Pictures of You

Chapter 77

77

Evie

Hours later, I’m still pondering Drew’s words. He can’t be right. I would never have stopped fighting for them. How could I let my parents fall in love with a surrogate granddaughter and then steal her away? No wonder they didn’t want to see me. I must have completely worn them out—worn Drew out too. And driven Bree away after our argument at the wedding.

“Dad, I would never have done this,” I tell him, after Chloe and Harriet and Bree have left, Mum has gone to bed, and it’s just him, Drew, and I having a nightcap on the deck.

But I did. I did do it. The fact that I can’t remember doing it isn’t an excuse.

I pick up Dad’s iPad again and reread the email I’d asked to see, clearly sent from my account.

Mum and Dad,

Things can’t go on like this. We are constantly under attack. You’ve never tried to love Oliver. He’s on edge when we’re with you. He never felt good enough. And now Harriet asked why you don’t like Daddy. I have to choose my family.

Evie.

“The important thing is you’re here now,” Dad says softly.

“I didn’t write this,” I argue.

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“No, Dad. These are not my words. I don’t write like this. It’s the clipped tone, can’t you hear it? And the sentences are all the same length. I don’t speak that way or write that way—without any poetry to it …”

Who wrote this?

“Sweetheart, I hardly think you were considering the poetry of the message. You were furious with us!”

“I also never put a full stop after my name,” I tell them. “In forensic linguistics, that kind of thing is relevant. You can hang a criminal case on punctuation! I’m telling you, I didn’t write this.”

Did Oliver ?

Dad doesn’t seem to believe me. I try to imagine my parents receiving the message, heartbroken, and me completely unaware it had been sent.

“But this is no different from the way you’d been messaging us for years, Evie. Every time you canceled a visit or didn’t like the way we’d said something. Or when you’d write to tell us we were wrong about Oliver and laboriously explain his perspective on things. You blew hot and cold with us the entire marriage. And when it wore your mother down, yes, she’d step back. Just to catch her breath before you’d criticize her again, but you know, Evie, your mother is a person too. It was destroying her life.”

“And were there full stops after my name in all those emails too?”

Both of them stare at me, then look at each other.

“Why didn’t I just leave ?” 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 just rescuing 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, saving Harriet … 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?