When I’d given him my trust the night the coastguard came, he’d shut down on me and refused to sleep with me. He acted as if giving him my trust was an abomination.
Yet here he was asking for the very same gift he’d thrown in my face.
“Pim?” His gentle voice interrupted my thoughts.
I blinked, bringing him into focus, standing with his arm empty and requesting my hand, his gaze imploring me to trust.
I shivered as an icy gale whipped around the harsh corners of the jail. My mother was in there. She was in there because of something she’d done for me. I was so close to seeing her, yet the vinegary guilt made me step back. “I…why did you bring me here?”
He didn’t need to tell me who we were here to see or how he’d arranged this. I’d known the moment I’d set eyes on this place. This place housing my murderess mother.
I didn’t need to know how. I needed to know why.
Why?
Especially as he’d read my notes to No One. He saw how much I blamed her for what’d happened to me. He would’ve witnessed the misplaced hate I’d carried for her in the way my pencil scribbled harder whenever I wrote her name.
I’d thrown around the fantasy of visiting her but in reality…I wasn’t ready.
I doubted I would ever be ready.
“Because she asked to see you,” Elder murmured. “And more importantly, you need to see her.”
“She asked about me?” I shook my head, my hair coiling around my cheeks as if protecting me from the breach of his tampering in my life. “When? How?”
He winced, dropping his arm uncomfortably. “I called her. I left a message telling her who I was and that you were safe. I didn’t think she’d call me back.”
“But she did?”
“She did.”
“And?” I snapped. “What did you tell her?”
Oh, God…imagine if he told her everything? How he’d found me at Alrik’s days away from committing suicide. How my tongue was half severed. How my panic attacks made me so weak.
She was in prison. She didn’t need such terrible thoughts when she already lived in a terrible place.
Elder stepped slowly toward me, remorse painting his handsome face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I know now how that must feel.” He shook his head with a harsh cough. “If anyone spoke to my mother on my behalf…I’d be fucking livid.” Rage burned in his gaze, directed at himself. “I’m truly sorry, Pimlico, but you have my word, not once did I tell her how we met, where you came from, or what we’ve done since finding each other.”
His hand crept out, touching mine with a barely there coax. “She doesn’t know anything more than you’re alive. The rest is up to you to tell her…if and when you’re ready.”
I snatched my fingers back from his. “But the things I thought about her…the hate I held while those things were done to—”
Elder lurched forward, stealing my hand and squeezing it hard. “Stop. You didn’t know. You were alone. You were abandoned to that bastard’s whims. You didn’t know you were loved and searched for. Just like she didn’t know how much she loved you until you were gone. She didn’t show it, and it made you doubt.” He cupped my cheek, beseeching me to understand. His face harsh and wind-bitten but still just as lovely. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I swallowed the ball in my throat. “I did. I blamed her…for all of it.”
I still do even when I shouldn’t.
“Blame is good. You needed someone to blame.”
“I blamed him, too.”
“He deserved it. He deserves to rot on his kitchen floor for eternity.”
“But how can I look at her knowing what she did for me, all while I harboured suspicions that she might’ve been the one to set it up? That I concocted ideas that I was merely an experiment for her to see how her child would react with the same monsters she studied?”
Elder gathered me close, tucking me against his warm moleskin jacket. “Fuck, Pim.”
I trembled, spilling my darkest confessions—even the ones I daren’t write in my notes to No One. “I hated her for not hugging me like other mothers. I despised her for making it feel wrong that I wanted to be a little girl playing with dolls. I told myself I was lucky to be treated as an equal and an adult even when I was young enough to be afraid of the dark. Instead of rocking me back to sleep, she’d give me textbooks to read about the psychology of why children fixate on things that can’t hurt them. That phobias for irrational things can be over-come if one just grows up and faces what they’re truly afraid of.”
Elder’s jacket was warm and heady like the incense flavour he carried on his skin. Its rich scent siphoned up my nose, doing its best to soothe me when I didn’t deserve to be soothed.