Chapter 31
KEATS
“What are you going to do?” Fear arises, followed by a boiling rage as I watch uncertainty fall across my girl’s features. They did this to her.
“What should I do?” She voices the question so quietly I’m unsure if I’ve heard her right. The soft sound disarms me, the rage falling away.
She’s shrinking before my eyes. The life that shone in her hazel eyes dims at the mere intrusion of a phone call, as if her mother were standing here in person.
“I don’t know, Sosie. What do you think is best?
” I struggle with my own familial issues, so I’m not one to lecture on how somebody handles their situation.
“I don’t know.” Her voice is strained as her gaze treks through the windows. The irony of her paying extra to move in this week to start feeling truly herself, only to have it ruined by the ringing of her phone. Fuck them for doing this to her.
She needs support, not another obstacle. So I do what I think she needs to be able to put this behind her. I dig the phone from her purse and kneel beside her. Holding it out, I say, “She’s left several messages. You don’t have to answer her call, but you can still see what she wants, if you want.”
She takes the phone from me and looks at the screen. Although I saw the voicemail transcribed into text, I didn’t read it. Her gaze rolls over the words and then dart to mine.
“At a party . . .”
She rolls her eyes as she slides her phone open to hear the full message.
“. . . dropped.”
I quietly mouth, “What dropped?”
Tapping a finger against her lips, she shakes her head and looks down as if it helps her hear better.
I only catch bits before her grip tightens on the phone, and she leans her head against it.
Now I can’t tell if they’re threatening her or trying to reconnect, so I grow increasingly frustrated as the message drags on.
When tears wobble in the corners of her eyes, her hand trembles as she begins to fall apart.
I rub her thigh to comfort her, though I’m not sure what she’s dealing with to know what she needs.
She pulls the phone down and hits the speaker button, and I hear her mom say, “Call me.” The phone goes silent as we stare at each other.
I’m not sure what to say, but I can already see a myriad of emotions playing out across her face. Shock. Guilt. Sadness. Pain. But what I don’t see is happiness from hearing from her or the tenacity she’s shown since leaving.
Suppression only works to hide the trauma temporarily. Every kid wants to please their parents. Sosie is no different. Pain doesn’t change that need. It reshapes it.
“I . . .” She stands with the phone at her side, her fingers whitening at the tips as if she needs something tangible to hold on to. One call is all it took to shake the foundation she built without them and rock my world in the aftershocks.
“What do you need, Sosie?”
When she wanders into the living room, her gaze is vacant as if the woman who was just tugging at the button of my jeans, the one that had her confidence highlighted in the light she carried in her eyes moments prior, is gone.
Without warning, she was ripped from her new life and from me, from the happiness she had found on her own and dragged back into the hell of the past with one fucking phone call.
Why are they so hell-bent on ruining her life?
The timing sends her into a tailspin. She hates silence, but it’s too loud to ignore as it rushes my ears. She’s too quiet as she searches for something that doesn’t seem to be there.
When I enter the room, she plants her hands on the counter and levels her eyes on me as if finding the horizon to steady herself, and replies, “I need to see him.”
My knee-jerk reaction is to question what she’ll get from this visit other than more heartache.
I don’t voice that concern because it won’t help the situation.
But standing here, I fist my hands, struggling to cope with how helpless I feel as she processes what this means to her.
Yet somehow, I’m supposed to let her find her own way of dealing with it when all I want to do is hold her until it goes away. “What happened?”
“My father had a heart attack.”
Oh shit. Her turmoil is understandable under these circumstances.
But is it justified after the pain he’s caused her?
I can’t stop from putting myself in her shoes and know I’d see my mom if she were in the hospital.
But my mom wasn’t good at the job. Her father used his role in her life to manipulate her into certain outcomes, which excluded me. They’re not the same.
“I’m sorry,” I say about the man who threatened me with harm if I ever contacted his daughter again. That’s the difference between him and me. I’d be fine never seeing him again, but despite what he’s done, he matters to her, so his life matters to me.
