Putting the tea aside on the nightstand, I wilt down in the bed and give him my honest thoughts. “Because it hurts too much. Because talking won’t change it. Because my life is already too screwed up for me to handle.”
He sets the papers down on the coffee table in front of him, leans forward, and says, “Ignoring it is only going to make it hurt worse. That’s your problem, Ni—Elizabeth.” Shaking his head at his near slip, he looks back to me and continues, “You hide everything, and when you do that, you give those things power over you.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No,” I respond, and he releases annoyance in a sigh, saying, “Then explain last night to me.”
“That wasn’t—”
“Have you looked at yourself lately?” he chides. “A woman who’s in control wouldn’t be smashing her head into a fucking wall.”
“You don’t understand,” I defend.
“Then please, explain it to me. Make me understand why your body is covered in contusions.”
His glare is sharp, pinning his frustrations to me as I sit here awkwardly. Knowing how Declan saw me last night, knowing the things I’ve revealed to him, I feel denuded of my armor I’m used to hiding behind. I’ve laid myself bare to this man, but now I want to hide again. I want to throw the fa?ade on and lash my crude words at him. Push him out of the honesty I’ve been giving him.
But he sees me wanting to avoid when he presses, “I want you to tell me why you’re determined to destroy yourself. Tell me why.”
Shaking my head, I stutter, “I don’t . . . You wouldn’t understand . . . I can’t . . . ”
“Why hide now? Why? Just talk to me. Tell me.”
But I doubt he would even understand if I told him. I barely understand it myself. As I continue to avoid answering, he stands up and walks over to me, sitting on the bed in front of me. His closeness, especially after kissing him last night, unsettles me, and I let my fear grow.
With a rigid tone, heavy with his brogue, he says, “Help me figure you out. Tell me why you’re hurting yourself.”
“I’m not . . . ” I begin when I hear the tribulation in the cracks of his stern voice. I give in to his request because I know he deserves it. I owe him whatever it is that he wants. “I’m not hurting myself.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It makes me feel better,” I confess. “When I’m hurting, really hurting, I hit myself and it takes the hurt away.”
“You’re wrong. You’re just masking the pain; you’re not getting rid of it.”
“But I don’t know how to get rid of it.”
“You deal with it. You talk about it and face it and process it.”
His words are reminiscent of Carnegie’s. He once told me something very similar when I spoke with him about Bennett. But the thing is, to face a pain like that takes a particular type of strength I don’t possess.
“But what about you?” I accuse. “You hide.”
“I do,” he admits freely. “I miss my mum, and I hide from that whole fucked up situation. But it’s not eating at me the way you allow things to eat at you. I’m not the one throwing punches at myself, you are.”
His words are caustic. They piss me off because they’re true. He’s right, and I hate that. I hate that I’ve become transparent to him. Hate that I’ve allowed that. Gone is the camouflage. I left it behind for atonement, for repentance.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I concede.
He gives an understanding nod. “I know. I just want you to talk, that’s all.”
“About my mom?”
“It’s a good place to start.”
“What’s to say? I mean, I’m scared to know too much,” I tell him, struggling to not break down.
“Too much? Did you not read through everything?”
“No. I was so upset, that I . . . I just couldn’t read it. I couldn’t focus.”
He insists that I need to know, so I sit and listen to him tell me the documented facts of how and why my mother sold me to some guy she barely knew. And the fabricated story she told my father and the police that I was kidnapped when she left me in my car seat unattended while she went inside a gas station to pay.
He speaks in detail as I sit here like a stone, forcing my feelings away. I keep my breathing as even as I can as I concentrate on restoring my steel cage while he continues to tell me about her mental instability. She had extreme postpartum depression and was later diagnosed with manic depression and deemed insane by the courts, which is why she was sentenced to a state mental hospital instead of prison.
“Say something.”
I keep my eyes downcast, afraid if I look at him, I won’t be able to hold myself together as well as I’m doing right now. “Is she still there?”
“No. She was released after serving twelve years.”
“What?” I blurt out in disbelief, finally looking up to Declan. “But . . . I was still a kid. Why didn’t she come for me?”
“She relinquished her parental rights.”
My thoughts begin to collide in my head, and when I turn my face away, he catches me. “Don’t do that. Don’t avoid.”
“Why am I so unlovable?”
“Look at me,” he demands, and when I do, his face is blurred through my unshed tears. “Your mum was sick. She—”