I couldn’t talk. I just held my hand up to indicate that my mother shouldn’t follow me, and hurried up to my room. There I locked my door and buried myself underneath the covers. I was so heartbroken I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up.
But I couldn’t leave my parents and neither did I want them to find out how destroyed I was. I also couldn’t bear for them to think anything bad about Caleb. I knew he had done wrong, I knew he was a murderer, but he was my murderer and I still cared how others perceived him. I wanted my parents to remember him as the man I had originally presented to them. In spite of everything I was hopelessly in love with Caleb. Deep down I still couldn’t understand or even believe how I could have been so wrong about him.
My phone rang, and for a second I thought it was him. I shoved aside the covers and grabbed my phone. It was Sandra. I didn’t want to speak to her, but I was worried my mother would call her and ask what was going on so I took the call.
“Don’t tell my parents any of this business with Caleb,” I said.
“Of course not. Err, have you spoken to Caleb yet?”
“I have.”
“And what did he say?” she prompted.
My heart constricted with misery. I formed words in my mouth, but no sound came out. What had happened in his office still seemed like a nightmare that I couldn’t wait to wake up from.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “From now on, I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
“What?”
“Look, Sandra. I’m really grateful to you for looking out for me, but I really can’t talk about him to you or anyone. Not yet. Maybe one day, huh?”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you at the shop tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow. Willow?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m really sorry it worked out this way.”
“It’s okay. I guess it was not meant to be.”
49
Willow
By the middle of the following week, my new normal became an empty gaze and a blank face. I had completely lost my appetite and I found it hard to sleep at night. Sandra did her best to cheer me up, she made jokes, and she never referred to Caleb. I was grateful to her for that.
Around my parents I forced myself to maintain my usual, somewhat light-hearted self, but every time my mom slipped up and asked about him it cut like a knife.
Bradley continued with his deliveries but he didn’t dare face me any longer. He knew I was hurting and he didn’t dare bring up the reason why. Perhaps he was just biding his time until I recovered enough for him to speak normally to me.
For my part I couldn’t even imagine the day when I would become normal again, when I would stop thinking of Caleb. Day and night an insidious voice whispered, ‘people change. He was just a kid. Everybody deserves a second chance.” Or I would find myself wishing he would come looking for me. That he would come to me and tell me he loved me. He would ask for my forgiveness and we could be together. Then I would catch myself for being so pathetic. He had lied to me. Worse, how could I even want to be with a murderer? Especially a man who had killed my only living relative and burnt down his house.
The pain in my heart was a physical thing. I lay in bed and stared into the dark night and cursed him for coming into my life. For the first time in my life, I wished darkly that I would once again lose my memory. That all the time we had spent together was somehow erased because it haunted me like a never-ending nightmare. His laugh … the tenderness I’d seen in his eyes … the way he had taken care of me as though I was precious beyond belief.
It was all a lie.
And that was what haunted me the most. How could the same person that had killed my uncle because he had lost his temper, return to my life and treat me the way he did? It didn’t make any sense.
I lashed out in frustration, and only at the scream that broke the silence did I realize that I had knocked over a ceramic vase. I turned to see Sandra with her hand on her chest in shock. I moved my gaze to the shattered pieces of the vase on the floor. I just stared at the broken shards dumbly. The image before me seemed to eerily and perfectly mirrored the state I was in.
It was almost a relief that something could show perfectly just how I felt inside. I picked up my phone then and dialed his number.
I had let him go too easily.