7
Chapter Seven
REESE
"You said I was takenbecause of you. What do I have to do with you?" I ask him. I feel like I need more air. I can hardly breathe, even with the vast open space of nothing but trees and oxygen surrounding us.
"Reese," he stops the conversation. He needs to tell me the rest. I need to hear it all. The questions that have been burning through my mind for the past three years have answers and I need them all.
"Please," I beg.
"Your mother was the nurse who had to inform my father of my continued sentence and that I would be held in solitary confinement for an indefinite amount of time. Not only did my father lose my mother, he lost me too. And for some screwed up reason, even though he was convinced I was the one who killed my mother, 'the love of his freaking life', he still wanted to be near me. He was obsessed with my mother and me.Obsessed.He went crazy. He had already gone crazy."
I think I've come to figure that out. A sane person wouldn't lock a fifteen-year-old up in a shed. "I can see that," I say softly, backing up, needing some space. Needing space from myself at this point. I drop down against a tree, pulling a bottle of water out of my backpack, grateful for Sin raiding Snatcher's fridge before we left. "Keep going."
"My father inflicts pain onto others as they have done to him. You were the retribution—the revenge on your mother for taking me from him," he says. "He took you from her."
"I was taken as a punishment to my mother—the woman who wanted nothing but to devote her life to helping others?" I confirm, mostly for myself. This senseless purpose for my condemning is because someone wanted revenge against Mom. Not me.
"I don't understand this. If you didn't kill your mother, then—" His chest heaves in and out as if he's contemplating the answer to the question he's hoped I wouldn't ask. "Who did?"
"No one killed her," he tells me. "She's not dead; although, she might as well be. I'll likely never see her again. And if I did, I'm not sure how I'd feel, facing the fact that she is alive and I've been held here as a prisoner for five years."
The wind has been stolen from my lungs. The words melted on my tongue, and my thoughts are spinning like a top. She's alive. No one killed her. And no one knows this?
"You said she was buried behind the shed," I remind him.
"She is. I buried some of her belongings--things that made her still feel like she existed—into the dirt, so I could forget about her. She isn't buried in a literal sense, but the thought of her as a mother is buried behind the shed." What mother does this to her child?
"Sin, if she isn't dead, where is she?"
"I don't know. She abandoned me here with nothing but a fucking note—a note telling me to bury some of her belongings and then inform my father that I had found her dead. She said he would blame me for her death and I would be removed from Chipley and tried as a minor. She told me to plead innocent. Instead, I was diagnosed with psychosis and held in solitary confinement at Applebrook. She thought her plan would work. She thought an apology for bringing me to Chipley would make me feel better. She thought that if she admitted her mistakes, I would forgive her. She admitted that everything she had done was wrong, but that her plan was the only way both of us could survive."
I'm trying my hardest to comprehend all of this, but I can't. Why couldn't his mother just leave on her own and take Sin with her? If she was a caretaker, she should have been able to come and go as she pleased. "If she wasn't a prisoner, then why?"
"She knew too much. When she asked to leave, Jackson Crownwell made a deal with her. Her plan that she left me on that note was part of that deal. The plan revolved around no one finding out about Chipley." Sin takes a seat beside me and wraps his arm around my neck, placing a kiss on my temple.
"That's why your father assumed you murdered her?" I ask, leaning my head against his chest.
"Once I was brought back to Chipley after another three-year sentence at Applebrook, I found my father. I unleashed on him. I blamed him for everything. I told him he was the reason she was dead. I tried to convince him that he murdered her. It was my form of revenge on him, I guess. My mother brought us to Chipley in the first place so we could get away from him. Then he found us, and I still don't know how." He closes his eyes and nods his head, like he's trying to get his thoughts straight. "You know, when you lose your mind, you become weak enough to be convinced of something you didn't do? That's what I did to him. Because he deserved it."
"Everyone still thinks your mother is dead?" I ask.
"Yes, and no one will ever know anything differently."
"I'm sorry," I tell him. I'm sorry because he's just like me. He didn't ask for this. He was more or less taken against his will, too.
"You shouldn't be sorry. I should be sorry and you should hate me."
Hate? This wasn't his fault. He didn't ask for his. I didn't ask for this. Life was stripped away from both of us and I can't hate him for that. "Then why do I think I love you?" I ask.
"Love? What the hell is love? Abandonment? Is that love? No, you don't. You don't love someone after a week. I know that much. You love that you're not alone. You love that you're no longer in the dark. You love that there is some kind of screwed up light of hope out there. But, let me assure you, Reese, you don't love me. No one can love me."
"Stop," I yell. "Love is when someone will put their life on the line for someone else. Love is offering food to someone when you're starving. Love is giving someone hope, even when we both know there is none. Maybe this kind of love isn't the type where I can't eat, can't sleep, can't breathe, but this love is one I don't think I could survive without. It doesn't matter what you say to me, you won't change the way I feel."
Sin grabs his bag and throws it over his shoulders, angered and unsettled. He doesn't look at me and if he wants to get offended by the truth, he can. "Don't let your feelings get you killed," he spouts off, spitting a mouthful into the dirt. "Love gets people killed."
"Like who?" I run up to his side and step in front of him, continuing my strides backwards. "Who did love get killed?"
