Both of them stare at me, then look at each other.
“Why didn’t I justleave?” I ask, blowing my nose.
“Leaving an abusive relationship is not that easy,” Drew says, and I stare at him. It’s the first time anyone has used that word.
It looks like it’s breaking his heart having to spell this out. “He always knew where you were. He tracked you. If any of us ever expressed a hint of a concern about him, he pulled you further away. You were scared of him, but you’d make every excuse for him. He had that hold over you. You broke up once, but then you went straight back—he was all promises, no delivery. Constantly apologizing, begging your forgiveness, ‘working on himself.’ Never with any discernible change.”
I take this in. “So I was scared of being with him, but more scared of leaving?”
They both nod and I’m newly sorry for having placed them in such a horrible bind, regret and guilt rising up and breaking through the surface in the form of tears.
“And I lost all of you in the process?”
It’s unthinkable.
They look silenced. Like they’re ashamed they gave up on me.
“We tried,” Dad says, choking up.
“The number of times I had to restrain myself from rushing in there and justrescuing you,” Drew says quietly. “From high school onwards. The rage I felt at the hold he had over you …”
This new information piles in on top of the shame and guilt and hopelessness. The idea of Drew, enraged. The vision of him wanting to fix it. The way he looks now, brows knitted, jaw set, leaning intently toward me in one of the chairs on the deck, elbows on his thighs, hands cradling a glass of whisky as he talks about riding in and rescuing me, and by extension my parents, after he’d already done that in a different way, savingHarriet … It’s giving serious Darcy-saving-the-Bennets-from-ruin energy.
I want to tell them I’m sorry, but it seems so inadequate. I would never have isolated myself from them if I’d had any real say in it. But the idea that I could have reached a point with someone where I was so small that I’d lost my own voice is truly terrifying.
“I thought I was strong,” I admit. I guess I was wrong about that too.
“No,” Drew says. “Don’t you dare take this on as if it was your fault. You’re the victim here.”
It sounds like we were all victims.
“I just want my memory back,” I say, crying now. “I’m ready now. I’ve heard the worst. I just want it all back, so I can move forward.”
Neither of them speak. Do they not want me to remember?
Or have I not yet heard the worst?
TEN DAYS AGO
78
Evie
I gently push the covers off and swivel my legs over the side of our bed. Oliver’s still asleep beside me, facing the other way. We’ve slept like this for years—if we’re actually in the same room—each on the far side of the king-size mattress, clutching the edge of the sheet. I’ve perfected the knack of wrapping it around my leg, almost like a little hammock over the side, keeping me as far from him as possible, while preventing me from falling out.
That’s if Oliver is at home at all. He spends a lot of nights somewhere else. “Work,” apparently. I don’t ask. It’s reached a point where I don’t care. Honestly, if he came home and told me he’d fallen madly in love with a partner at the firm and she was pregnant with triplets, I’d be relieved. This marriage is dead.
I’mdead, with it.
The death knell was when I read that the bioluminescence was back at Jervis Bay.
“Come with me?” I’d begged him. I remembered that enchanted night with Drew and believed that glittery water capable of anything—as if it held some supernatural power to draw people close. Perhaps it could save even us.
He did agree to go, reluctantly, and, as we pulled up the car, I turned to him. “Coming?”
“I can see it from here,” he said. And technically we could see it shimmering and glowing in the distance. He doesn’t like sand. Doesn’t look at the stars. Doesn’tlive. “I’ll make a few work calls from the car. Don’t be long, Evie.”
I walked to the water’s edge and dipped my toes in. Thought how different this was. How wrong everything felt. How trapped I’d become. There was so little of me left by that night, I was barely able to mourn for myself. Couldn’t rouse the pity I deeply deserved. Couldn’t even cry.
