Chapter 35 Gwen #2
Laughing dryly, she shook her head. “Everything in here is neat and tidy. Just look at her closet. She has her shirts and pants organized by color, style, cut. And when I was looking through everything, I found this.” She grabbed a notebook off the windowsill.
With tears in her eyes, she flipped between the pages.
“She’s been making a list of everyone who’s helped her here.
Every article of clothing we’ve given her, every pair of shoes, every bit of makeup Simone loaned her.
It’s a ledger she was gonna use to pay everybody back or maybe donate to the ranch once she was on her feet.
I don’t know. But I’ve been in the apartments of depressed people, and they never look like this.
“This girl wasn’t depressed.” Rhiannon wiped some snot from her nose with the edge of her sleeve. “She was happy, and she was hopeful. And she was just the sweetest thing. We gave her close to nothing, but it was everything to her, and I just can’t believe this. I can’t believe any of it.”
That lump in my throat got thicker with every word she spoke. Tears finally spilled over. Not in a stream, but a gush. A sharp inhale kept me from sobbing. But the tears weren’t stopping.
My voice quivered again when I said, “Is this what Sarah’s cabin looked like?”
Rhiannon’s face screwed up. Her lips swelled as the tears came down. It took a few calming breaths before she could nod in answer. “Sebastian told you about her, huh?”
I nodded too.
“She was the first person I thought about when Edwards and Mitchell showed yesterday.” Rhiannon swatted some tears away.
“Similar story, I guess. But at least this town shamed Jason out of it. He got some sort of punishment. Not as much as he deserved, but he didn’t get to go on living his life like nothing happened.
“And this son of a bitch, this Evan, or Ethan, or whatever the hell his name is, he’s going to get away with it. Jason did too.” The tears came down again, and Rhiannon gulped in a breath. As she let it out, she rubbed her eyes. “All these bastards get away with it.”
“That’s why I’m angry.” My lips trembled like the wings of a hummingbird.
The tears came down harder, but I didn’t stop.
I had to say it. “I was angry when my mom died, but not like this. My mom died because she was drinking and driving. I was angry she never got her life together. I was angry that I didn’t have time to heal that relationship.
I was angry she was gone, and we were never going to fix the things that were broken between us.
But this is different.” It was a sob this time. “This is different, Rhiannon.”
Eyes pinched shut, she cupped a hand over her face to regain her composure. She lowered it with lips in an O, exhaling slowly. “I know it is. I know, kid.”
“I don’t know how you do this.” Breaths were getting harder to find.
Even when I told myself to breathe, I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.
Not between the tears. “I don’t know how you can handle all this pain.
We bring you all this, and you help us. You heal us.
You were healing her. It was working. She was learning.
She had hope, and dreams, and a future. And now it’s gone. It’s just gone because of him.
“I know he killed her, just like I know David could’ve killed Simone, but I don’t know how you deal with this. I don’t know how you can stay so calm. I don’t know how you can hear these women tell their stories and not want to kill the bastards who did this to them.”
It was either a sob or a laugh that escaped Rhiannon. I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was a combination of both. “Moments like this don’t make it any easier.”
The only way to stop my trembling lip was to bite down on it.
But when I opened my mouth, it just started again.
“I can’t write a poem. I can’t write about the way that I feel, because there aren’t words for this.
Words can’t explain how sick this world makes me.
How it treats women, how it punishes us for every breath we take, every move we make, but men are rewarded for nothing.
It’s our fault when they hurt us. It’s our fault for having bad taste in them.
The world thinks so little of us, that even when we’re working toward something, when we’re doing everything right, everything they did will catch up to us, and we can’t handle it.
They think we’ll kill ourselves because we can live through what they did, but we can’t live without them?
“I just—” A gasping sob cut me off. “I love this ranch, but it shouldn’t have to exist. Women shouldn’t need to run here because no one else will help us.
We shouldn’t have to live in fear that an ex is gonna show up and beat the shit out of us like David did to Simone.
We shouldn’t have to come here at all, because they shouldn’t treat us the way they do.
“Then they won’t leave us be. Me and Delilah both had to run in the middle of the night, because they wouldn’t just leave us be.
Troy never really wanted me to begin with.
He just wanted what I could do for him. Now, I’m the crazy one.
I’m the one who can’t sleep at night. I’m the one who needs drugs to keep the nightmares at bay.
