“I wasn’t…” I couldn’t find the word, so I decided, “right until you were here,” I confessed. “It’s not like I’m right now, I just feel better that you’re here.”
She tipped her head to the side and whispered, “Same.”
I shook my head and continued my confession, “I was such a shit sis?—”
Alex corrected her head with a snap. “Stop it, Blake.”
She got up and walked to me, then sank cross-legged on the floor in front of me.
There was something so Alex about that, but I was not this Blake at the vanity table, not anymore.
Thus, I got up, pushed the chair aside and sank down on the floor with her so our knees were brushing.
Her gaze warmed at my actions, and she reached for my hands.
We both took hold.
“We were like…fellow captives,” she said.
Oh God.
That was the perfect way to describe it.
We so were.
“You did what you could to survive,” she went on. “And so did I.”
“I wish I’d snapped out of it a lot sooner,” I remarked.
She shook our hands. “Who cares when you did? You did. And I carry guilt because I left you to it.”
That stunned me. “You left me to what?”
She lifted a shoulder, but her half-shrug was ill at ease. “You were the next in line. She focused on you. It was like she was grooming you to be like her. Blake, I knew she was doing that, even when I was young and I didn’t understand what it was called. I knew it wasn’t fun for you. And I escaped. I left you to it.”
“It was hardly your job to protect me from her.”
“We should have been a team.”
“We were,” I asserted, and her head twitched. “Okay, maybe not a very functioning one.”
She started to laugh.
I tightened my hold on her. “But we made it through.”
“Thank you for all you did for the wedding.”
“I loved doing it.”
“It was the perfect day.”
“I’m glad.”
“And thank you for taking the hit of Mum’s…scene so I didn’t have to think about that while Rix and I were in St. Lucia.”
I managed not to flinch at thinking about Mum’s “scene.”
More progress.
