“I was raped,” she said.
Stunned by her confession, I wondered: Should I hug her? Should I tell her it was not her fault and that she would be fine? She was not and the path of self-destruction she had chosen finally made sense.
I stood there and let the silence linger for a while. Not trained to deal with such matters, I was not prepared for an acquaintance to suddenly trust me with her truth but her words could not be unspoken.
Standing there, listening to her sobs, I managed to say that I was sorry for what had happened to her. I thought about “A Time to Kill,” the 1996 film starring Samuel L. Jackson. In the film, which is based on the 1988 novel of the same name by John Grisham, Jackson plays Carl Lee Hailey, who is on trial for murdering the men who raped and beat his 10-year-old daughter.