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It’s difficult to know how I might have reacted when coming face-to-face with someone who’d abused and violated me in some of the worst ways imaginable.
But now I was wondering if perhaps I was right.
Maybe I was a monster.
Because regardless of what he’d done, a man was dead.
And I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but happy about it.
ONE
Hanna
Fifteen years earlier
I felt the hard crack of his palm on my face at the same time I heard the sound that echoed in the room because of it.
I wasn’t sure which was worse, the way it felt or the way it sounded.
Tears welled in my eyes, and I hated them. I hated that this vile man, a poor excuse for a stepfather, had the power to make me cry.
I told myself that the tears were the result of the lingering sting on my cheek from where he’d made contact, but I knew it was a lie.
One big, fat lie.
It was the words. It wasalwaysthe words.
“You’ll get no sympathy from me,” he declared proudly. He actually felt good about himself and what he was doing. He got enjoyment out of tearing down a fourteen-year-old girl. “Your own Daddy didn’t love you. Do you think I care how you feel? Do you think it matters to me if you cry?”
If I didn’t already know that it’d just make things worse, I might have laughed. He didn’t need to ask me those questions. It wasn’t as though he believed I didn’t already know the answer.
He made sure I understood precisely where I stood in this house, in this so-called family, every single day of my miserable life.
And there was one thing he was right about.
My dad didn’t love me. He left before I even had the opportunity to grow old enough to create one lasting memory with him.
Then again, considering he’d left me to this, I wasn’t sure I would have wanted any memories with him anyway. Because if they’d been good, I’d constantly wonder how he could have done it to me. I’d wonder why he’d have left me to this.
And if they were bad memories, they’d only be more negativity to add to all the misery I was currently living in.
So, it was possibly better that my dad didn’t love me. At least there was far less disappointment.
But I’d have been lying if I said that I didn’t think about what it could be like if he’d stuck around, if he had cared just a little.
Because I was now stuck with these two—my mom and Jimmy—and anything else had to have been better than that.
My mother spent more days drunk or high than she did sober, and Jimmy used me as his personal punching bag.
I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not really.
But Jimmy didn’t see it that way. Simply breathing was enough for me to set him off.
My eyes slid to the side, where I found my mother, drunk and passed out on the couch.
Yep.
Not an ounce of sympathy or protection would be found there. The best thing I could do at this point was not fight. It would only make things worse.
