Chapter 13 #2
Mandy’s voice pushes through my fog, and I lift my head, turning towards her.
Pregnancy ? A silence washes over the dinner table, and I feel incredibly out of the loop.
“What?” I glance from face to face, but everyone is looking down at their plates like they’re in the midst of a riveting crossword puzzle.
My eyes shift back to Cora, but she’s not looking at her plate.
Her eyes are wide and accusatory as she stares down a sheepish-looking Mandy.
Mandy presses her lips between her teeth, flipping her hair over one shoulder. “Sorry. I-I didn’t mean to blurt that out. We were talking about our cousin’s new baby, and it just triggered… you know. I suck at thinking before I speak.”
I blink. Cora’s fork clinks against the dinner plate as she folds her hands in her lap, but she refuses to meet my eyes.
I don’t think she’s looked at me once since our stare-down from earlier.
I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth, putting two and two together with a hard knot twisting in my gut. “Are you pregnant, Cora?”
Her head finally jerks towards me, alarmed by the sound of my voice addressing her for the first time in weeks.
I watch her haunted eyes swirl with grief and confusion and sadness and everything in between.
But the eye contact doesn’t last, and she ducks her head with fluttering lashes.
“I was,” she says softly, so soft I almost don’t hear her.
Then she pins her eyes back on Mandy. “I didn’t want to talk about this.
I didn’t want to talk about any of this. ”
Cora pushes back from the table and stands up, scratching at her wrist and making a quick escape from the dining room to the staircase.
I follow, not caring if it looks strange or inappropriate—my instincts tell me to follow her.
I can feel their eyes boring into my back, trying to understand why I’m chasing Mandy’s sister up the stairs, but they have to know .
They have to know we’re different now.
The image of Cora and me standing together, our hands interlocked, dappled in blood stains and dirt with an identical far-off look in our eyes, has made the rounds on the internet.
In fact, it went viral as soon as the photo was released by the media.
It has over two-million shares and hundreds of thousands of comments ranging from, “ Sending prayers to those poor souls ” to “ This looks like the movie poster for the next Quentin Tarantino film ” to “ Following for future wedding announcement ”.
Mandy delicately questioned me about the photo, hoping for insight into our shared nightmare.
Hoping for answers I wasn’t able to give her.
She doesn’t know all the details of what transpired in that basement—only what she’s seen in news articles and TV broadcasts.
All I told Mandy was that we formed a friendship out of survival and fear and boredom and loneliness. It was necessary. It was inevitable. It was all we had.
She’ll never know the things I was forced to do, the lines that were crossed, or the guilt I’ll carry with me until the day I die.
And she’ll certainly never know how those lines blurred inexplicably on that final day.
I take the stairs up two at a time, passing through the loft and poking my head into each room. I find her sitting on the edge of the guest bed of her old bedroom, pinching the bed covers between white-knuckled fingers. Her breathing is labored and her hair is blocking her face.
“Cora.”
She looks up, surprised that I followed her. I watch the complex emotions flicker in her eyes as she tries to read me—tries to make sense of why I’m standing in front of her, looking just as lost and vulnerable as she is.
Cora rises to her feet, smoothing down the fabric of her slightly too-big dress, then tucking her hair behind her ears. My eyes dance across her face, drinking in her pink cheeks and those soft, full lips that I should not be so familiar with.
Then we each take a step forward. Then another. Then one more.
And before we’ve thought anything through or had time to ponder our next move, our arms are wrapped around each other, her hot breath against my neck, her hair that smells like daffodils tickling my nose. I pull her close, breathing in every ounce of her, savoring her warmth.
She feels like home .
“Dean,” she whispers, her voice breaking on my name like it split her in half.
I squeeze her tighter, my hand cradling the back of her head, my fingers tangling in her hair.
I breathe in and out, slow and deep, trying not to go back to that basement where she was all I had to hold onto.
“I’m sorry I haven’t called you,” I apologize, and I truly am sorry. “I didn’t know what to say.”
