Echo(66)

“But what about you?” I accuse. “You hide.”

“I do,” he admits freely. “I miss my mum, and I hide from that whole f*cked up situation. But it’s not eating at me the way you allow things to eat at you. I’m not the one throwing punches at myself, you are.”

His words are caustic. They piss me off because they’re true. He’s right, and I hate that. I hate that I’ve become transparent to him. Hate that I’ve allowed that. Gone is the camouflage. I left it behind for atonement, for repentance.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I concede.

He gives an understanding nod. “I know. I just want you to talk, that’s all.”

“About my mom?”

“It’s a good place to start.”

“What’s to say? I mean, I’m scared to know too much,” I tell him, struggling to not break down.

“Too much? Did you not read through everything?”

“No. I was so upset, that I . . . I just couldn’t read it. I couldn’t focus.”

He insists that I need to know, so I sit and listen to him tell me the documented facts of how and why my mother sold me to some guy she barely knew. And the fabricated story she told my father and the police that I was kidnapped when she left me in my car seat unattended while she went inside a gas station to pay.

He speaks in detail as I sit here like a stone, forcing my feelings away. I keep my breathing as even as I can as I concentrate on restoring my steel cage while he continues to tell me about her mental instability. She had extreme postpartum depression and was later diagnosed with manic depression and deemed insane by the courts, which is why she was sentenced to a state mental hospital instead of prison.

“Say something.”

I keep my eyes downcast, afraid if I look at him, I won’t be able to hold myself together as well as I’m doing right now. “Is she still there?”

“No. She was released after serving twelve years.”

“What?” I blurt out in disbelief, finally looking up to Declan. “But . . . I was still a kid. Why didn’t she come for me?”

“She relinquished her parental rights.”

My thoughts begin to collide in my head, and when I turn my face away, he catches me. “Don’t do that. Don’t avoid.”

“Why am I so unlovable?”

“Look at me,” he demands, and when I do, his face is blurred through my unshed tears. “Your mum was sick. She—”

“What the f*ck are you doing?” I scream in disbelief. “Why are you defending her?”

“I’m not defending, I’m being rational.”

“You can’t rationalize what she did,” I throw at him. “She sold me! What if the police had never found me? But she didn’t care what happened to me as long as she got what she wanted.”

“You don’t think it’s worth making sense out of? To find any semblance of understanding?”

“Are you kidding me? No! What she did was wrong! People like her don’t deserve understanding!”

“You mean people like you?” he throws at me.

“What?”

“How is what she did any different than what you did?”

His assumption that I’m anything like the woman who sold me pisses me off, and I snap, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m talking about you. Why did you marry Bennett? Why did you make me fall for you? Why did you lie?”

“It’s not the same,” I state, refusing to believe I’m of the same vile nature as my mother.

“Because you wanted something to make you feel better. Because you were only thinking of yourself and you didn’t care what happened to the people who came in your path or that you destroyed,” he answers for me in growing rage.

His words shut me up. I don’t want to acknowledge the parallels, but it’s there, unmistakably. He just threw it in my face.

“She knew better,” I poorly argue.

“So did you,” he affirms.

“I can’t forgive her for what she did.”

“No one is saying you have to. I just want you to face the facts and deal with it. I don’t care how you deal with it as long as you do something with the information instead of hiding from it,” he says. “And yes, what she did was awful, and it makes no sense, but neither do your actions.”