Chapter 21 Gwen #2
“Was that Sebastian?” Delilah’s puffy eyes still glistened, but the redness receded.
“It was, and I’m sor—”
“Don’t be.” She sniffled again, smiling. “Maybe one day, I’ll have what you guys do.”
I snorted. Not because there was anything wrong with him or our relationship. There was just a whole hell of a lot wrong with me. “It’s all fresh. But yeah. Things do get better. You wouldn’t recognize the girl I was when I got here. But back on topic. How did you guys meet?”
“His dad was friends with my dad. We kinda grew up together, I guess,” she said. “He’s older though. When I was in third grade, he left for college. He came back when I was fifteen. We just reconnected, you know? I was older and more mature. He didn’t see me as a little kid anymore.”
If he left for college when she was in third grade, he was nine or ten years older than her. It worried me that she saw herself as mature at fifteen.
Then again, when I was fifteen, so did I.
“That must’ve made leaving harder.” Full mugs in hand, I returned to the sofa. “If your families were close, I mean.”
“It did, yeah. That was the crazy thing.” She closed both hands around her mug, staring at the contents for a few heartbeats.
“It was early on in our relationship when he hit me for the first time. And I didn’t tell anyone, because I didn’t want anyone to think poorly of him.
But when I couldn’t take it anymore, and I finally told my dad, he didn’t really care. ”
“It wasn’t that he didn’t believe you?”
“No, he believed me. He just didn’t think it was all that big of a deal. He said he thought I could defend myself.”
“A few of my friends said the same thing when I told them. Wasn’t a good feeling.
” Juggling my cocoa, I cozied up beneath a throw blanket.
“It’s so funny, because in society, one of the worst things you can be is a woman beater.
But when you actually tell someone that your man is beating you, they think there’s no way you can be a part of the statistic. ”
“He wasn’t entirely wrong though. I did defend myself a lot of the time.” Delilah lifted her legs onto the sofa, crossed them lotus style, and tucked her cup in the center. “He was a big guy, but he usually backed down after I hit him too. That’s probably why I took it for as long as I did.”
Like Rhiannon had said on Delilah’s first day, that’s why we were all here.
None of us were perfect victims. Very few perfect victims existed.
Almost everyone who experienced domestic violence defended themselves eventually.
That’s why it took so many of us so long to even acknowledge we were in that situation.
“Why did you decide to leave?” I asked.
A hard swallow. Delilah had a hard time meeting my gaze.
“He didn’t back down that last time. He shoved me so hard that my head went through the wall.
That was the worst pain I ever felt. I danced ballet for years.
I know what pain feels like. But it was just so different.
I couldn’t see straight, I was sick to my stomach, I couldn’t even think, and then I had to lie in bed beside him afterward because I had nowhere else to go. ”
I knew that pain too. “The disorientation of a concussion can be terrifying. Especially if you don’t go to a hospital to get assurance that you’re gonna be okay.”
“And I definitely didn’t,” she murmured, still staring at the cocoa. The snow out the window behind her fell heavier and harder now. “I went to my dad’s the next day and asked him if I could stay with him, and he said no. That I needed to work it out with Evan.”
“That’s when you called the shelter?”
A nod. “All the local ones were full, so they got me in touch with Rhiannon. I feel a lot better here.”
I could tell. It sure was ironic that this conversation started with her saying that there were good times, yet she’d only spoken about the bad.
“But?” I asked.
“But… I guess I’m just lonely. And I feel like he has the right to know about the pregnancy. If the roles were reversed, I would want to know. Not because I want to go back to him, but…” Gritting her teeth, Delilah shook her head. “I don’t know.”
That cold look in her eyes told me more than her words. “Because you want this to hurt him the way it’s hurting you.”
Slumping her shoulders, she met my gaze. “Does that make me a horrible person?”
There was a good chance I wasn’t the right person to ask.
“No,” I said. “It makes you a fair one. You wish you could balance an uneven scale.”
She let out a breath and wiped at her nose, sniffling. “Thank God. I felt so guilty.”
“Shame is something you feel when you’ve done something wrong,” I said. “Guilt is empathy we’ve been taught to feel for any and everyone, even when they don’t deserve it. Evan doesn’t deserve your guilt.”
She chewed her lower lip. “I really haven’t done anything to feel guilty for. I left, but that’s not something I should be ashamed of. It was just about protecting myself. And, I thought, protecting my baby.”
“If anything, you should be proud. It took me eleven years to leave my ex. It only took you three.”
“I don’t know about that.” Delilah finally lifted her mug to her lips.
She blew on it but still didn’t take a sip.
“I mean, I know that I did what I had to. But this wasn’t where I saw my life going, you know?
Me and my dad, we had a good relationship.
Until all this, we really did. I wanted to be who he wanted me to be.
The sweet, innocent little flower. The good girl. ”
My heart beat a little harder, and the same fire I had felt when I’d killed David burned in my chest. “No, Delilah. That’s not who you want to be.”
“It kind of is though,” she said. “Or it was, I guess. That’s what I always wanted. Marry my high school sweetheart, have a couple kids, buy a little house in the suburbs, and live happily ever after.”
“But now you know.” Setting my mug on the coffee table, I shook my head. “Now you know that the happily ever after is just that. The rolling credits at the end of a fairytale. That’s not real life.
“In real life, women fit in two boxes. We’re either the delicate flower or the violent storm.
The victim or the villain. One harsh storm is gonna break the flower’s neck.
All victims get are thoughts and prayers.
At least villains get justice. If you’ve gotta be the flower or the storm, be the damn storm.
And be proud of it. Because if you were the flower, you wouldn’t have survived.
You had to be the storm. And I’m glad you were. ”
A smile quirked the edge of Delilah’s lips. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Because you’re here to tell the story,” I said.
“Because he could’ve killed you, and you got away before he had the chance.
Because we’re sitting here, drinking hot cocoa, and snow is falling outside, and a fluffy dog is curled up under your legs, and everyone in this room knows that they’re safe, and that we have a future ahead of us.
“We wouldn’t be sitting here right now if we hadn’t fought back.
If we hadn’t chosen to be the villain when we could have been the victim.
You and I, we get to be friends. We get to have lives.
One day, maybe we’ll marry better men, and we’ll have kids, and they’ll be friends too, and they’ll never go through what we went through, because we won’t teach them to be flowers. We’ll teach them to be storms.”
A few seconds passed, and she just looked at me. Her eyes crinkled at the edges, and that touch of joy at the corner of her mouth climbed higher.
“What?” I asked, eyes creasing with confusion. “Why’re you looking at me like that?”
The smile climbed. “We’re friends, huh?”
I laughed. “I think soon, we’ll be best friends.”
Smiling wider, she shook her head. “I haven’t had any of those in a while.”
“Well, now you’ve got a whole hell of a lot. And friends drink each other’s cocoa.” I gestured to it. “C’mon. Tell me that’s not better than store bought.”
Chuckling, Delilah took a sip. Eyes wide, she gulped down another. “I need this recipe. Like, yesterday.”
“I’ll jot it down for—”
Crack-cra—Thump!
We jumped to look out the window behind the sofa.
Half a dozen yards from my cabin, a tree limb, white with snow, laid half on the ground. A few streaks of wood still bound it to the conifer’s trunk, holding it at an angle. Somehow, it looked like it’d always been there. Like it’d grown that way to lend support to the entire tree’s structure.
Delilah chuckled, and so did I. She said, “You know what?”
“What’s that?”
“Storms are prettier than flowers anyway.”