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It felt like a lifetime passed before she responded, and I didn’t miss that she didn’t answer but instead asked me another question.
Little Runner
What’s your biggest regret?
Had two of them. Only one I could give her access to.
Me
That I didn’t stop my stepfather from hurting Raven soon enough. That she didn’t get a real childhood.
I wasn’t sure what Charleigh knew about it. If Raven had shared with her any of those things in the many times they’d hung out. Things that still made nausea swirl in my guts and rage spiral through my system.
I had ended that motherfucker a long, long time ago, but that didn’t mean the sting of it wasn’t there. Didn’t mean the regret didn’t remain. The vengeance enacted would never truly cover what he’d done.
But I didn’t give her time to respond. Instead, I asked her the one thing that had plagued me since I’d marked those words on her flesh.
Me
What’s the grief you have tatted on your arm?
I stared at my phone for the longest time, willing a text to comethrough. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, and I finally slumped back on the mattress, wondering if I’d pushed her too far.
It felt like forever as I lay there toiling with thoughts of this woman who had lodged herself somewhere in my spirit, wedging out a section for herself. This care too much.
An actual hour had passed, and I was about to drift when my phone vibrated beside me. I scrambled to grab it, lifting it high so I could read what she said.
Little Runner
I had a son.
Grief hit me so hard I rocketed upright, and my teeth ground like it could staunch the shearing pain I instantly felt for her.
Because I could hear the finality in her words.
Had.
I wavered for one second, unsure of what I was doing, before I put through a FaceTime call. I doubted much that she would answer, and I didn’t know what the fuck I would even say if she did, but I felt the compulsion to see her right then. Actually look at her face and understand what she was feeling.
I wasn’t prepared for it, though, when she did. Wasn’t prepared to see the tears running down her cheeks, those cinnamon eyes somber in the dull light. She was curled up against her headboard, knees tucked to her chest, all that sweetness colored in pain.
“Charleigh.” I mumbled her name like it could convey everything I was feeling for her.
She choked a soft sound, and I murmured, “I’m so fuckin’ sorry.”
She gave a sorrowful shake of her head. “He’s been gone for a long time, but I don’t think this pain will ever go away.”
“No. I doubt that it will.”
It might dim and distort, form calluses and scars, but it was something she would always carry.
“The only thing you can do is live in it.” I repeated a semblance of what she’d written. The truth that the only thing she could do was put one foot in front of the other. Find the joys of today. Peace in the midst of it.
I wanted to be the one to help her do it which was so fucked up, I didn’t know how to make sense of it. I knew better than delving into any of this because there was no changing who I was, but there I sat, staring at this girl through the hazy light and wondering how it was that one person could swing into my life and make such a disorder of it.
Crack this foundation that’d been set years ago.
“What happened to him?” I finally asked after I’d given her some time to just sit there and cry.
