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Her face pinched as she tumbled through the memories. “I remember going to my baby sister, crawling into her crib, and wrapping my arms around her. I don’t think I said anything aloud, but I think I was making a promise that I would take care of her. Jessica.”
Wistfulness filled her hushed words when she said her sister’s name.
It speared through me, her devotion, her love.
“My father finally left one night, the door slamming shut behind him. We never heard from him again.” Savannah blinked rapidly. “He didn’t even say goodbye. You’d have thought that things might have gotten better after that, but I think in some sick way my father was holding my mother together or maybe she’d lost the one person she’d been taking her cruelty out on because she turned it on us.”
Rage skidded through my veins, and I drew her closer, her name my breath. “Savannah.”
Sadness shook her head. “She’d yell and scream and hit, and I remember being so thankful when she finally took us and dumped us at our grandmother’s when I was seven and my sister was four. We finally had a safe, quiet place.”
A bout of solace rolled through me, but it was eradicated in a moment. “Only our grandmother died two years later.”
Moisture clouded that storm-filled gaze. “I’d never felt so alone as then, so terrified as when our mother came to the neighbor’s house where we’d spent a couple nights and loaded us into her car. I remember how angry she’d seemed. Annoyed by our presence. After that, she kept dumping us different places, with our aunt for a couple months, then with random friends, though inevitably they’d get tired of having us around.”
The words seemed to get stuck in Savannah’s throat before she forced them out. “Pretty soon, our mother started leaving us with whatever guy she was dating at the time, and they…”
Her throat tremored, and I held her closer. Ugly, uncontrollable rage thrashed in my spirit.
A ferocity blazed through my body and ignited in my fingertips.
Searing me with the need to kill.
She swallowed, and she lifted that brave chin the way she did, pushing into a place I had a hunch she never allowed anyone into, either. The words that fell from her mouth were wrought with strain and the type of horror that only existed in the kind of life that she’d lived. “I did everything to protect my sister because she was the only one that mattered to me. It was just me and her against the world, and God, Ezra, were we against the world. Surviving the best that we could. I did everything I could to keep her safe.”
Savannah’s voice cracked, and I brushed my thumb over the sharp angle of her cheek. Sickness curdled in my stomach.
“No child should ever have to go through that, Savannah.”
A tear streaked free. “No, but we did. I was fifteen when our mother left us again. It took a couple weeks before I realized she was never coming back. Her boyfriend saw it as…an opportunity.”
She dragged her nails across my chest like she was seeking a way in.
A safe place.
And that’s the only fucking thing that I wanted for her.
To give her a safe place.
Savannah’s words turned harsh and haggard. “I wasn’t going to allow it to happen, Ezra, I wasn’t going to stand there weak and pathetic and allow someone to hurt us. To hurt my sister. So I packed the few things that we had, and we escaped that night. I kept us hidden, jumping from friend to friend, just like Jessica and I had done when we were young. But I knew if someone found out that our mother was gone, we’d be put in foster care, and we’d be separated. And that was a fate I couldn’t tolerate. I’d promised her that it was just her and me. Forever. We were going to make it together and we didn’t need anyone else. Why, when they would just abandon us anyway? Hurt us? We had to fight for ourselves and take care of each other.”
More tears fell, and I kept trying to capture them, hold them, so she’d know I’d hold her, too.
How could she trust anyone after what she’d been put through?
And I hated for her…hated every person who’d ever inflicted a scar. Anyone who’d ever let her down. Every single person who hadn’t been there for her when she needed it.
“And we did,” Savannah wheezed. “Jessica and I made it for years. Hiding in the shadows. We didn’t go to school because obviously someone would notice, and I worked two jobs and rented a room from this sweet old lady who I’d convinced I was twenty.”
She warred, and her voice dropped even lower. “Once Jessica turned eighteen, I was starting to hope, Ezra. Had started to hope that life was going to turn out different for us. We were going to make it past the abuse and the trauma that we’d been raised in.”
