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Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve got this.
“Hey, Willow,” I coo. “Remember me?”
Willow slumps down the headboard onto the pillows, clutching the woven blanket like it’s a lifeline. She stares at me for a long, teary-eyed moment, then nods.
“Good.” I smile. I’m surprised at how natural it feels to smile at her. “I had to take your mommy to the doctor’s. She’s sick.” Which, technically, is accurate.
More or less.
“Sick?” Willow frowns and hides half her face behind the blanket. “But she was just here.”
“I know. I think she’s been sick for a while, and just didn’t want you to worry. Does she…”Fuck,how do I ask this kid without traumatizing or confusing her? “Does she do that a lot?”
Willow looks away. Then slowly nods. “Mommy doesn’t want me to worry,” she mutters so quietly, I almost can’t hear her. “And Martin doesn’t like it when we go to the doctor. He gets real mad.”
I grab one of the stuffed lounge chairs from a corner of the room and carefully set it down near the bed. The movement gives me an excuse to grab something hard in lieu of punching my fist through the wall like I’d rather be doing. I almost slam the chairon the ground just to be cathartic for myself, but I rethink it when I see the little girl eye me warily.
So instead, I set it down so slowly and quietly, the legs never make so much as a squeak when I settle my large frame down onto the chair. This seems to have the effect on Willow that I wanted: she’s stopped sniffling, and she’s not cowering away from me. She actually seems curious, eyeing me from behind the blanket.
“Martin?” Again, I don’t know the right questions to ask a traumatized five-year-old. I find it interesting that she doesn’t call him “Daddy” or “Dad” or whatever.
“Yeah.” She lowers the blanket just enough to grab her stuffed animal and hug it to her chest. “He’s my dad. I guess.”
I do my best to suppress my smirk. “You guess?”
Willow shrugs and starts picking lint off the toy’s fur. “He’s mean. He’s really mean to Mommy.”
“Is he mean to you?”
Translation:Do I need to go load up my men and pay thismudaka visit?
Because, as much as I might not do the whole “kid thing,” I sure as shit don’t tolerate abuse. Especially not when it’s a grown man hitting a little girl.
Even the king of hell has standards.
Willow scrunches up her face. “He yells a lot. He—he—he calls me names sometimes, but Mommy doesn’t like that.” She hugs the stuffed rabbit closer. “He hits Mommy,” she mumbles into the fur.
I have so many questions. So many questions, and not a clue how to get the right answers. I want to know more about this Martin asshole, where he lives, how he got his hands on Clara, who thefuckhe thinks he is terrorizing such a sweet little girl…
But I don’t want to make the kid cry by launching an interrogation. And, frankly, it’s none of my business. It’s not my problem.
And I’m going to keep chanting that to myself like a fucking mantra so my instincts follow suit.
“Are you gonna send us back?”
Her question yanks me out of my brooding. “What?”
Willow swings her feet around so they dangle over the side of the bed. She’s still holding fast to the rabbit, but not as white-knuckled as before. “When Mommy feels better. Are you gonna send us back to Martin?”
Fuck no.
I study her carefully and choose my words with as much caution as possible. “Do you want to go back?”
She immediately shakes her head. Fear fills her eyes. “No!”
“Then no.” I slowly rise from the chair and take her moment of visible relief to gently nudge her back down. “It’s bedtime. You need to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
