your lecture with, “I don’t need another man giving me crap right now.”’ ‘I didn’t say that,’ I protested. ‘You did. You were angry and I am sure you didn’t mean it but I was going to talk to you about it today. You need to apologise to him. He is only a boy and not every man is Joel, Claire, not even the little men who share his genetics. Don’t alienate them because they happen to be boys. Love them into being wonderful men like your father.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“She made me laugh all the time as a child, as an adolescent and even as a surly teenager. I place my hand over my still beating heart, wondering how I can keep going, knowing that Julia will never make me laugh again except in my memories. ‘Oh, Julia,’ I say, as I press down on my chest. She liked things to be fair and right. She would never have dated a married man. It would have gone against everything she stood for. Where would she have even met one? Unless she knew him from Sydney. Eric Peters pops into my head again. The image of the year-book photo. But he lives in Sydney and Brian said that Julia was taking weekends away in Melbourne. The letters seem to indicate that they were together in Melbourne. Sydney’s only a short flight away, but still. I hate that I have no answers to any of these questions.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“It feels very wrong to be reading his words to my daughter, about my daughter, these private whispers of love. But I cannot stop myself. I pick up the next few letters, glancing over them, noting that they are all written in the same vein. Certain sentences jump out at me in the midst of his adoring prose. Stop worrying about who can see us. I promise you no one knows. It’s our special secret. Why did they feel the need to be anonymous in a small town? What difference would it have made if she had seen someone she knew from university? Why were they hiding? And why does he want her to destroy the letters? Exactly what kind of relationship were they having? Questions tumbling through my head, I pick up another one.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“is the greeting from a lover, a romantic, a boy or a man who felt a great deal for her. She was twenty, a young woman who was mature beyond her years, so she could have been dating a boy her age or even a much older man. I have friends whose daughters are dating men that are ten and twenty years older than them. Anything is possible. I realise the letters could even be from a woman, although Julia has never said anything to indicate she was interested in women. Her walls used to be covered in ubiquitous boy band posters when she was thirteen and fourteen, and if I asked I would receive a rundown on how much she loved each one of them, how gorgeous they were and how one day she was going to marry a musician. I want to scream with frustration at all the things I don’t know about my daughter, at all that can now be called into question.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“My mouth is dry by the time I am safely alone in my hotel room. I haven’t eaten lunch and I know that I should at least get myself a bottle of water and something small, but the letters demand to be read. It feels like an invasion of Julia’s privacy. It is an invasion – I know she hated the idea that I was so interested in every thought and feeling she had. ‘I don’t have to share everything with you, Mum.’ ‘You don’t but you used to.’ ‘Things change.’ ‘Oh, how they change,’ I mutter as I stare down at the stack of letters. I have purposefully not focused on the words beyond the greeting.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“What if I were a criminal?’ ‘I’d still try to help you.’ ‘What if I murdered someone?’ ‘I’d get you a good lawyer.’ ‘What if I dropped out of school and married a rock star?’ ‘I’d come to his concerts,’ I said, laughing along with her. I lean down from my position on the bed and pick up a pair of jeans. I sniff and then fold them in half when the only scent I can detect is a floral chemical smell of washing powder. I want to lie down on her bed and rest for an hour or two or three but I have a flight booked for tomorrow morning. Devastatingly, I have not found what I came here to find. It is best I return home to what is left of my family.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“Joel’s eyes had swept the room quickly, noting that the woman wasn’t there. He growled as he spoke, keeping his voice low. ‘And now you’ve scratched the fucking floor because you dragged them, rather than put them up on their side.’ ‘We couldn’t lift them, Joel.’ ‘I know. And that’s why I was going to do it. I told you I would do it. I’m here in time, aren’t I? There are no guests here now, are there? Hello, hello, are any of Julia’s friends here yet?’ ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘No. So you didn’t need to scratch the fucking floor, did you, Claire, but you had to make a point, didn’t you? You just had to make a fucking point.’ ‘I’m sorry, Joel… I didn’t—’ ‘No, you never fucking do,’ he snapped, advancing on me, forcing me backwards until I was pressed against the wall.