He’s alive and he’s home.
Every time I go into town, I’m afraid I’ll run into him. Every time I turn around, I’m afraid I’ll see his face, once a face I knew like the back of my own hand. A face I used to love to touch and kiss and hold in the palms of my hands, now a face that I’ll never be able to look at without being reminded of all the things I’ve done. It won’t matter that those things were all for him. It won’t matter how much I’ve died a thousand times over the years, all for him. Nothing will matter to him but the fact that I’m still here, still where he left me, following in my mother’s footsteps, unable to move forward. While unspeakable things were being done to him, every day for five years, I had good things, wonderful things right at my fingertips, and I let them slip away. It won’t matter how or why; it will only matter that I let them go.
Pushing myself up from the bench, I walk with determined steps through the wet grass, to the one place I can still escape and forget the world around me until Meredith gets here tomorrow and talks some sense into me. It cuts me like a knife each time I walk in there and see the floor and the mirrors covered in dust, unused and forgotten, but it’s still my place, my sanctuary and the one thing that is still one hundred percent all mine, that no one, not even my mother, can take from me.
She’s taken it all, and still, it’s not enough. She’ll continue to take and demand and I’ll continue to fold, because it’s the only thing I know how to do. Over the years, we developed a quiet understanding that has served us well. I did as she said without complaint, and she continued to make sure Eli’s sister and the rest of the world would always remember him as a hero. Now that he’s alive, now that old rumors resurfaced, that quiet understanding has been destroyed. I’ve had to beg and plead with her every day, I’ve had to show weakness and bite back my anger because, once again, I needed her popularity with all the heavy hitters in the town and government that carried over from my father, and the power that reputation brings to fix things. And once again, she named her price and I paid in full to make sure Eli and his sister were protected.
I rub the tips of my fingers against the band of the watch on the inside of my wrist, as I make the two-acre walk across our land to the stables. I can see a few lights streaming from the windows in the distance, guiding me through the dark cover of night. My mother and the household staff are fast asleep in the main house, and the stable workers went home to their families hours ago. Just like I’ve done every night for the last three and half months, I quietly walk through the open archway into the stables, letting the soft whinny of one of the horses and the stomping of hooves against the dirt calm my racing heart.
I head past the stalls and turn down the hallway that leads to the very back of the stable, pausing in front of the locked door. Closing my eyes, I try and stop the memories, but it’s pointless. I continue coming to this room, night after night, because I need the pain. I need the sharp stab of agony in my heart and the overwhelming ache of sadness, because even though it hurts, underneath all that pain is a reminder that I used to be happy. I used to be a different person, a stronger person, a confident person.
Slowly opening my eyes, I unlock the door, and walk down another dark hallway, my hands shaking with nervous energy as I flip the switch on the inside of the room. My room. The place I love and hate equally. Leaning my back against the wall right inside, I slide to the ground and let the memories consume me, slicing my heart open to leave me bleeding on the floor.
Chapter 4
Eli
You’re sure you’ll be okay home alone?” Kat asks for the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes since her husband, Daniel, left to drop my niece off with a sitter.
God forbid they leave a two-year-old home alone with her crazy uncle. It’s not like I know the first thing about kids, or would even want to be home alone with one, but it would have been nice to be asked. To be considered. To feel normal.
Fuck, I have a niece. A beautiful, chatty, spitting image of my sister, niece.
“Kat, I’m not a child, I’ll be fine. Plus, I have Rylan to keep me company.”
The man in question lifts his arm next to me on the couch and gives my sister a wave. She ignores him, like always. Aside from having to put up with my bullshit, she’s also had to contend with my best friend also living under her roof until he can get acclimated to not being chained to a wall and not having to ask permission every time he takes a piss. Although his problems lean farther away from screaming nightmares in the middle of the night to being a slob of a houseguest with no respect for anything around him. Rylan grew up in the system, bouncing around from one foster home to the next until we graduated high school and he convinced me to join the Marines with him. He spent more time in our tiny apartment at the edge of town when we were kids than he did at any of his numerous foster homes, finding more comfort with us even though we had two drunks for parents who never cared about our well-being, than he did in the homes he moved around between during that time. Kat had the unfortunate experience of having not one, but two, older brothers to stick up for her and kick anyone’s ass who dared mess with her. I probably should have asked if it was okay that Rylan shack up in her house instead of just bringing him home with me when we were rescued, but it’s not like my sister would have ever said no anyway. Rylan was part of the family, and he always would be, end of story.
“Did you take your medication today?” Kat asks softly, grabbing her purse from the side table by the front door when we hear Daniel’s car pull into the drive.
“We got your uppers, we got your downers, we got your Xanax and your Prozac, your Lipitor for high cholesterol from the shit they made us eat, when they remembered to feed us, and every antibiotic known to man to make sure we didn’t bring any funk home,” Rylan rattles, ticking off the long list of medicines we both came home with. “We’re covered, sis.”
I snort and Kat sighs.