How quickly my reality has changed should leave me spinning, but I’m so focused on her that somehow I keep it together.
She scoffs. “It’s not your fault, Weston.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not sorry it happened,” I tell her. “I’m not apologizing for it, I’m empathizing with youbecauseit happened. You can accept empathy if you want to. Compassion won’t make you any less strong of a person.”
Nothing could make her anything short of superhuman in my eyes. But I see the shift in her as my meaning sinks in. Her face softens and tears start to form. I have a feeling she’s never let anyone lessen her burden before, the way she’s so fiercely independent.
My hand cups her face, fingers wiping below one eyelid as I keep talking. “It doesn’t make you weak to share your load with someone else. That’s what love is. Sharing in the good, the boring, and the unthinkably horrible. It’s always better with someone else. You’re not alone anymore, darlin’.”
“Love?” Her voice is a cracked whisper.
“Yes, love. I love you, Amelia. Regardless of your history, of whatever name you use, I love who you are here and now. How you make me feel when I’m with you. Shit, even when I’mnotwith you, I’m better because of you.”
“I tell you my father is one of the most famous killers of our lifetime and you tell me youloveme?”
“I don’t care that your father was a serial killer,” I tell her, pushing some hair behind her ear so I can see all of her beautiful face.
“Mass murderer,” she corrects me, laughing darkly. “No wonder you didn’t make it in the National Association of Serial Killers. You don’t even know the standards to qualify as one.” She laughs again, sardonic, with a hint of her tears in there. “Dear old dad didn’t make the cut.”
It makes even more sense now. Her dark humor, her tragic outlook on life. It’s all she’s had to cope with, on her own, that immense black cloud following her everywhere she goes.
I’ve heard that trauma victims cope in a variety of ways. Looks like she got the black humor version of healing. I can work with that. At least it’s not self-harm, or substance abuse. Fucked up humor, I can do.
“I think we have enough killers in the family,” I tell her, gentle smile on my face so she knows I’m kidding and this changes nothing for me.
She’s spent years keeping everyone else out because she doesn’t want the judgment, the reminders of her past. I want to show her that it’s who she is, regardless of what happened to her in the past, that makes me love her.
“If it’s okay with you, I’ll retire permanently from that option. We’ll pick a new career for me together.”
She laughs, tears rolling down her face. “You’re seriously telling me you’re okay with this?”
Okay?
I struggle to control my voice, my volume, as the words shoot out of me, but I focus on assuring her, not scaring her. “Of course I’m not okay with what happened, what you went through. Nothing about that isokay. It’s going to take time, and probably a lot more talks, for me to really understand what your life has been like as a result of what he did. But it doesn’t change the wayI feel about you.” I scoff before continuing. “Shit, if anything, it makes me love you more, for how strong you’ve been, the fact that you managed to live anything close to a normal life after going through trauma like that. You’re fucking amazing, angel. You managed to let me in after all of it, too, which might be the most amazing part of all.”
Her face crumbles and she ducks into my chest, crying harder than before.
It takes minutes, maybe longer, but she calms down eventually. When she gets her breathing back to normal, she tells me the rest of the story.
How the rest of her middle and high school years were hell, complete pariahs, both her and her mother. Her mom couldn’t find work that could replace the income they’d lost, and no one would hire her except some asshole who ran a skeevy diner and barely paid her. Amelia’s dick of a brother was out of the house by that point, but he held their father’s death against both women and was a raging sweaty ball sac to them both.
She tells me how she couldn’t wait for college, a fresh start, where people wouldn’t know her, wouldn’t know her past. And for the first time, once she was there, she was able to have friends, and a boyfriend. Except when she began to trust him and told that motherfucker the connection to her father, he freaked, ruining everything she was trying to build there.
Just a few months to get a taste of what life would’ve been if she were a normal girl with a normal childhood, and then it was all trashed with one confession. She left school, changed her legal name, and started studying code online.
Amelia explained how there was an insurance payout—back before the law protected insurance companies from suicide by cop—that went to her mom. But she wouldn’t touch the money, and put it into a trust for Amelia that she could access once she turned eighteen. While she didn’t want the money either, Ameliaeventually caved, using it to buy a used van and convert it for van life. She donated the rest to the victims' families and has been living off of her wages ever since, sending money to her mom regularly to help her make ends meet, and donating the rest to a charity supporting the victims’ families when she has anything above what she needs to survive.
Apparently, somewhere along the way, her brother started raiding their mom’s mail. Found some correspondence from the insurance company and lost his shit that there was a payout and he didn’t see any of it. He started threatening their mom, then Amelia (when he could find ways to get ahold of her), and that’s when she got extra creative on keeping on the move, changing up her contact information regularly, and risking no form of connection to any one place or person.
Their mother, though, had nowhere to go, and has been stuck working a shitty diner job for a piece of shit manager ever since. The brother has been using blackmail over Amelia’s identity to keep the mother in line all this time, and it’s kept her from seeing her mom for nearly a decade.
As bad as all that is, by the time she’s finished the entire story, a long time later, it seems like some of the worst parts of it for her are the emotional conflicts it created within her.
“Sometimes,” she says, sniffling, head on my shoulder, not meeting my eyes. “Even though I hate him, sometimes I still miss him. And I hate myself for it. How can I miss anything about a monster? But before that day, he was just my dad. Before that day, I had a normal life. Agoodlife. And so, so many lives got ruined that day. I don’t have the worst of it, I know I don’t. I don’t have the right to feel sorry for myself when so many others lost their loved ones who were actually innocent. Their lives were shattered and they didn’t deserve it. But it’s so hard not to think those thoughts, you know?”
Sucking in a breath through my teeth, I consider how to respond and decide to speak from the heart. “I don’t know if there’s an easy answer to this, darlin’, but I’m gonna tell you how I see it and you can do what you want with that perspective.”
She nods against my shoulder and I take it as encouragement to keep going, my hand rubbing her arm as I do.
