“He was crying. Wanted his mommy.”
Hell. I suck in a breath and it sticks in my throat. “Where’s Mary?”
I want to grab both my kids and get the fuck out of here right now, before my brain starts properly processing what Dolly said about why Cole was crying.
The same reason why Mary has bad dreams, and why I can’t sleep at night.
We find my daughter in the next room, a messy kitchen. She’s under the table, sucking on her thumb, rocking back and forth, tear tracks on her cheeks.
“What the hell happened?” I grind out, a hammer pounding inside my temples, as I try to ignore the stab of fear in my chest.
“She gets like that sometimes,” Dolly says dismissively. “Sensitive little girl. Maybe one of the other kids said something to her? I don’t know. I can’t keep an eye on them every single moment, Mr. Hansen, it’s—”
Cursing under my breath, I go to my knees, Cole firmly held to my side, and tug on her arm. “Mary. Come here.”
She sniffles, looks away, pulls her thumb from her mouth and lets her hand drop to her lap. She looks tiny under the Formica table, her blond hair tangled, her sky-blue dress, the one she selected so carefully this morning to replace the clothes I’d chosen for her, rumpled and stained.
My chest is so tight I can’t fucking breathe.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go home.”
“To Grandma?” she asks in a tiny voice, fucking killing me.
“No.”
“I want my grandma,” she wails softly, and for the millionth time this month I ask myself what I thought I was doing, bringing them along with me in this dark spiral I’m in, in this desperate escape from something I can’t name.
“We’ll
call her,” I promise with sudden inspiration, shocked to realize I’m gonna do it, even though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t call home for a while longer.
Not until I found a way out of hell.
“She doesn’t get along with the other children very well,” Dolly goes on behind me. Maybe she was talking all along. I didn’t notice. “She’s a bit difficult.”
“My daughter isn’t difficult,” I say through clenched teeth as I finally manage to tug Mary out from under the table and haul her to my right side, my arm tight around her.
“Hm,” is all Dolly offers, clearly disagreeing.
I kiss the top of my daughter’s head, her soft hair with their scent of shampoo and talcum, fierce protectiveness rising through me like a burning flame.
There’s so much more I could have said. We’ve been through some tough times. We’re still not ashore, still drifting, trying to make it out of the wreck.
Mary isn’t difficult. She’s wounded, and I have no idea how to heal her. I hope she’ll forget the pain one day, find trust in the world again. In the people around her.
But how could she, when she barely had me these past few years, then her grandfather passed away, and I took her away from her grandmother?
All my fault. All my goddamn fault.
I hold both my kids to me, feeling their slight bodies pressed to my sides, and breathe in deeply, not sure if it’s them I’m trying to comfort, them I’m trying to save, or myself.
Which is a fucking useless thought.
Nothing can save me. That much I’ve known all along.
I just don’t know why I haven’t given up yet, and that’s the only truth I’ve allowed myself to consider all this damn time.
When the doorbell rings the next morning, I drag myself out of the armchair where I spent the night, feeling like something scraped off the bottom of a barrel. I frown as I try to remember who it might be.