Open Wounds (Harbour Bay #2)(55)
“That isn’t going to be happen, so get used to me being here.” She glanced around the empty room. “Am I your first visitor?”
“They called my mum, but she had to work,” Kellie replied and shrugged as if it meant nothing when in fact it meant everything. “What can you do?”
Amelia clenched her hands into fists. The rage she felt at knowing Kellie’s mother left her only daughter to go through this alone was enough to put murder on her brain. She had never liked the woman but had endured her for Kellie’s sake. As far as Amelia was concerned she was an utter failure at everything she did including raising her daughter.
Kellie said it was because of her father, that her mother had loved him so much that after he was gone a part of her left too. But Amelia didn’t buy that crap. In her opinion Jules Munroe only cared about one person and that was herself. Kellie was just an ornament, like a plant that gets watered at the end of a long day’s work.
The only time Jules spared a moment for her daughter was the first few minutes once she got home at seven in the morning after her shift and ate the breakfast her daughter made for her. But in Kellie’s eyes her mother was doing the best she could. It just wasn’t the best anyone hoped for.
Amelia never knew her own father. He’d left the same day—the same hour—he’d knocked up her fifteen-year-old mother, who was no peach herself. For the first five years of her life, Amelia moved from one floor mattress to another around the neighbourhood.
She survived on other people’s kindnesses until DoCS had stepped in and removed her from her mother’s lack of care. A week later, her mother’s parents had come and collected her. They were for the most part unforgiving, determined that she did not follow their daughter’s dark path, but they loved her. For the first time in years she’d gone to bed every night after bathing, her stomach full.
She didn’t even mind brushing her teeth but her childish brain still believed her mother would come for her, that she wouldn’t want to live her life without her daughter, and for years, Amelia had continued to believe it. Until one night when two police officers came to her grandparents’ caravan with the news that Bree Donovan was dead, a victim of stupidity, and with it went Amelia’s dream of her mother returning to claim her.
But the one constant in her life had been her grandparents. They’d fought at times, even drove her mad at their attempts to control her, but they did just about anything for her. She never lacked or wanted in her life, and she knew that should she ever call them, they would be there for her, wherever she was, ready to help her with whatever she needed.
A wave of sympathy went through her, knowing how alone Kellie was. How her own mother couldn’t find the time to visit her in the hospital, a victim of rape.
Amelia felt grateful for those she had, but Kellie did have someone who cared—her—and she would do anything for her friend. She was everything to her, the air she breathed, the reason she got up in the morning, the sister she never had and her only friend in the world. She antagonised a lot of people, and Kellie was the only one to stick around after being introduced.
Amelia had always seen their neighbourhood as just another place to live. Moving around in her younger years like a nomad had made her settle in, had her thinking this was as good as it got. Kellie had always been different. She knew there was a better life out there and was determined to be a part of it. Amelia had seen the drug dealers and the prostitutes and thought nothing of it. That everywhere in the world was the same low grade rent, but now she saw it for what it was—human degradation. She knew now of the things that went bump in the night. It had been too late for Kellie.
She couldn’t imagine the pain she felt, what she was going through, but it made her ache to know that her friend was hurting. If only she could take it all away. If only she’d been the one to be attacked and not Kellie.
Could she truly heal mentally, or was her friend doomed to remain fragmented? She itched to hold her, to comfort her the only way she knew how. Amelia wasn’t the easiest person to love and people in pain weren’t usually something she sought out. She had always been unable to tap into that part of her that gave people hope or comfort and she felt out of her league, but her friend needed her, now more than ever. Amelia was determined to give her something—anything.
“But I’m here. So that’s all that matters. I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
Kellie shook her head slightly before wincing. “I don’t want you here.”
Pain, hot and sharp sliced through Amelia at the words. The voice speaking them didn’t sound like the girl she had known for ten years, the tone dead and cool, so unlike Kellie’s exuberant bouncy tenor.
“Kellie, please don’t push me out. You’re everything to me and all I want to do is help you. I couldn’t be there for you last night, to stop him from hurting you, but I’m here now. Let me stay. Please.”
“I don’t feel like reassuring you right now. I’m the one whose life has ended. I don’t care about anyone else. I don’t care how you feel. I only have room for me and I don’t want you to know what he did to me.”
“It doesn’t matter to me. You’re still Kellie, my best friend. No one can take that away from us no matter how hard they try. Concentrate on getting better but know that I’m here. That I’m not about to let anything else happen to you if it’s the last thing I do. I promise you that, Kel.”