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I wasn’t brave. I was so scared that it had been worn into my skin. His words were more lies. More knives in my already open wounds, carving away at any of the innocence I had held in an iron fist when I ran.
“What do you think you know about me, Callum?” I asked him another question, one that would likely go unanswered again. So, instead of waiting for his reply, I spat my own words out at him. I moved toward him, and to his credit, he didn’t flinch, not once. “You made it abundantly clear you wanted to know fuck all the day you pushed, no,shovedme out of your life. You told me you never wanted to see or speak to me again. I told you I loved you, and you told me I was just a stupid little girl who didn’t know what love was.” I came within inches of his face. His eyes bored into mine. “Doyou remember that?” With every word, I pushed my finger into his chest, yet he still didn’t react.
“I remember.” His words were whispered, barely audible. “You don’t understand, Alina. I had no choice.”
I laughed. It was bitter and filled with contempt for his poor excuse for reasoning. “You had no choice but to turn your back on me like everyone else in this town. Damn you to hell, Callum. Get out.” Brimming with anger, I thrust my arm toward the bedroom door. “Get the fuck out of my house,” I yelled.
I was filled with a violent rage. After waiting ten years to hear his explanation, Callum had left me infuriated, disappointed by how weak he was, that he couldn’t even man up to the real reason he tucked his tail between his legs and ran back to the town that hated my mother and me so much.
“There is always a choice, Callum. You’re just too fucking gutless to admit the real reason,” I said and watched his face twist, giving way to his own fury.
The mask of his patience had begun to waiver, replaced with unbridled frustration. No matter how much or hard I pushed him for the truth, his secret and lies were locked up in his personal vault.
Quietly, he pulled back and swung his legs off the bed, pausing when he got to the door, keeping his back to me. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Hearing his car on the gravel, I threw myself back on the mattress, screaming into the pillow on my bed.
Screaming until I no longer made a sound.
* * *
If it hadn’t been for Callum, I would never have gone back to school. I would have continued to hide out until my mother’s trial and she was released. I had met with her and the legal-aid lawyer in the morning before I’d returned to school. His name was Tobias Green, green by name and by nature. He was a fumbling idiot. I was under no illusion this would be his first case. My mother had misplaced trust in him with her freedom, which was placed squarely in his hands, and it seemed like that trust was too heavy for him to hold.
“You need to plead guilty.” He addressed my mother only, ignoring me entirely. I think I made him nervous. “We can claim insanity and get a lesser sentence.”
“I’m not insane,” my mother protested, her sad eyes falling on me. “Tell him, Alina. I’m not crazy, you tell him, my angel. Tell him.”
“How much time would she get?” Asking Tobias the question pained me as if the one person she had in her life was also convinced she was guilty of murder.
“Martha, you have already confessed. If we can convince the judge you’re guilty because of mental impairment, the least you could expect is detention in a psychiatric hospital. You’ll get the help you need and possibly be rehabilitated through the jail’s mental health system.” He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, adjusting the same pages he’d already organized twice since his arrival. “The worst is life imprisonment.”
“Mr. Green, she can’t go to jail. It would kill her.”
* * *
Tobias Green didn’t care. He couldn’t possibly have cared less about my mother or her case. It was his first case, and the faster he could push it through the courts, the better off he would be. To him, my mother was simply a court experience.
The trial had lasted a week, and by the end, the judge had convicted her of manslaughter. She had been taken away in a fit of tears, both hers and mine.
My mother was sentenced to fifteen years minimum in a psychiatric facility until she was deemed fit and no longer a threat to herself or the public. She was to spend year after year, locked away in a hospital with walls colored between pea green and cream without any stimulation from the kaleidoscope of colors she loved so much. And yet, she was still expected to rehabilitate.
If anyone was crazy here based on that ridiculous notion alone, it certainly was not my mother.
ChapterTwelve
Alina
My day had been carefully planned, crafting it so I could avoid being within the same space as Callum when he turned up. If I could avoid having any unnecessary conversations or being prodded by his questions for the time he was there, I could call the day a success.
I knew he wanted to talk, to explain, but I didn’t have the heart or patience to put myself through that metaphorical meat grinder. I’d barely escaped the last time.
It was almost midmorning before I heard his car come ambling down my driveway. I had taken some sort of refuge in the garden shed while hoping to find some tools my mother once used to tend to the lavender fields sprawling the grounds of our property. The shed still had the lingering scent of the oil she’d used to weather the old boards. The smell provided a small sense of happier times.
My mother always worked the fields and was meticulous about the scheduling of her beloved plants. Hours upon hours, and day after day, she’d tended the crops, working herself to exhaustion because of the passion she had for the purple-hued blossoms.
“Jackpot.”
After digging around rusted and foreign objects for almost an hour, my eyes discovered the garden fork hanging from an old hook along the beams on the shed wall. Reaching up, I wiggled my fingers, trying to touch it and slide it down. After a couple of dismally failed attempts, I searched for something to step on, giving me the few extra inches of height I desperately needed.
