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She picks the blanket I just dropped on the floor and covers herself before turning toward me.
My eyes glimpse her black bra, and I pull on the two corners of the blanket, covering her front. When I squeeze her in a hug, she flinches at the sudden contact, and her entire body tenses. But I don’t let go. My mind is running a race. My thoughts are incoherent. I’m not sure what to think. I hold her tight, hoping her touch will give me some answers.
Time passes, and her body slowly relaxes in my grip as I lead her to the couch. She hasn’t spoken a word, and now I’m dreading if she thinks she has already shared enough.
I turn to her, giving her the space she needs, and whisper in a hushed voice, “Help me understand, Marr. For the past half hour, my mind has been racing, and now I’m scared of my own thoughts. I can no longer sit in this mental train dreading what happened to you. Please stop this frenzy for me.”
“What are your worst thoughts?” Her eyes shine with tears, but her voice is steady.
Her tears are not of sorrow, but it’s the pain of opening herself, being vulnerable in front of me. She doesn’t know how much I respect her in this fucking moment.
“No, we are not playing the guessing game. You’re going to tell me everything that you planned to when you asked me to talk in private. You’ll tell me every-fucking-thing you planned to tell me.”
She swallows, glancing nervously up at me, indecision clear in her shiny blue eyes.
“Oscar told me you underwent treatment for social anxiety disorder,” I say. She blinks rapidly, her eyes large and lost. “I twisted his arm. I wanted to know more, anything, about you.”
“I grew up in Kindred Hearts Orphanage. Nobody knows about my parents,” she says and again goes quiet, maybe giving me a chance to absorb her words. But her words make no fucking sense.
“I know it’s hard, but you’ll have to give me more than that, baby,” I whisper softly. I’m still as a stone, my head buried between my hands with elbows resting on my thighs. I don’t want to cause any disturbance, and break her trance.
“A lady who worked at Kindred Hearts found me in a dilapidated house…in a gruesome state. My back had wounds”—her hands reach behind her back over the blanket—“filled with blood and pus. I was…barely breathing. Doctors said I might have been in that state for several days as my wounds were severely infected.” The couch moves as she shivers, reciting the horrid events.
While she catches her breath, my breathing has stopped.
“I stayed in the hospital for several months. Forensics roughly estimated the scars to be three or four years old. My age was also an approximate guess. So, who—” Her words come out raspy, like her throat is having difficulty forming sentences. “Whoever had me, had me for a few years. That means I couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old before I...I was…in the possession of—”
“W-who took you?” My hands grip the corner of the couch as my brain tries to comprehend her words, my body taut with fear, anger, and frustration.
She shakes her head, her eyes not meeting mine. “Don’t know. After the crime was reported by Kindred Hearts staff, police searched the area, but they couldn’t find anyone. Most likely someone dumped me there.”
“Your parents?”
She shakes her head again. “I had only three memories when they brought me to the hospital. Pain, immense pain, seeping through my bones. Sleep—I was always sleeping. Doctors believed I was mostly sedated.”
“What’s the third thing?”
“Roses.” For the first time, there’s a faint lightness in her voice. “I only remembered the smell of roses. Wherever I was, there were roses.”
Can this be any more fucked up?
I clear my throat, my heart running a mile a minute. “H-how do you know that?”
“I was in the hospital, and one day, a nurse brought red roses for me. Before that day, I had never spoken a word or reacted to anything. But I pointed to the bouquet and smiled. She asked me if I liked roses and that was my first word: rose. So, they started calling me Rose, and I got the name.”
“No one came to find you?” My throat struggles to form sentences, but I also need to know her story.
She shakes her head in denial once more. “No. There was no report of a missing child. My case stayed open for a long time.” Her hands twist around the edges of the blanket. “When I moved to Cherrywood, I requested they close it.”
I gaze ahead and run both my hands through my hair. “You don’t want to meet your parents?”
“I don’t have parents, Zander. The people who brought me into this world forgot me long ago. I don’t want to be a burden on anyone. I don’t want to be… unwanted, again.” There’s not even a pinch of hatred in her voice. She says it as a matter of fact. How can she not hate those who should have protected her but failed horribly? But before I ask her that, I need to know more.
“What happened to you all those years?”
She takes a deep breath, as if praying to some heavenly force for courage. “Not sure. I have burn marks of something sharp. My skin was torn and loose. The charity trust of the hospital donated for some grafting surgeries. Doctors believe someone kept me on a bed of hot metal or something.”
“Fucking hell!” My razor thin control snaps as I burn with rage.
