Her lips trembled, and she pressed them together. She gave a short nod. “That’s normal. Anger is a part of grief.”
This was different. But I didn’t want to get into that. Clearly, Rhiannon was struggling too.
Clicking the door shut behind me, I took a step into the room. That put us half a dozen feet apart. Rhiannon was in the corner before the closet, right next to that mirror where Delilah sat on the floor and did her makeup.
I considered heading for the sofa, but I leaned against the kitchen counter instead. “How are you handling it?”
Rhiannon glanced around and let out a half laugh. “About the same as you. Sad and angry.”
“I guess that’s to be expected.”
“But confused, too.” She rubbed a hand down her face and gestured to some photos taped to the wall. “This one, I’m assuming it’s her mom. She looks like Delilah. The rest though? Every photo is of you guys.” Rhiannon pointed at each one as she spoke. “You and Delilah. Delilah and Simone. Delilah and Lori, from the nursery. Junie and Simone. Even a picture of Honey.”
Laughing dryly, she shook her head. “Everything in here is neat and tidy. Just look at her closet. She has her shirts and pants organized by color, style, cut. And when I was looking through everything, I found this.” She grabbed a notebook off the windowsill. With tears in her eyes, she flipped between the pages. “She’s been making a list of everyone who’s helped her here. Every article of clothing we’ve given her, every pair of shoes, every bit of makeup Simone loaned her. It’s a ledger she was gonna use to pay everybody back or maybe donate to theranch once she was on her feet. I don’t know. But I’ve been in the apartments of depressed people, and they never look like this.
“This girl wasn’t depressed.” Rhiannon wiped some snot from her nose with the edge of her sleeve. “She was happy, and she was hopeful. And she was just the sweetest thing. We gave her close to nothing, but it was everything to her, and I just can’t believe this. I can’t believe any of it.”
That lump in my throat got thicker with every word she spoke. Tears finally spilled over. Not in a stream, but a gush. A sharp inhale kept me from sobbing. But the tears weren’t stopping.
My voice quivered again when I said, “Is this what Sarah’s cabin looked like?”
Rhiannon’s face screwed up. Her lips swelled as the tears came down. It took a few calming breaths before she could nod in answer. “Sebastian told you about her, huh?”
I nodded too.
“She was the first person I thought about when Edwards and Mitchell showed yesterday.” Rhiannon swatted some tears away. “Similar story, I guess. But at least this town shamed Jason out of it. He got some sort of punishment. Not as much as he deserved, but he didn’t get to go on living his life like nothing happened.
“And this son of a bitch, this Evan, or Ethan, or whatever the hell his name is, he’s going to get away with it. Jason did too.” The tears came down again, and Rhiannon gulped in a breath. As she let it out, she rubbed her eyes. “All these bastards get away with it.”
“That’s why I’m angry.” My lips trembled like the wings of a hummingbird. The tears came down harder, but I didn’t stop. I had to say it. “I was angry when my mom died, but not like this. My mom died because she was drinking and driving. I was angry she never got her life together. I was angry that I didn’t havetime to heal that relationship. I was angry she was gone, and we were never going to fix the things that were broken between us. But this is different.” It was a sob this time. “This is different, Rhiannon.”
Eyes pinched shut, she cupped a hand over her face to regain her composure. She lowered it with lips in an O, exhaling slowly. “I know it is. I know, kid.”
“I don’t know how you do this.” Breaths were getting harder to find. Even when I told myself to breathe, I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. Not between the tears. “I don’t know how you can handle all this pain. We bring you all this, and you help us. You heal us. You were healing her. It was working. She was learning. She had hope, and dreams, and a future. And now it’s gone. It’s just gone because of him.
“I know he killed her, just like I know David could’ve killed Simone, but I don’t know how you deal with this. I don’t know how you can stay so calm. I don’t know how you can hear these women tell their stories and not want to kill the bastards who did this to them.”
It was either a sob or a laugh that escaped Rhiannon. I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was a combination of both. “Moments like this don’t make it any easier.”
The only way to stop my trembling lip was to bite down on it. But when I opened my mouth, it just started again. “I can’t write a poem. I can’t write about the way that I feel, because there aren’t words for this. Words can’t explain how sick this world makes me. How it treats women, how it punishes us for every breath we take, every move we make, but men are rewarded for nothing. It’sourfault when they hurt us. It’s our fault for having bad taste in them. The world thinks so little of us, that even when we’re working toward something, when we’re doing everything right, everythingtheydid will catch up to us, and we can’t handleit. They think we’ll kill ourselves because we can livethroughwhat they did, but we can’t live without them?
“I just—” A gasping sob cut me off. “I love this ranch, but it shouldn’t have to exist. Women shouldn’t need to run here because no one else will help us. We shouldn’t have to live in fear that an ex is gonna show up and beat the shit out of us like David did to Simone. We shouldn’t have to come here at all, because they shouldn’t treat us the way they do.
“Then they won’t leave us be. Me and Delilah both had to run in the middle of the night, because they wouldn’t justleave us be. Troy never really wanted me to begin with. He just wanted what I could do for him. Now, I’m the crazy one. I’m the one who can’t sleep at night. I’m the one who needs drugs to keep the nightmares at bay. I can’t trust any man, can’t open up to anyone, and he’s fine. He’s just fine, and I’m crazy. If he ever shows, if he ever hurts me again, all he has to do is put the gun in my hand, and everybody’ll say I did it myself. Just like with Sarah. Just like Delilah.”
Lips shaking, head pounding, I gripped the counter for stability.
The image of blood splattering consumed my mind. Delilah in Sarah’s place, a bullet ripping through her forehead, crimson shooting out her pretty blonde hair, gray matter sticking to the trees behind her, staining the snow like David’s had. “Is that what he did? Did he shoot her, Rhiannon? What did he do to her? Why do they think it was a suicide?What did he do to her?”
Rhiannon came across the room to me. Her arms twisted around my shoulders, and mine around hers. I collapsed into her, unsure if anything I just said made sense, unsure if she even heard it through my weeps.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she whispered through tears of her own. “It’s okay?—”
“It’s not okay!” A sob or a scream, I wasn’t sure. It bellowed into the crook of Rhiannon’s neck as we collapsed to the vinyl floors. “None of this is okay!”
“I know.” Sniffling, gasping in breath, she held me tight and ran a hand over the back of my head. “I know, sweetheart.”
Rhiannon knew the pain, but she didn’t know the fury.
