The excitement in her gaze vanished, and in its place a shimmer of water blurred her eyes. “I…”
“Nothing. I was wiped from the earth so easily, Kloe. No one cared that Judd Asher had just vanished. He died that day. My life just… suddenly hadn’t been. No one mourned me. No one bothered to look too hard. Judd Asher melted into the background, and the nothing took him.”
She downed her drink and picked up the bottle that sat on the table, filling her glass to the top.
“So, I needed something, anything, to fill that gap.” Her eyes snapped back to mine again. “And that’s where you came in.”
“Me?”
“Mmm. If I couldn’t fill it with my life, then maybe I could fill it with yours. I needed to fill that gaping chasm with anything, just to make my existence real. To know that life still went on while mine stopped.”
“I don’t understand.” Her voice was quiet, her confusion evident in her narrow eyes.
“The world could have blown up. Aliens could have taken every living person on this cruel fucking planet, and I wouldn’t have had a clue while I rotted away in there. Twenty years is a long time, Kloe. So long that you begin to think that maybe the nothing took over everything else.” Another drink. “And maybe if I filled that nothing with your life, then maybe mine wasn’t as unimportant to the world. That my existence had a meaning after all.”
I could see she still didn’t comprehend what I was saying. Maybe it didn’t make sense for me to fill the gap in my life with someone else’s, but to me it made perfect sense. A story to scribe on the blank pages of twenty-one years. Lyrics to accompany the piece of music that didn’t otherwise flow fluidly from the orchestra. A life to fill a life.
Pushing my birth certificate slightly to the right, I placed hers down before mine.
“Is that my birth certificate?”
“It is,” I answered without glancing at her. “You were born two years before me so, of course, you go first.”
She sat, stunned into silence, as she watched me place the next paper down at the side of Judd’s disappearance article.
“You were seven when your mother, Josie Rowan, married Brian Smith.”
Pain flickered over her face when she looked at the marriage certificate. I hated it, the sorrow that seeped from her, so quickly lowering my eyes again, I placed the next item down.
“Where did you get that?” Her voice was choked, horror cloaking her soft voice as she started to shake beside me.
“It’s best not to ask that,” I answered, giving her a quick grin.
The medical record of Samantha Rowan mocked us both. Mocked her lies and her childhood.
“You were such a sweet little thing,” I murmured as I flipped open the file. “I couldn’t quite push myself to read it. Although I admit I’ve had it a while. But when you told me what my… father,” I spat out the word, making her flinch, “had done to you, I made myself look.”
My eyes slid to hers when I placed the police report down next, and I had to clench my fists together. “Care to tell me which is lying. You, or the report?”
She stiffened, her back slamming ramrod straight as she turned her face away from mine.
She gasped when I grabbed her jaw and forced her to look at me. “Why – did – you – lie?”
Tears rolled over her cheeks, wetting my hands with her suffering as she tried to shake herself from my grip.
“Tell me!”
“Fuck you!” she spat, agony pouring from her with her tears. “Stop it! Stop this!”
“Tell me, Kloe.” She wrestled with me, trying to scramble back, but she couldn’t escape, not this time. “Tell me the fucking truth. Stop lying to yourself. Face it!”
“No!” she screamed as her fists fought to connect with any part of me she could.
The evidence of her pain was crippling me, but she needed to face it. She needed to stop hiding from herself. She would never heal if she didn’t cede to the correct memories.
“It was all bullshit, Kloe. All lies you told yourself to stop it from hurting. But hurting is good. It’s the only thing that can help you to accept the truth.”
She pushed at me, desperate to escape what I was forcing her to remember. She’d built so many walls that even now she struggled to knock them down and allow the truth to seep inside. I understood her, I did, and I knew when she bore the real story of her life that it would crush her. Maybe that’s why I was forcing her to see, or maybe I actually wanted to help her, or maybe it was both, but either way, she had to admit to the past.
“Your mother never called you Honey Cup, did she? She never held you and loved you. She never comforted you in the hours you spent alone in that attic. Because she was as bad as him. Wasn’t she? She hurt you as much as he did. Didn’t she? DIDN’T SHE?”