Chapter Twenty #2
How was I supposed to work after that? Any effort to stay in the here and now was thwarted by thoughts of Mira. Of the way her lips looked when she admitted she needed me. Of the way the wind lifted her hair as it brushed across her back, the dusty southern sky a backdrop to her silhouette.
And then there were the three thousand questions running through my mind about the utterly disturbing information she had given me that threatened to shut down all of my mental facilities.
Every instinct in my body screamed to protect her.
Even the short physical distance away from her felt like a canyon.
Three hours stretched on forever.
When at last the end of the shift came, I jogged to her truck and pulled the door closed behind me with more force than I’d intended. All of the pent up agitation somehow escaped through my fingertips. Mira didn’t jump this time, like she expected no less of me.
I gripped the steering wheel. “I think you need to start by telling me where you got those scars around your neck.”
“Caleb, I’m sorry.” She looked at me with those dove gray eyes, begging forgiveness. “Evan came over after our date. He told me about the job offer on the big rig.”
I jerked my head in surprise. Speaking of the devil himself, Evan jumped in front of the parked truck and pelvic thrusted in a circular motion with his tongue wagging. I could only imagine what he’d said to her. The urge to peel out and flip him over the hood was massive.
“Were you trying to let me go?” I asked, dragging my gaze away from my idiot brother.
A nod and a whisper. “I don’t want to hold you back.”
And just like that, a weight lifted from me that left me relieved and exhausted all at once.
“Dammit, Mira. You won’t hold me back. I can’t remember being happier than when I thought you were mine.
That job won’t bring me peace. I like it here.
I fit here.” I took her hand in mine to show her the truth to my words.
“Don’t do that to me again. I know you meant well, but you’re just going to have to trust me to make my own decisions about this stuff, okay? ”
Moisture brushed her dark eyelashes but no tears fell. She smiled and squeezed my hand gently in her own. Thickly, she said, “Okay.”
“The scars,” I reminded her.
She sighed. “Drive. I can’t do this if you’re looking at me.”
I spared a glance for my truck but decided it would be fine parked here until my shift in the morning. The old Chevy’s idling engine sounded like a freight train, and we ambled out of the parking lot behind the rest of the crew. “Where to?”
Mira shrugged miserably. “Anywhere but home. He’ll find me there.
” She drew her knees up to her chest as if it would protect her from the words she would say.
“My stepfather, Angus, was a cruel man. He hurt my mother, and when I tried to defend her, he hurt me. One day, right after my seventh birthday party, Angus decided he fancied me.”
She spared a frightened glance for me, but I tried to keep my disgust hidden behind a stoic face. If he was alive like she said, I already wanted to kill him.
“He never touched me, Caleb. I fought him, and he didn’t push too hard.
It was a game to him. He knew it made me uncomfortable, so it was his way of toying with me.
Of hurting my mom. One night, he got really drunk and found me hiding under my bed.
He said, ‘Mira, you’re a pretty girl, and pretty girls should have pretty things.
Like a pearl necklace.’ And then he took his cigarette and held me down and burned the first notch into my collar bone.
And over the next year, he did the rest. He finished the necklace the night he killed my mother. ”
Unable to take anymore, I swore under my breath. My stomach twisted with a nauseous clenching and, for a split second, I thought I would be sick right there on the dashboard of her truck. This was the first time I realized evil really existed. “Was that when you went into the institution?”
Mira was quiet for a long time. She looked out the window and bit the end of her thumbnail. “You read my report?”
“Becca brought it to me. You could’ve told me, you know,” I said, turning onto Dark Corner Road.
“I said we can’t go to my place,” she protested, straightening up with a panicked look.
“We aren’t. I’m taking you to my place.”
“Oh. So, Becca was the one who posted those flyers all over town?”
A fury I hadn’t known before burned in my gut. I knew that girl would make copies and possibly blackmail Mira. I hadn’t, however, thought she had it in her to go as far as peppering the town with that shit. “I didn’t know she did that,” I gritted out. “Where has Angus been all these years?”
Mira swallowed audibly. “In prison. For child abuse and child endangerment, not for murder.”
“How did he get away with killing your mom?”
“Angus had planned my mother’s murder down to the tiniest detail.
I didn’t understand that because I was only eight at the time, but he had everything nailed down to look like self-defense.
The blood spatter, the trajectory and timing of the bullets.
He shot himself twice, then killed her with a smile on his face.
The neighbors called in the gunshots but their report matched Angus’s lies.
He had very good lawyers, and after what I’d seen, I had trouble speaking.
I had so many thoughts and visions, memories rattling around my head that I couldn’t say what I wanted to.
” Mira glared at the turnoff to her house as we passed.
“Before the cops showed up, Angus repeated this made-up story of what happened over and over to me, but I knew what I’d seen.
Because of the stutters in my story, and my trouble speaking coherently, I was deemed an unreliable witness.
Angus couldn’t deny the allegations that I had been abused, though.
The evidence was there, still bleeding on my neck, which was exactly what he wanted the cops who arrested him to think.
My mother had gone after him because he hurt me.
He wanted them to think she shot him, and then he killed her in self-defense.
So he got prison, but not for long enough.
” Having unloaded something so cavernous and dark that she had likely kept to herself for so many years, she let out a long, shaky breath. “So that’s me. Crazy Mira.”
I pulled the truck to a stop in front of my house.
“Don’t say that. You aren’t crazy.” I pulled her to me and hugged her tightly.
“You’re strong. You went through something no one should ever go through, and you survived.
Screw anyone who calls you that. They don’t know anything important about you. Not like I do.”