Page 51 of Captive

That gets me to look at her. “Is what you?”

“Oh, come on. You know exactly what I mean, but if you’re going to make me say it, fine. Am I making you feel bad? Do I make you feel guilty?” She lets those questions sink in before she continues, “Ezra, I don’t want to make you feel any of those things. I’m sorry if my comments rub you the wrong way or if they’re inappropriate.”

“Abby,” I try to squash her concern, “it’s not—”

But she won’t have it. “It is. Besides that intervention or whatever you want to call it, you’ve been avoiding me ever since the last kill. At first I thought it was because you were upset with me and Royal, but now I’m starting to wonder if it’s not just us you were upset with.” She’s quiet for a few seconds. “Why did you leave the room that night, after handing me your handsaw?”

This is so not a conversation I thought I would have today. Or ever.

“I just needed some air.”

“Please. There was plenty of air in that room and you know it. Did it smell a little coppery? Yes, it did, but still lots of air.” She’s not having it. “You didn’t leave because you needed air. You left because it was too much for you, because I’m too much for you.”

It shouldn’t bother me as much, but I hate the way she blames herself for how I’m feeling. It’s not her fault I can’t get over this. It’s mine. “You’re not too much. It’s not you. It’s me. Something is wrong with me.”

She steps closer to me and sets a gentle hand on my arm, whispering, “Nothing is wrong with you. Nothing. If I would’ve known who you lost, I never would’ve been so pushy. I wouldn’t have made any of those comments to you. I was just trying to make light of things, I guess, so it never occurred to me that you might be struggling, too.”

Abby shakes her head. “So, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I make things worse for you. I’m sorry I make you think of everything you lost. If anything, that’s the opposite of what I want to do. I want to make things better for you, for Royal, and for Hawthorne, too. Our situations might be different, but I know how that pain can feel like it fades, and then it comes storming back when you’re least paying attention. Stuff like that never goes away, not fully.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I say. “None of this is your fault. It’s me—”

“Stop saying that. It’s not you. You’re not to blame for any of it. Everyone deals with grief differently, and even though people say it gets better, it doesn’t. As the days go on, as the years go by, we just get better at hiding it, at not thinking about it, but when we stop and have time to think, time to reminisce and be nostalgic, that pain hurts just as much as it did in the beginning.”

She’s not wrong. I’ve never heard a more correct summarization of grief and loss.

“I never understood how we’re supposed to move on from it,” I mutter, my gaze falling to my own feet. “If it never goes away, what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to get through it?”

A silly question to ask her. If anything, I should be the one sharing my wisdom with her, not the other way around. I’m older than her by quite a few years. She’s, what? In her lower twenties, mid-twenties at most? I’m thirty. I’m old enough to be responsible for my own emotions, old enough to have them under control and not lock myself away in my bedroom like I’m in some sappy teenage movie having an existential crisis.

“The only thing you can do,” she answers me. “Get through it day by day. Surround yourself with other people you love. Her memory, her love; those things will never disappear, and that’s okay. She’s a part of who you are, and pretending you’re fine and her memory doesn’t exist won’t get you far.”

She sounds so confident, like she always does. How I wish I had her confidence, just a fraction of it.

“Is that what you do, with your sister?”

A gentle smile tugs at the corners of Abby’s lips. “Hell no. I mean, theoretically, yes, I’d love to practice what I preach, but it’s a lot harder to put in practice, I know. I might sound like I have it all figured out, but I don’t. Almost every time I go to sleep, I have the same recurring nightmare, but it’s like a flashback of the day that I found her. I’m not past it. I think being alone for so long, doing what I was doing, didn’t necessarily help me much.”

She says, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I got the practice in, and I’m glad I somehow stumbled on you guys, but… I do wonder if things might’ve been better for me if I wasn’t alone.” Ten long, tense seconds pass. “Being alone really does make things worse.”

Her nose wrinkles. “I have actually felt better ever since I talked to you and Royal about it, and I feel even better knowing we’re going to close that chapter of my life. I don’t know what’s going to happen after we get Connor, but I think… I think I’m starting to look forward to the future. Might not know what it’ll entail, but I’m still excited for it.”

Her silver gaze flicks up to me when she adds, “I’m excited to keep getting to know you guys. We haven’t known each other for that long, but it feels like you’re family—which is exactly why I don’t want to be the cause of your anxiety. I want to help make you feel better, not worse.”

“And what if I can’t feel better? What if I’m just broken forever?”

I swear, the way she gazes up at me makes me feel some type of way. It’s like I can feel the missing pieces of me slowly drawing back together, little by little. I wouldn’t say I feel whole, but being this close to her, being so vulnerable with her, makes the holes inside more tolerable.

“You’re not broken,” Abby says. “None of us are. We have more baggage than your average person, but look at us. Look at you. Look at everything you guys are doing. A broken person wouldn’t be able to do all that. I think you’re so much stronger than you realize.”

Something in my chest tightens. My heart? And not in a heart attack kind of way. No, it tightens in a way it hasn’t tightened in a long, long time, reminiscent to how I felt the night of our last kill, when I stood near her and watched as she partook in the dismembering.

It tightens in longing. In want. In desire. In everything it shouldn’t, but unlike that night, when it was too much for me and I had to put some distance between us, I stay right where I am, locked in on her.

After a minute, I whisper, “You do make me feel better, you know. You don’t make me feel worse. I just… I’m not used to feeling better, and I feel guilty for wanting to, like I’m betraying her memory.”

“Do you really think she wouldn’t want you to be happy again?”

Well, if we’re going down that road, I don’t think she’d want me to resort to killing, but I suppose happiness is way different than that. Would she want me to be happy? It’s not something we ever talked about. You don’t discuss those things when you’re so young and you think you have the rest of your life to figure everything out. But, yeah, she probably would want me to be happy again.