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“And that’s a bad thing?”
“It can be. When those around you are made to continuously sacrifice so that you can have things exactly as you want them.” Doom settled around her. She knew she’d made a mistake the second the words escaped. Why had they suddenly refused to be held back?
“Are we talking about you now?” Greg sounded truly perplexed.
“I somehow became what he’d been...” Why hadn’t she seen that? Was she talking out loud? She most certainly wasn’t having a conversation with Greg. She knew he was there. Felt his presence. Knew she had to keep herself separate and apart from it.
“All those years, Wood sacrificed, and Peter let him. Wood was smarter than Peter even. He could have been anything he wanted to be. Before he quit school, he was already getting scholarship opportunities. For sports and for academics. He turned it all down to finish raising Peter. Who, by the way, didn’t get any major scholarships. Not because he didn’t try. He just didn’t win them. And that was fine, because he worked harder than most.
“But when he graduated high school, rather than insisting that it was Wood’s turn, going to work before college so that Wood could have a chance to finish his own education, Peter just kept taking from his older brother. He never once encouraged Wood to do more. Never even asked what his brother might have wanted for his own life if their mother hadn’t been killed.
“And after we married...he did the same with me. He loved me. He brought me things I wanted. Gave me a home and family. But all of those things served him, too. Which isn’t bad. It’s the way it’s supposed to be...” What was wrong with her? She didn’t usually ramble. Didn’t go on and on.
“I loved him, but he was my past. This child is my future. I want to move on.”
So badly she wanted to move on. Move away from... Greg could have been there. Or not. There was only silence, and she couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Two people, filling each other’s needs. That’s how it’s supposed to work,” she said, but not sounding at all like the self she knew. She was acting like a ghost. Some creature that didn’t really exist, emitting words that had always been there, lingering, but not meant to be spoken.
Or heard. Not even by her own mind’s ear.
Peter had given her life after her parents had been killed. Without him...
And he’d been good to her. Loved her. Brought her gifts she’d truly wanted.
Been gentle in his dealings with her. And he’d been good to Wood, too. But in return, he’d expected both her and Wood to support him unconditionally. Peter hadn’t even considered Wood’s dreams—or her own. Peter had made Elaina feel obligated to him. Unlike the unconditional love she’d known with her parents, his had seem to come at a price. Like she was forever in his debt. And while she still cared for him, and was grateful for all he’d done for her, she didn’t owe him her future. She never had.
She’d been thinking, talking silently to herself, but heard a voice and realized she was talking out loud.
She watched it all happening, her on the couch, Greg somewhere there, words flying everywhere... Like a horror movie, a nightmare, she could see it all and couldn’t stop it.
There was roaring in her ears. A loud surf encasing her head in cotton. She was in a battle for herself. Breaking free from the misconceptions her mind had taken on, probably, in part, of her own accord, but from Peter’s confidence and strong personality, as well. She couldn’t hear Greg move; she couldn’t breathe.
“I tried to encourage Wood to do more...and he was so used to Peter taking that Wood somehow took my encouragement to mean that I thought he wasn’t enough. I...it kills me to think he ever thought I thought that... That I hurt him...” Emotion welled. She wasn’t sure what to do with it.
There was too much to let out. Too many tears to cry.
And too much to keep boxed in any longer.
She couldn’t grasp her own happiness. She’d lost the right when she’d hurt the two men who’d saved her from near death. Those two men who were the only living family she’d had.
“I was responsible for the accident,” she blurted out. “It’s because of me that Peter’s dead. I took from Wood the one thing he loved more than anything else in the world. And I took away everything Peter had worked for. And no one knows.”
The words were said.
Her truth had been exposed.
And she was done being a prisoner. For better or worse, her most horrible truth was free.
* * *
Greg just reached up and flipped the switch on the tableside lamp. The light infused the room in a soft glow that reached over to Elaina’s side of the couch, illuminating one si
de of her face and casting shadow on the other.
There were tears wetting her beautiful features, but they weren’t streaming, engulfing her. They just welled slowly over her eyes, dripped down her cheeks. The expression in her eyes seemed to have no beginning and no end. A part of her that had always been there, but that he could only now see.
Her ponytail, as neat as usual, seemed stark, unkind, as though expecting too much of someone who was weary from having to hold it all up, so perfectly, for so long.
