There was a good chance I wasn’t the right person to ask.
“No,” I said. “It makes you a fair one. You wish you could balance an uneven scale.”
She let out a breath and wiped at her nose, sniffling. “Thank God. I felt so guilty.”
“Shame is something you feel when you’ve done something wrong,” I said. “Guilt is empathy we’ve been taught to feel for any and everyone, even when they don’t deserve it. Evan doesn’t deserve your guilt.”
She chewed her lower lip. “I really haven’t done anything to feel guilty for. I left, but that’s not something I should be ashamed of. It was just about protecting myself. And, I thought, protecting my baby.”
“If anything, you should be proud. It took me eleven years to leave my ex. It only took you three.”
“I don’t know about that.” Delilah finally lifted her mug to her lips. She blew on it but still didn’t take a sip. “I mean, I know that I did what I had to. But this wasn’t where I saw my life going, you know? Me and my dad, we had a good relationship. Until all this, we really did. I wanted to be whohewanted me to be. The sweet, innocent little flower. The good girl.”
My heart beat a little harder, and the same fire I had felt when I’d killed David burned in my chest. “No, Delilah. That’s not who you want to be.”
“It kind of is though,” she said. “Or it was, I guess. That’s what I always wanted. Marry my high school sweetheart, have a couple kids, buy a little house in the suburbs, and live happily ever after.”
“But now you know.” Setting my mug on the coffee table, I shook my head. “Now you know that the happily ever after is just that. The rolling credits at the end of a fairytale. That’s not real life.
“In real life, women fit in two boxes. We’re either the delicate flower or the violent storm. The victim or the villain. One harsh storm is gonna break the flower’s neck. All victims get are thoughts and prayers. At least villains get justice. If you’ve gotta be the flower or the storm, be the damn storm. And be proud of it. Because if you were the flower, you wouldn’t have survived. Youhadto be the storm. And I’m glad you were.”
A smile quirked the edge of Delilah’s lips. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Because you’re here to tell the story,” I said. “Because he could’ve killed you, and you got away before he had the chance. Because we’re sitting here, drinking hot cocoa, and snow is falling outside, and a fluffy dog is curled up under your legs, and everyone in this room knows that they’re safe, and that we have a future ahead of us.
“We wouldn’t be sitting here right now if we hadn’t fought back. If we hadn’t chosen to be the villain when we could have been the victim. You and I, we get to be friends. We get to have lives. One day, maybe we’ll marry better men, and we’ll have kids, and they’ll be friends too, and they’ll never go through what we went through, because we won’t teach them to be flowers. We’ll teach them to be storms.”
A few seconds passed, and she just looked at me. Her eyes crinkled at the edges, and that touch of joy at the corner of her mouth climbed higher.
“What?” I asked, eyes creasing with confusion. “Why’re you looking at me like that?”
The smile climbed. “We’re friends, huh?”
I laughed. “I think soon, we’ll be best friends.”
Smiling wider, she shook her head. “I haven’t had any of those in a while.”
“Well, now you’ve got a whole hell of a lot. And friends drink each other’s cocoa.” I gestured to it. “C’mon. Tell me that’s not better than store bought.”
Chuckling, Delilah took a sip. Eyes wide, she gulped down another. “I need this recipe. Like, yesterday.”
“I’ll jot it down for?—”
Crack-cra—Thump!
We jumped to look out the window behind the sofa.
Half a dozen yards from my cabin, a tree limb, white with snow, laid half on the ground. A few streaks of wood still bound it to the conifer’s trunk, holding it at an angle. Somehow, it looked like it’d always been there. Like it’d grown that way to lend support to the entire tree’s structure.
Delilah chuckled, and so did I. She said, “You know what?”
“What’s that?”
“Storms are prettier than flowers anyway.”
