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“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. There’s a hole inside my chest.” I wanted to tear it out as I started toward her. “It’s in there, and it’s as big as an ocean. I can’t take a day. I take a day, and I’ll feel everything. I’ll fall into that ocean, and I’ll never come back out. I’m at the top, still hanging on. I am refusing to fall because there’s no lifeboat for me there. There’s no ladder to climb back out. I fall and I’m there alone, and I’m never coming back.” I stared at her a moment, feeling my emotions rage. “He took my friend,” I continued, “the only friend I was able to have. He took her dad. Her mom. Her siblings. And two days later—two days—my mom and brother were gone too. She—” I had to stop and catch my breath, my lungs were spasming so tight. “I don’t know why it happened. If she was so shocked that she couldn’t control the car?” My voice broke, but I forced it steady. I forced everything in me steady. “That week was the worst in my life, taking me into this new nightmare world, and in some ways, I’ve never left. This is just the latest shitty thing to happen to me, except this thing is shitty enough that the entire world once again knows how shitty my life is.”
Lo stood silently, listening with tears falling down her face.
I made myself breathe in some calm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to unleash all of that on you.”
Lo opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her head dropped. She walked straight over and wrapped her arms around me.
Oh.
She held on tight as she whispered, “I’m so fucking terrified.”
I reached up, putting my arms around her as best I could.
“I’m scared someone will kill Mom and Dad,” she continued.
My hands flexed, holding her to me.
“I have nightmares that someone will find our house, and Roger will try to defend us because you know he will. But he’s not a fighter and he’ll get killed instead. And my baby girls…” Her voice broke.
I squeezed her as tightly as I could.
This was why I should’ve planned for this.
Why I should’ve run, no matter what Brett said.
That was all too late now. The only thing I had was regrets, and the only thing that could’ve stopped any of this terror from touching them was if I had left as soon as I legally could, if I had lived with no family, no friends, and no loved ones that he could take away from me.
I ached at just imagining that life.
“I’m so terrified of what could happen to them. If I’m taken. If I’m killed. If they’re…” She hiccupped through her tears. “I can’t go there. If I do, I will lose my shit in a way that I’ll never be able to unlose it. But Billie…” She pulled back, still holding onto me. “I am absolutely terrified of losing my sister.”
My hands trembled against her back. Her sister. Brett called Charlotte, Cynthia, and Luna my nieces.
My family.
I’d fought so hard from letting them in that last wall, but it was all for nothing now.
I loved them. They were my family.
Lo kept going, not knowing my train of thought, “I don’t want to imagine what your life has been like, and I’m saying that because I’ve done it. All of us have. Mom. Dad. Roger. You have to do what you have to do to get through this shit. I understand that, but don’t push to the point where something in you completely breaks and I lose my sister a whole different way. I’m not worried about some sick psycho trying to hurt you. You’re a survivor. You’re going to survive whatever comes at you, but you need to survive yourself too.”
I sucked in a rattling breath and whispered, “I just told you, I can’t fall into that dark ocean world. I won’t climb back out.”
She shook her head. “That’s bullshit. I’m obsessed with you. If you go, I go. And if I go, Roger comes. Then the girls. Howard. But Vicky will be the last, and she’ll hold out. She won’t go with us.”
A slight laugh escaped me. “You’re right. She’d find a boat.”
“Totally. She’d bring the Coast Guard to save all our asses.”
“She would.”
“See? If you go into that dark ocean, we’ll make sure you’d come back. And we didn’t even consider what Brett Broudou would do. Knowing him, he’d dive in under you to quickly make a raft so you never even touch the water.”
I barked out a laugh. “I don’t know about that.”
“Or he’d try to punch into a different dimension. Maybe a different ocean. A pink ocean.”