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“I couldn’t comprehend what to make of the email, of the things he said. Everything I had wanted him to acknowledge, he had acknowledged. All the things I had dreamed of him saying over the years and the realisations I was desperate for him to come to were right there in his words. And yet I didn’t know if I could trust him. I questioned myself and everything that he had put me through, viciously rotating my wrist so that the old ache would remind me of the truth. But there was no question he was changed. He is changed. Julia never accepted that.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“I kept seeing that day when we all went to the park together for a picnic. I don’t know if you remember it but it was about two months before you told me to leave. I remember how you had packed so carefully, making sure there were peanut-butter sandwiches for Cooper and a chicken sandwich for Nick and vegetarian for Julia. I know that you packed three different kinds of sandwich for me so that I could choose and I knew, even as I watched you, that you were doing it so I wouldn’t have a reason to get pissed off, to lash out. But I found one anyway.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“did, it hit me. It just hit me. It felt like someone had slammed a plank of wood into the side of my head. I couldn’t breathe or think straight. I couldn’t make my hands work to call room service. I had lost everything and I knew that I was entirely, completely to blame. I knew that I had hurt the woman I loved more than anything in the world. I know you tried to tell me this, tried to tell me what I was doing to you, to us and our family. I used to watch your mouth move, saying the words, but hear nothing. In the darkness of my silent hotel room I finally heard you. I got it and it shattered me. I didn’t move for three days after that until security came to check on me. I lay in the bed and I relived every moment of pain I caused you and the kids. I forced myself to remember each incident, each fucking time I hurt you. And while I was doing that I saw the awful parallel with my father and my childhood. I knew the psychology behind it because I’m not an idiot, but I had never connected the dots of my own abuse with those of me when I was the abuser. In my head the reasons for my behaviour had always been justified. It was ridiculous that I couldn’t explain away my father’s abuse but I could explain away my own.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“On the day I told him to leave, I had $100 left in my account. Like many women in my situation, I had no access to the other accounts that were filled with money.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“Nah, I’m not interested in that. It won’t make what he did to you, to us, any easier to live with and besides, I don’t want it to be something that doesn’t bother me. I want to remember so I never choose a man like him.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“Years later, she still hadn’t forgiven him. ‘I’m doing what I can, Mum. A text once a week is more than he deserves.’ ‘At first yes, but not now. Not for many years now. He’s not that man any more, Julia, as your brothers have explained. I don’t want you to regret not getting to know him as he is now.’ ‘I don’t care who he is now. I text him and I let him buy me stuff. That’s all I can do. If I can ever forget some of those times… those hideous, horrible times, then maybe it will be different.’ ‘I wish you could. Not forget them, but perhaps forgive them. Therapy would help, darling, it really would.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“discuss him. I tried as the years went by to encourage her to give her father another chance but she remained firm on this. She was only twelve when he left but I let her watch as I shed frustrated, angry tears. She had gone from being Daddy’s girl to being ignored by her father. She saw the abuse but I believe, at the time, that she found a way to separate her and Joel’s relationship from that. He adored her and she him. Her animosity towards him came after he left, when she struggled with being dismissed along with the rest of us. It was only then that she began going over the incidents of abuse – perhaps as a way of saving herself from missing him, loving him, being rejected by him. I know how difficult that juxtaposition between the man who hurt her mother and her adoring father was for her.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… I’m sorry, okay?’ Joel says, his tone softening into despair. I know he’s berating himself. He doesn’t allow himself to lose control, not now, not for a long time. But his epiphany came too late for us. He has redeemed himself by becoming someone else entirely but I still cannot completely trust the change, even after all these years. Sometimes I push just to see what will happen. Nothing ever does.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“Isn’t that what every generation is supposed to do? Improve on the concept of mothering?”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“Sometimes you shed tears and no matter how long you cry for you feel as though you could start again the moment you stop”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“The kind of sex that you get turned on thinking about the next day, that sends a shiver right through you.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret

“am one of those people now, one of those mothers. You read about them. You fear their experiences and yet you never really believe you will become them. I am one of those and I am not sure I know how to be that person, how to survive being that person.”
― Nicole Trope, My Daughter's Secret