He ambles toward the island and leans against it heavily, staring off into space and reliving the memory.
“We was fightin' a lot. I didn't want them to go. Trin decided to take matters into her own hands and hung herself outside the window.”
I turn to stare out the windows on either side of the front door, imagining what it must've been like to look over and see your daughter's feet dangling right outside, swinging back and forth. It's morbid as fuck, and I feel a pinch of sympathy for the old man.
“Raven left with Kacey two days later. Couple of months after that, the lighthouse shut down due to a newer and more advanced structure being built. Been alone ever since.”
“Why didn’t you go to be with them once it shut down?”
He’s agitated, his lips twitching and his fingers stroking his beard.
“They hated me, and I loved being here. I knew that if I left, ain’t none of us would’ve been happy with my being there.”
Maybe his wife and daughter would’ve forgiven him had he only made an effort and prioritized them, but it doesn’t matter now. And I’m not interested in therapizing the old man.
Sylvester meets my stare, guilt swirling in his eyes.
“She cried a lot.”
Then, he drops his gaze and ambles toward the stairs. I stare off into space as the clink of metal groans beneath his weight, slowly fading away.
My gaze cuts to the window again, and instead of looking from the inside out, I'm standing right outside the front door, a girl dangling from a rope. Then, the faceless girl fades into the image of Sawyer, her body swaying in the air. Another sad soul that found a different way out.
My throat closes, and it feels like a punch to the chest. I shake my head, pinching my eyes shut and rubbing them harshly with my finger and thumb to banish the fucked-up thought from my brain.
I'm not ready to admit why it's so fucking hard to breathe.
The witch has done enough damage; the last thing I need is her needling her way into my head like a worm in an apple, eating at my common sense and self-preservation.
è una maledetta bugiarda, and I can’t look at her without being teleported back to that damn step outside the church, a priest at my side, consoling me because my mother lied to me, too. They both stole so much of my life from me and left without a backward glance. Without remorse.
Yet, the urge to go find her and fight with her again is almost unbearable. Growling in frustration, I swipe my hands over my hair, the strands longer than I’m used to. Seeing her is a bad idea. I still want to fucking throttle her, but fuck if I don’t want to kiss her, too. Even worse, I want to protect her while also wanting to protect myself from her.
After admitting what her brother did to her and seeing the raw pain in her eyes—the terror that one day he is going to catch up to her—the sadness that clings to her like a second skin makes so much more sense now.
She’s a wild animal that has entered survival mode and doesn’t know how to live any other way. And it’s driving me fucking wild. Mi sta facendo uscire pazzo, porca miseria.
The rage I felt in that moment of her confession was blinding, and not for a single fucking second has it let up since. All I can think about is how to make her pain go away. The near-obsessive need to search down the fucker and bash his head in until there’s nothing left is all-consuming.
He’s still haunting her, and all I can feel is rage because she’s fucking mine.
But that's the goddamn problem, isn't it? She's made it more than clear she doesn't actually want that. She will always bite the hand that feeds her because she's more comfortable being starved when it's all she's ever known.
I’m charging toward the front door, swinging it open, and storming toward the cave before I process what I’m doing and why. I just… need to talk to her. I've had enough of the fucking silence.
I’m so lost in my head that I don’t even remember walking to the cave or getting down into it. But I draw short, confused when I realize she’s not in here.
“Sawyer?” I call, my voice bouncing off the stone walls and echoing.
She doesn’t answer. Instantly, all my furious thoughts come to a screeching halt, and my mind goes deadly silent. Something is wrong.
I call her name again, louder and more urgently, except she still doesn’t answer. My eyes frantically search around the cave, my head swiveling in every direction.
My eyes bypass a tunnel far in the back of the cave and then quickly snap back to it. I beeline for it, continuing to call for her. It’s darker back here and curses spill from my mouth because I don’t have a goddamn flashlight to see properly.