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time over the last two weeks just staring at my phone, telling myself to dial her number or send her a quick text.
Just to check in. Just to make sure she’s okay.
Instead, I’ve been a coward, getting my inside information from Mandy and avoiding Cora just like I’m avoiding everything else in my life.
Cora’s hands land on the back of my neck as she pulls back, our eyes bound, our connection still palpable.
The look on her face is too familiar, too reminiscent of that last day—the moment everything shifted.
The moment our relationship or friendship or whatever the fuck we were was stripped down to bare bones and raw truths and more questions than we’ll ever have answers to.
I break away. I turn away from her, my hands linked behind my head as I try to sort through the murk and muck swirling around my brain.
When I spin back around, Cora’s arms are folded across her breasts, her armor up, her gaze pointed at her freshly painted toenails. I inhale sharply. “You were pregnant?”
Cora sucks her bottom lip between her teeth as she scratches at her wrist and spares me the smallest glance. She looks flustered as she replies, “Yes.”
I crack on the exhale. “Jesus. Are you okay? ”
A shoulder shrug. That’s all she gives me.
“Cora…”
“My HCG levels were high enough to indicate a pregnancy had occurred. But there was nothing on the ultrasound, so they told me it was either a chemical pregnancy or I miscarried early—likely when Earl kicked me until he broke six of my ribs, then tossed me down a flight of stairs like I was a bag of trash.”
She keeps scratching her wrist.
“Fuck, Corabelle…” I run a palm over my face, reeling from the knowledge that our three weeks of hell created a life —as fleeting as it was. A thought pokes me and I add, “Do you know if it was… mine?”
I watch her cheeks burn as she stares off behind my shoulder, bobbing one knee up and down. “No. There’s no way to know,” she says, refusing to look me in the eyes. Refusing to acknowledge what that question implies. “It wasn’t viable.”
I look down at the cream-colored carpet, zoning in on a matching tuft of dog hair. “You should have told me when you found out.”
I feel her eyes on me again, but I don’t look up.
“Told you? When, Dean?” Her tone is strained—accusatory. “When you were shutting me out? When you decided to abandon me after everything we went through?”
“I just needed time, Cora.”
“How much time? I noticed the look on your face when you saw me standing in the kitchen tonight. You looked like you saw a ghost,” she says, heated and ready to break. “You didn’t want me to be here.”
“That’s not true…”
“It is true. You probably would have avoided me forever.”
I spare a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure no one is standing outside the door, then I take a step forward and whisper harshly, “I raped you.”
Cora presses her lips together, her eyes glossing over. “You did what you had to do to get us out of there. I told you to do it. That’s not rape.”
“You didn’t want it. That is rape,” I counter.
We avoid the elephant in the room: the fact that maybe we both wanted it that final day.
“I wanted to live ,” Cora insists, taking her own step closer to me, her voice low. “I would have done almost anything to survive at that point.”
“Everything okay?”
We spin around, moving away from each other in the process, to find Bridget standing in the doorway, her hand against the frame as she leans into the room. I swallow, bowing my head.
Cora clears her throat. “We’re just catching up, Mom. Sorry I bailed… we’ll be out in a minute.”
I raise my chin, watching as Bridget gives us a tight-lipped smile and that ‘worried mother’ look before retreating back down the hallway.
Catching up .
Like we’re two old friends reconnecting over margaritas.
Nope—just chatting about rape and abuse and miscarriages, wondering how the fuck we’re ever going to move past this and just be us again.
Cora releases a long sigh, dropping her arms to her sides and glancing up at me. “We should get back to dinner. I’m sure Blizzard is eyeing my dissected meatloaf.”
I’m about to ask her, What now ? Where do we go from here ? When can we talk again ?
But she sweeps past me, daffodils and passionfruit and so many unknowns lingering on my skin as she disappears out the door. I watch her go with gritted teeth, hopelessness swimming through my veins.
We are bound, chained, tied—to our trauma and to each other.
We’re in this together.
And yet, I’ve never felt more alone.