“No, I’m sorry,” she says as if she’s betraying me.
“I can’t explain it. I just . . .” She drops her gaze to the phone on the counter, her eyes rolling over the message again.
They’ve caused her so much damage that I start to wonder if this is a ploy of some sort to bring her back into their fold. “I need your support.”
“You have it. Do what you need to do to bring yourself peace. If that means visiting him, then so be it, but don’t let your guard down.”
“My father is dying,” she snaps.
“That doesn’t erase how he’s hurt you. That ring on your finger was a trade he made—your peace for his gain.
” Her head jolts on her neck, the words smacking her in the face.
Flames flicker in her eyes before her gaze drops to her finger that carried that diamond.
Regret settles into my chest because he’s still her father, no matter what he’s done.
But reasoning might not be something we can get to right now. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Then don’t.” Pushing flyaway strands back from her face, she raises her chin just enough for me to see it—resolve has set in.
It doesn’t matter what I say, she’s going to see him.
She’s just missing the part that I’m not stopping her.
But she needs someone to blame, and those misplaced emotions are falling on my shoulders instead of his.
It’s not her reaction that concerns me. It’s the lack of concern for her own safety. So I won’t stop wanting to protect her since she won’t.
She takes her phone from the counter and returns to the bedroom to grab her coat and purse she left on the floor. When she reaches the doorway, she stops to slip her arms into the sleeves and looks back at me. “I know you’re worried, but you don’t need to be. I need you to trust me, Keats.”
“It’s not about trusting you, Sosie. It’s them.” How can she not see that? Going blindly into the lion’s den is never a good idea. “They cut you off, threatened you, morphed you into someone you’re not to expand their own agenda.”
“This isn’t me choosing them over you.”
Fear of losing her punctures the argument, leaving only holes behind.
I have every right to worry about what they might do to her.
What they do to her affects us. It’s a chain reaction.
“Then why does it feel like we’re finally together and they’re tempting you toward the door to the Vitrine you always dreaded?
You said it was what you feared most when I met you.
” Her lips part and her eyes avert as if she’d forgotten her own worst nightmare.
I take a breath and calm my voice. “We’ve been here before, Sosie.
What if they try to make that choice for you again? ”
I’m hit with ice this time when she says, “I got away once. I can do it again.”
“But I wouldn’t have caged you in the first place.”
The resolve she’s garnered to see her father isn’t granted to me.
She tightens the belt around her waist, and her shoulders fall as her interest in finishing this conversation wanes.
She finally looks at me, and I wish she hadn’t.
Disappointment colors the greens as she stares, and says, “Hides behind words and masks behind ideas instead of truths. Wasn’t that what the email said? ”
It’s been years since I heard those words from her the first time as she read that email.
They’re words that stuck with me and shaped me as an author.
Now used to strike their intended target, effectively hitting my ego where it hurts most. My purpose.
My savior from a life I didn’t want. My writing.
“I’m impressed how you’ve saved that in your back pocket to use without discretion. ”
“I haven’t been saving it. I’ve had my own shit to deal with, but you still haven’t taken your professor’s advice.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I ask, “And what’s that?”
“You can say whatever you want, phrase it however you best see fit, but that doesn’t make it an eternal truth. That’s just your side of it.” I lose our connection when she pulls her gaze away from me.
“Sosie, I—”
“It’s a medical situation,” she says, taking a sobering breath. “Not a trap I’m falling into.”
I’m not near the door, but give her a bigger berth by moving closer to the window. “I’m not stopping you from going. I know it’s something you need to do.”
She walks out without another word, not even giving me the courtesy of a backward glance before I lose her presence entirely.
I stand there, staring, as she disappears down the stairwell, the rush of her footsteps slowly fading as the distance grows between us.
And silence. What feels like minutes passing, I’m still staring through the open door like she’s going to magically reappear when I know she won’t.
I fucked up.