That thought should scare me, but coming from him, oddly it doesn’t. We stare at each other for a few moments until I work up the courage to tell him.
“I killed someone.”
Inside I cringe, waiting for him to recoil or the way he looks at me to change. None of that happens, what he says shocks me for a moment.
“Did they deserveit?”
“Probably not…” He waits me out, sensing this is only going to come out on my terms and in my own way.
People in my hometown know all about it but outside of that, I’ve never spoken to a soul about what happened that night.
“My mom died when I was young,” I say, looking down at his collar bone.
He doesn’t try to make me look at him.
“Dad remarried after six months to a woman that my mom hated. I only found out about that later. I was just a kid and didn’t realize the relationship history. She had three kids of her own, two daughters who were a couple of years older and a son the same age. I couldn’t understand why she was so cold to me, especially the older I got.
“It was because I looked like my mom. And every passing year all she could see was the rival she hated so much. I still believe she only married my dad as a fuck you to mom.”
Callum’s brow furrows at the absurdity of that. He still keeps quiet.
“It bled into her daughters, or she told them to do it, who knows. They started treating me like shit, embarrassing me in school, bullying me, getting other kids to bully me.”
“Fuck,” he shakes his head angrily.
“I dealt with it,” I told him. “The wicked stepsisters,” I laugh a little. “That is what me and my friends called them. Like I was some kind of Cinderella. They didn’t make me clean the house or anything, we had maids for that.”
“What did your dad do?”
“Nothing.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah, I don’t like to think about him anymore. He shut down, he let Helen take the lead, and she got to do whatever she wanted. The only person who helped me in that house was Stephen. He kept his sisters at bay, when he could. They hated that we got close, and it really pissed Helen off, but he made life bearable.”
“I don’t know whether I like him yet.”
“Probably hate him. Turned out he was a part of it, he wanted to break me in other ways.”
“What the fuck did he do to you,” Callum’s hand moves up to the back of my neck.
“Nothing I didn’t want at the time,” I reassure him. “Even if it was all a lie.”
“Jesus, Charley. They sound like fucking assholes.”
“I hate them all, especially my dad because he never looked out for me.”
I don’t want to go into any deeper detail than that. Callum doesn’t need to know every shitty thing they did to me. I don’t want him to feel sorry for me.
“The night it happened, Helen was being an extra special bitch. There was this gala, and they wanted a united front but I refused to go. So to force me, she contacted the college I’d been accepted into, a million miles away from them, and pulled my application.”
“What? Can she do that?”
“She was my legal guardian. The one thing I’d been counting on to move away and have a better life, and she made one phone call to a guy her dead husband had connections to and tore that away from me.”
“What happened?”
Taking a shaky breath, I focus on not picturing that night but telling it, like it's someone else’s story, not a memory.
