Page 350 of Mad Girl

“Oh, I see. You didn’t want me to know she abandoned me as a baby, because then I’d see how unforgivable it was of you to abandon me a second time—that day in your office.”

He flinched. “Elliot⁠—”

“And then I’d realize how absolutely warped it was when you proceeded to make me beg for forgiveness every time I did something bad.”

Nic’s face fell. While he sat there, hunched over his lap, silent and guilt-ridden, I tried to take myself back there—to the gruesome scene in my crib.

The hopelessness I must’ve felt. The fear. The desperation. The rage. How does a child process something like that?

In my case, by clawing.

Clawing to escape. Clawing to be free.

The pain: a welcome distraction. The only thing I could control when no one came to rescue me.

The incident itself disturbed me, but what bothered me more? My mother being blamed for it. If she was capable of something so heinous, what about me?

Did I have the same wicked blood running through my veins?

Did I have the potential to be like her?

Libby had said: “You’re not exactly like her. Just so close that it scares us.”

Bad, maybe. But not that bad.

That’s what they needed to believe—what Nic needed to believe. My own father.

I watched him carefully, nails digging into my palms, hard enough to draw blood. But I barely even felt it. “Is that what it’s always been about? The therapy? The letters? The begging? When I stabbed Michael, you thought maybe I was bad like her?”

Nic’s gaze dropped to the floor.

I remembered your conversation with him, Casey. How you’d questioned Nic’s motives after hearing me beg Sienna for forgiveness. How you’d said, “I asked…if he let you go on saying you were sorry and begging because, for some fucked-up reason, he needed the begging, needed to hear how sorry you were.” How he’d gotten upset with you and stormed off.

“You made me beg so you could feel better,” I said, finally putting it all together. “So you could reassure yourself we weren’t the same, even though we look the same. That’s probably why you didn’t want me to know I look like her, either.”

Nic didn’t answer. Didn’t even try to deny it.

But that didn’t matter anymore. His silence—the tears now rolling down his face—told me everything I needed to know.

He’d been doing it since I was a child: failing to say what needed to be said.

But this? Holding me accountable for her actions? All to fulfill his own emotional needs? To soothe his own guilt?

That wasn’t love.

It was him projecting his fears and trauma onto me, and it was fucked up.

“When the truth is,” I went on, voice shaking, “I just didn’t know how to cope back then. There was this dark thing raging inside me, and I didn’t know what it was.” A pause while the full weight of his betrayal sank in, and I fought back tears of my own. “But you did. You knew why it was there. You could’ve tried to help me overcome it, but you didn’t. You stayed silent. You abandoned me, too—when I needed you most. You let me hate myself. You let me believe I was broken, long before I ever heard you say so to the Harrises. How could you do that to me?”

“I was protecting you,” he whispered, wiping tears from his jaw.

“You were protecting yourself!” I cried.

“Everything I’ve ever done,” he said, much steadier now, “has been to protect you. I just did it the wrong way.”

And that was it.

The final straw for me, Casey.