I dip my head so we’re eye to eye. “There was no future where I wouldn’t have found you, Byrdie. When I make a promise, I keep it.”
“I was in the middle of the desert,” she whispers.
“And I’d have combed every inch of it looking for you, darlin’. I wasn’t leaving without you.”
Her eyes turn glassy, and she blinks rapidly.
“Hell.” I pull her into my lap, wrapping my arms around her and holding her. “I wasn’t looking to make you cry, sweetheart.”
“It’s okay.” She sniffs. “I was so sure I would die out there, and no one would care, but even though I knew no one was going to come after me, something wouldn’t let me stop walking.”
I kiss the top of her head. “You’re a survivor.”
“But I stayed in the compound when I shouldn’t have,” she bursts out, suddenly angry.
“You were trapped.”
I’ve wanted to know how she got caught up in a cult—we all have—but none of us will ask. This isn’t a memory any of us wants to pull out of Byrdie. She has to feel like she can trust us enough to want to tell us about it. She’s told Nash and me a bit, but she didn’t tell any of us about the baby she lost in the compound, and there are probably so many other painful things she’s not ready to share yet. Things it might take her years to open up about.
We’ll wait. She has us all forever.
“I stayed for my mom,” she says softly, her eyes distant and sad. “She took me there, and they killed her. I didn’t want to leave her, and I wish I had never followed her. Maybe she’d still have been alive.”
I frown. “What happened to her?”
She tells me about Jeremiah, a man old enough to be her father, who liked to watch her. About her growing uneasiness, and dropping subtle hints to her mom about wanting to leave. She’s brushing tears from her cheeks as she tells me about the gardening accident that cut up her mom’s leg so badly, and the untreated infection that turned into gangrene that killed her.
“Tell me about the accident,” I order her.
She looks briefly surprised. “It was in the garden. There are vegetables and fruits that we would pick daily. Mom was picking green beans when an acolyte—that’s one of Jeremiah’s men he trusted the most—was cutting back one of the bushes. He didn’t see her until it was too late.”
“Was this before or after you started dropping subtle hints that you wanted to leave?”
She furrows her brow. “After.”
“They hobbled her.”
She blinks at me. “What?”
I feel terrible that I’m the one who has to tell her this, but she needs to know. “They guessed or overheard that you wanted to leave and knew you wouldn’t go without her. So they hurt her badly enough that she couldn’t run with you. They hobbled her to force you to stay.”
“They wouldn’t…” Her voice trails off, and her face turns white with shock.
When her tears come, I’ve already started pulling her against my chest, ready for them.
Chapter 16
Byrdie
Vonn strokes my back as he holds me against his chest.
I take in his bedroom, a room I only ever used to enter to clean, and now that we’re together, I view it differently.
There’s not much personality in the space. Everything is in order. His bed was probably perfectly made before he settled me onto the sheets that I made a mess of. It could be because he was in the army, where he got used to inspections. It could just be Vonn. Probably it’s a little of both.
“I’m sorry I made you cry,” he says quietly once my tears have slowed.
“You told me something I needed to know.” I wipe the last of my tears with the tissue he handed me. “It hurt, but I did need to know it.”