I can’t trust any man, can’t open up to anyone, and he’s fine.
He’s just fine, and I’m crazy. If he ever shows, if he ever hurts me again, all he has to do is put the gun in my hand, and everybody’ll say I did it myself.
Just like with Sarah. Just like Delilah. ”
Lips shaking, head pounding, I gripped the counter for stability.
The image of blood splattering consumed my mind.
Delilah in Sarah’s place, a bullet ripping through her forehead, crimson shooting out her pretty blonde hair, gray matter sticking to the trees behind her, staining the snow like David’s had.
“Is that what he did? Did he shoot her, Rhiannon? What did he do to her? Why do they think it was a suicide? What did he do to her?”
Rhiannon came across the room to me. Her arms twisted around my shoulders, and mine around hers. I collapsed into her, unsure if anything I just said made sense, unsure if she even heard it through my weeps.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she whispered through tears of her own. “It’s okay—”
“It’s not okay!” A sob or a scream, I wasn’t sure. It bellowed into the crook of Rhiannon’s neck as we collapsed to the vinyl floors. “None of this is okay!”
“I know.” Sniffling, gasping in breath, she held me tight and ran a hand over the back of my head. “I know, sweetheart.”
Rhiannon knew the pain, but she didn’t know the fury.
The world is a better place without these men in it, Sebastian had said.
He was right. The world was a better place without David and Jason in it.
It would be a better place if only men like Sebastian got to live in it.
Rhiannon and I stayed like that for a while. I cried, and she held me. She cried, and I held her.
When we stopped blubbering, she pulled away, wiped my tears, and told me how proud she was that I’d opened up. For a few moments, I was vulnerable. That would help in my healing journey.
For the average person, maybe that was true.
Rhiannon didn’t understand. I locked it all away because crying in her arms wasn’t enough. That wouldn’t help me. It couldn’t heal me.
My vulnerability opened the gates of hell.
She invited me to come to the dining hall for breakfast. The plan was to announce Delilah’s death and arrange a vigil in her memory. I told her I’d be back by dinner, but I wanted some time to myself.
I was only by myself for the time it took to get to my house, change my clothes, feed Honey, then drive to Sebastian’s.
It was just before 11 a.m. when I finished my trip up the gravel drive. The place looked just like it had this morning. Classic, dark, perhaps a bit eerie.
One of the curtains on the main floor fluttered when I pushed my door shut. I was halfway up the steps when the ones on the mansion pulled open. Sebastian stood in the threshold.
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. I doubted mine did either.
Exhaustion had taken its toll, judging by the dark circles and washed out color of his usual peachy cheeks. Since I was still wearing my makeup from last night, and I had cried most of it off, I was sure I didn’t look much better.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” I was at the top of the steps now, glancing past him into the house. “Mind if I come in?”
He stepped aside and held the door open for me. “I don’t think I’ll ever tell you no.”
Once he heard the request I was about to make, that opinion could change rapidly.
With my feet on the hardwoods, I glanced up at the winding staircase straight ahead.
It was one of those fancy foyers I’d only seen in movies.
On the left, a cased opening to a formal living room with furniture worth as much as I made in a year, and the same applied to the cased opening on my right into the dining room.
If the circumstances were different, I would spend a while admiring all the architecture, all the attention to detail, the beautiful woodwork.
But the circumstances were what they were.
“I wanted to call,” Sebastian began, “but after the way everything went down, I figured you wanted some space—”
“Is Lizzie here?” I asked.
“No, she left with Aubrey a while ago. They’re going skiing.” He cocked his head to the side. “Why do you ask?”
“No cameras around either?”
His thick brown brows crunched into his eyes. “There are a couple outside, but no, none in here. Why?”
Throughout my drive, I had known exactly what I was going to say. I knew what I had to do. I knew what was right, and I knew what was wrong. So did he. But it was damn near impossible to look into those kind eyes and remember he was the man who’d dug up two bodies last night.
“What’s going on, Gwen?” Sebastian reached for me, but hesitated, studying each move I made. “Is it about David? Because if you really want me to dig him up again, I can, but—”
“No. I mean, kind of.” Swallowing hard, I shook my head. “No, I don’t want you to dig them up again. But yes, this is about him.”
He squinted at me. “Okay. I’m ready when you are.”
“I’m going to do it again.” Only after those words left me did my shoulders release. “I’m going to kill the man who killed Delilah. And I want your help.”