“I never said I wanted your help,” she growls. “In fact, I was fairly adamant that I wanted you to leave me be.”
I take a step closer even though closeness is the absolute last thing I need. “I thought you were dead, Tessa. Do you have any idea how many nights I sat outside your dad’s trailer, waiting for any sign of you? How many times I broke in while he was passed out and wondered what would happen if I threw all of my morals aside and hurt him until he told me where you were?” I’m yelling now, the anger I’ve buried over the last seventy-two hours flooding to the surface.
She stares back at me, gaze hard. But her bottom lip trembles. It’s a mask. It’s all a mask.
“I told you. I changed my mind.” But her voice wavers.
It breaks, and her bottom lip trembles.
“You’re lying to me.”
She swallows hard, and the visible walls of her expression crack. “You were better off without me. Why can’t you see that?”
“He hurt you, didn’t he?” I ignore her question because it’s a deflection. A way to avoid feeling everything she’s feeling. “Your dad,” I add when I take another step closer. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. The only explanation.
Tessa’s eyes fill, and she takes a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.” How can I make her see? How can I get her to understand that she was everything to me? That I would have given anything to know she was okay? Even if it was just that she’d changed her mind and didn’t want to be with me?
The silence around us is deafening while I wait for her to speak again. Will she tell me the truth? Or will more lies spill out when she opens her mouth?
“He nearly killed me,” she whispers as a single tear slips down her cheek.
A rumbling fills the air around us, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s a growl coming from me. I clench my hands into fists, doing everything I can to keep my anger in check.
I knew it was him. And despite knowing that it’s not an “eye for an eye”, and vengeance belongs to God, I can’t help but wish I could turn back time and make him feel everything she felt and more.
She lowers back down onto the seat. “He called and said he needed to talk. That he knew he’d messed up, and he wanted to make things right. That he didn’t want to miss his only daughter’s wedding.”
“And you went.”
“I was an idiot.”
“You wanted him there. Even after everything.” As twisted as it is, I can understand why she went. Not because I agree, but because Tessa was always loyal to the core. It didn’t matter how many times his fist broke her; she always got back up, willing to forgive because “next time might be different.”
“Like I said, I was an idiot,” she says. “When I showed up, he wasn’t drunk like I expected, and he’d even cleaned. It gave me hope. I hadn’t seen my dad sober in—well, ever.” She swallows hard. “I let him get close and didn’t even see the fist before it hit my cheek.”
The anger consumes me because I can picture it so clearly. Him, red-faced and furious, and Tessa, wide-eyed and innocent. Desperate to be loved by the man who should have loved her the most.
“I’m not entirely sure what happened after that. But when I woke up, I was covered in alcohol. He’d dumped all of what he’d had in the house out on me and stood there with a lighter in his hand.”
Horror twists in my gut, and bile burns my throat. “He was going to light it?” My own voice cracks. She’d been facing the end of her life, and I was sleeping safely, dreaming of a future that would never come.
She lets out a shaky breath. “That’s certainly what it looked like to me. Somehow, I managed to get away. My ankle and wrist were broken, my face was bloodied and bruised, and I later found out I had three cracked ribs.”
“Tessa—” I start to take a seat, every ounce of anger I had before vanished beneath the weight of her confession, but she holds up a hand.
“I don’t want your pity. I never wanted your pity.” Tears stream down her cheeks, but there’s fire in her eyes now, so I remain rooted in my spot, afraid that if I push, she’ll shut down again.
“He told me that I would never be anything but what I was. That the alcohol would take me, too, just like it did my mother and him, and that one day you would see it and leave me. He said it was better if I just crawled into a hole and died and that he was more than happy to take matters into his own hands. Just like he should have done a long time before.”
I turn away, afraid that she’ll see the anger on my face and stop speaking. With both hands clenched into fists, I steady my breathing, drawing a deep breath in and letting it out slowly. If only I could rewind time and kill him before the alcohol took him.
Except that’s not the outlook I should have—and I know it.
God, please take these angry thoughts from me. Please help me offer Tessa what she needs now. She’s had enough anger in her life.
When I face her again, her cheeks are stained with fresh tears.
