She wasn’t going to bring it up, it was way too embarrassing. No doubt he was just being nice by hanging out with her because of who her family were. With both her sisters-in-law and one of her brothers in the local police department, and her other brother a renowned criminal psychologist, she wasn’t surprised she was getting special treatment.
Not that she wanted it.
She had taken lives. If anyone deserved special treatment it was the women who had lost their lives at her hand and Emmanuel’s hand.
It was easy for Matthew to say that Emmanuel was responsible for the things he had made her do, but it was much harder to believe it when you were the one who had done the killing. Taking innocent lives to save her own, like she was somehow more important than them, it wasn’t right.
Grace was ashamed of some of the things she had done in the name of survival.
Some of the games had just been about surviving, like the water game, but some of them hadn't ended the other woman’s life. After those games, Emmanuel had handed her a gun and told her to finish them off.
The temptation to turn the gun on him was strong, but she was chained up with the key to the chain upstairs. If she killed Emmanuel, all she was sentencing herself to was a long, slow death from dehydration.
Once again, her own survival had won out.
Tears burned her eyes but didn't fall, and Grace threw back the covers and climbed from the bed, curling her hands into fists, and digging her fingernails into her palms. She needed to hurt, needed to suffer like the other women had suffered. It wasn’t fair that she got to be rescued, that her body was healing, her strength returning, that she was able to enjoy the feel of the sunshine on her skin and smell the sweet fragrance of flowers.
She should be dead.
Frustration burned inside her, and she dug her nails deeper into the soft flesh of her palms. It should be her that had died, but since it wasn’t she should be suffering. There was a part of her—a small part—that wished she was dead. It seemed the only fair answer, and yet another part, the bigger part, knew that she hadn't wanted to kill those women. She would forever be haunted by their faces and their pleas for mercy, but she wanted to live.
Grace still wanted to live, wanted to be normal, get back the life she had lost or build a new one. She wanted all those things she just knew she didn't deserve them.
Would Matthew still come by to visit her with burgers and pancakes if he knew that she had literally killed innocent women, kidnap victims? He would be repulsed by her.
She was repulsed with herself.
Her nails dug deeper, and she could feel blood dripping from her palms. It felt almost … good to bleed.
No doubt Jem would love to know that. He’d be all over it, he was itching to figure out some practical way to help her, but she couldn’t talk to him as a patient to a therapist. He was her big brother, Jem and Elijah had been fifteen by the time she came along. Her parents’ unplanned, later in life, change of life baby. While she hadn't been an unhappy surprise, her parents had been older, her brothers already in college before she started school. They’d been almost like parents to her rather than siblings. There was no way she could sit with Jem and tell him everything Emmanuel had made her do and how she felt about it.
Maybe she could talk to Matthew?
For some reason she felt like he would understand.
Which made absolutely no sense.
Why would Matthew understand anything about what it felt like to take a life?
Even if he’d had to kill someone in the line of duty, it wasn’t the same thing at all. If he’d killed any suspects, they’d been criminals, dangerous, he’d had to do it to protect himself and others. What she’d done was take the lives of innocent women who had never done anything to hurt anyone and were just trying to fight to live like she was.
What she’d done was wrong.
Justifiable perhaps, but still wrong.
It would be better if she could just stop thinking about Matthew as anything more than one of the cops working her case. He wouldn’t want her if he knew what she’d done, probably didn't want her anyway. Fixating on him was just a way for her to try to cope, it didn't mean anything.
Just because she kept glancing at the door to her room, hoping to hear footsteps, hoping to see his smiling face, hear him laugh, and stare at the twinkle in his warm brown eyes, it didn't mean that she liked him.
Definitely didn't.
Because he was just doing his job. She might go so far as to say they were developing a friendship, but that was it.
Pain sparked in her hands, and she had to force her fingers to uncurl. She’d asked her brothers and sisters-in-law to give her some time alone today. They all knew they couldn’t hover at her side indefinitely, if they tried it was going to stifle her healing and moving on, make them all become co-dependent, and sooner or later she would resent it. Not because she didn't love them to pieces, but because she wanted to grow strong again and have her own life, and that was something she couldn’t do if she had people constantly hovering over her.
Now, though, she wished they were still here. She felt lonely and unsettled, a sense of foreboding shadowing her. That was just because she’d spent the last five and a half years living on high alert, Grace knew that, but still she wanted the feeling to go. She was home now, free, healing, going home tomorrow, well, to Jem and Laynie’s house until she could get a job and her own place. There was no need to keep preparing herself for something awful to happen.
“You're safe now, Grace. Get over it,” she told herself aloud.