Something broke inside me and a wail reflected the turmoil that had been disturbing me. “I thought… I thought because I wanted to… to kill my own child that… that…”
Anderson’s arms came around me and he smothered me to his chest. His fingers cupped my head and his thumb twirled a short length of my hair. “That’s just silly. Nothing you did makes this your fault. It’s all on me. It’s all because I was too fucking stuck on revenge to accept the truth.”
“The truth?” I asked as my tears soaked his t-shirt.
“That none of this is your fault. It never was. I was wrong, Kloe. I admit I was wrong. All my life I’ve never understood how my parents could do such a thing. There had to be a reason. And I looked for a reason nearly all my life. And then there you were, and it was so easy to put that blame on you. Blaming you helped me to make sense of it all. It helped me to free the guilt. But it also made me believe a lie. A lie I wasn’t willing to trust but couldn’t seem to find another explanation to make that stupid one go away. I had to have something, anything, to blame. And I blamed you. I was wrong.”
I couldn’t begin to translate his statement. I was tired and his declaration deserved more than a quick thought and a half-hearted argument on my side. “Okay. I’m tired, Anderson, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to talk about this more.”
“I know. I just needed to say it before…”
He clammed up and I tilted my head, listening to the change in his breathing. “Before what?”
“Before I can’t.”
Well that didn’t make any sense, but before I could react to his puzzling words, he slipped his thumb against my lip, telling me he needed my silence. “Terry is waiting for you.”
Fear, just with his name, settled into my bones, and I sucked in a breath as my head shook from side to side. “Waiting for me?”
Quickly, Anderson realising his mistake, said. “No, not like that. I have him. He’s in the basement. Waiting for your vengeance.”
Visions of the last week flooded me and I winced. “I didn’t let him in, Anderson.”
After a short silence, he asked, “What do you mean?”
“He wanted my sanity. But I wouldn’t let him have it. I tried so hard to keep him out, and I think if you hadn’t turned up when you did, then he would have forced his way in.”
“You have no idea how strong you are,” he whispered.
“You. That’s all I could think of. Throughout it all, everything he did to me, I kept telling myself that I couldn’t let him win. I couldn’t fail you. I know he did what he did to me to hurt you, so I wouldn’t let him. Physical pain I can handle, but I refused him the mental torture he tried to put on me. I pushed him out, I closed off to him.” I turned my head, looking at him without seeing him. “You think I forced this blindness on myself?”
His sigh was heavy. “Maybe. Maybe it helped you. If you couldn’t see, then you wouldn’t visualise the horror for the rest of your life. Like you say, physical pain heals, but mental pain burns itself to us for a very long time.”
His hand slipped to my belly and I lowered my own, the cannula that was stuck in the back of my hand catching and making me hiss. “I’m sorry,” I whispered as shame made my stomach twist. “I shouldn’t have said those things I said to you. I was angry. You will be a fantastic father. You have so much love to give, so much gentleness inside you.”
Sorrow seemed to seep from him. I didn’t understand; I thought he would have been happy. “Anderson?”
Shaking himself, he rubbed my tummy. “I know. I hurt you. You had every right to say those things.”
Before I could say anything else, I felt the bed move as Anderson stood. “You need to eat. You need building up, for you and our child.”
I opened my mouth to say I wasn’t hungry but the sound of the door clicking closed made me blink. Something was bothering him. Still, even now, he lied to me. He hid things from me. My heart had soared when he had told me he no longer blamed me, that he had been wrong. Now there was room for hope, for our future, and for both of us. But I sensed Anderson didn’t think that way, that something was holding him back.
The silence made my blindness all the more real. My head flipped from side to side as my ears picked up various noises. Panic made my chest grow tight and my fingers dug into the sheet covering me. Being trapped inside a vacuum of blackness was brutal. We take sight for granted, well I did, and all of a sudden it was gone, leaving nothing but a gaping hole of things I couldn’t see, things I was vaguely aware of but unsure of. Every sound mocked me and my head spun from side to side, my eyes even narrowing as if I would be able to see through tiny slits instead of wide eyes.
“Miss Grant?” A female voice cut through the loud silence in my head and broke the suffocating dread drowning me.
Confusion set in at the unfamiliar voice and I frowned, moving my head around to try and determine where she was.