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Another tear spilled over my lashes and flooded down my cheek, and I forced myself to lift my chin and look at my dad. “I-I’m sorry, Daddy. So sorry.”
He took a step toward me. “Baby, there’s nothing to be sorry for. Whatever it is, I swear, I’ll fix it. But I have to know what it is first, Lu.”
“You…you can’t fix me, Daddy.” Taking a deep breath, I dived in head first. “I’ve been…cutting myself since I was…twelve.”
A weight didn’t magically lift from my shoulders when I admitted to what I’d been doing. If anything, as I watched my dad’s eyes widen in a mixture of surprise and terror, it only grew heavier. My legs turned to jelly, but Harris was there to hold me up when I started to sway.
“That’s not funny, Lucy.” He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to deny what I’d just told him. “Let’s go back to the pregnancy thing. If this is some ploy to keep me from killing Harris, I’ll keep my hands clean. I’ll just call his dad and let him handle it.”
I hadn’t wanted to show him the proof but knew I’d have to. Harris wouldn’t let me half-ass this. With shaky fingers, I unsnapped the bracelet on my wrist and turned it over, showing him my scars. The small smile he’d tried to give me at his teasing disappeared. Lana and Aunt Emmie let out little gasps while Mom’s face paled and I knew if she hadn’t been sitting down she probably would have passed out.
“Twelve?” Mom choked out. “You’ve been hurting yourself for six years, Lucy? But, why?”
I couldn’t answer her. How did I explain why to her? It had been hard enough telling Harris.
Telling her that it was like a release for me didn’t even begin to explain it. No one understood. How could they?
Lana jumped to her feet and crossed the few feet that separated us. Her fingers were like ice as she lifted my wrist to examine it closer. “Lucy, this one was deep. You could have killed yourself.” Her face was paper white, her honey brown eyes looking haunted now. “Is that what you wanted to do? Kill yourself?”
“No. It’s not like that,” I rushed to assure her, but her hands were shaking so bad and the tears—gods, the tears—choked me to the point where I couldn’t speak.
Her head snapped in Marcus’s direction. “Did you know about this?”
I’d never seen any real emotion from Marcus before. He was normally so stoic that it was hard to tell if he was anything but bored, but right then he looked destroyed. His face was pale, his eyes full of so many emotions I couldn’t even begin to name them all. “I didn’t suspect anything like that.” His voice was hoarse, and I realized he was close to tears.
Marcus.
Close to tears.
I hadn’t realized he cared so much. Never knew I would hurt him just as deeply as I did my family. I wanted to wrap my arms around him, promise never to do it again, but part of me knew I couldn’t. What if I did it again? I wanted to do it right then and there. Everyone in the room was crying and I was fighting to draw in my next breath.
“But why?” Mom demanded again. She was trembling, and her eyes were just as wide with fear as my dad’s, but her voice was full of anger. “Why, Lucy? Why would you do this to yourself?”
“Layla, maybe you should calm down,” Aunt Emmie advised.
“Fuck calm,” she cried. “I want to know why, damn it.”
“Because it helped,” I exploded, and sucked in a breath that didn’t quite fill my lungs. “It’s the only thing that has ever helped. Sometimes I feel suffocated by everything that runs through my head. It becomes too much and all I want to do is draw in a deep enough breath, and the pain helps. It grounds me. I can breathe again. I can turn everything else off and sleep. I can focus because the pain distracts me from all the bad shit.”
I hadn’t meant to scream. Hadn’t planned on telling them any of what had just flooded out of me. But Mom’s anger had hit me straight in the heart because it was the one thing I had been scared of if she ever found out.
That she would hate me for it.
There have been so many amazingly strong women as role models in my life. I looked up to each and every one of them, but I couldn’t be as strong as them. I couldn’t handle the stress, the emotions that wouldn’t stop destroying me. The cutting brought me the kind of release I’d been unable to find anywhere else. Not with a therapist. Not with Harris.
Maybe I was defective.
“The therapist didn’t help?” Aunt Emmie questioned in a voice so quiet I almost didn’t hear her.
“N-no,” I muttered and met her gaze for a second before lowering my eyes back to the carpet. “Did he help you?” She had been with me when my biological father had taken me. He’d left her unconscious and bleeding on the ground and I’d been unable to help her. That wasn’t the only thing Aunt Emmie’d had to deal with in her life that she’d needed to seek help from a therapist for, but it was one that we both had shared together.
“A little.” She grimaced. “Not much, but a little.”
“Why didn’t you tell me it wasn’t working, Lucy?” Mom demanded, moving farther away from me. Seeing the distance she was putting between us only made me feel ten times more ashamed of what I’d done. “Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why?” she screamed.
