I Have Lived and I Have Loved - Willow Winters Page 0,259

I can’t. All I can picture is how Marie looked the last time I saw her. I knew she wasn’t well, but they wouldn’t let me go to her. They wouldn’t let me keep her from leaving. She left me, and I knew it was the last time I’d see her.

“I couldn’t save her,” I whisper and let the warm tears slide down my cheeks. “I begged her, the last time I saw her, I begged her to take her medication but she didn’t believe it would work.”

Marie never had a chance. The moment she was saved from her father, the true beast destroyed her. Her memory.

The home she was in was temporary, and they didn’t care for her. They just wanted a check. The city bus brought her there, and the program paid for it and her medication but she was always alone. The burden was left on her shoulders, except for the small moments I had with her.

“She’d gotten worse the last time I saw her. She started hurting herself.” My breathing is ragged and I lean my head against the wall, closing my eyes and willing the images to go away.

“She needed more help than I could give her.” There wasn’t a phone call I didn’t make. Marie became my priority, but I had no rights to her. I had no legal way to protect her or to take her like I so desperately wanted to.

“She’s gone?” he asks me.

I wipe the tears away and take a steadying breath. When I lick my lips, the salt coats the tip of my tongue. It’s only then that I come back to the moment, to what I can change. To what I can prevent.

“Her death affected me very deeply because it reminded me of-” I hesitate and swallow before I say, “Jay.”

John shifts uncomfortably in the steel chair and the metal legs scratch the floor. “Because his father abused him?” he asks.

I’m careful about answering, but I decide to ask, “What do you know about what he did?”

John glances at the red light for a moment, as if distracted by it before looking back at me. “Jay has told me a lot,” John answers with a tone that tells me he’s uncomfortable.

“Did he tell you his father liked to see how much pain Jay could take before screaming for his dead mother?” The words slip out of me like a void. The brutality and tragedy seeming cold as ice on my lips. I look up into John’s eyes as I explain, “It wasn’t good enough unless his father believed it was genuine.” He tortured him in so many ways. As if it were a game and he was simply trying to find the best tool that was most effective. But nothing ever would be. He would never win; he’d never be content.

“Is that what Marie’s father did?” John asks, forcing my gaze back to him. To the present. To being in a basement twenty years later, brought back by the one boy I wish I could have saved.

If only I’d known.

“Yes, but that’s not why she reminded me of Jay. When I left both of them, I knew they were going to their deaths.” My composure crumbles as I state the words as a fact. Because it’s so true.

I left Jay, and Marie left me. “Maybe I never deserved to help her,” I croak out. Maybe if she’d been in someone else’s care, she’d still be alive. That’s the thought that keeps me up at night. The thought that made me down an entire bottle of pills in the hopes of ending my own life.

“I’m so sorry that you lost Marie, Robin,” John says with such sympathy as he leans forward that it breaks me. “It’s not your fault,” he tells me as if it’s a truth.

“I knew and I couldn’t do anything. And when I left Jay-” My throat closes and refuses to let me take in a breath. My upper body collapses, and I hug my legs close.

Watching her walk away from me was every bit the same as when Jay turned his back on me in the field. He pushed me forward and said he’d stay behind for only a minute, but I knew it.

I knew it would be the last time.

And I still ran.

Marie never gave me the choice.

“Hush,” I hear John say at the same time as I hear the bed creak with movement. I focus on calming myself as John rests a large