Year 28 - J.L. Mac Page 0,95

Without wasting another moment, I rush to my car, double over by the driver’s side door and heave for several minutes. The shaking in my hands is growing exponentially with every step toward realization I take. The events of the entire evening tumble through my brain, bumping around drunkenly because none of it makes sense. Nothing adds up. I never should have been here. I never should have been in this house with that guy. I never would have. If things were the way they were supposed to be I likely would have been safe with Sy tonight, probably watching some movie we’ve seen a hundred times while he steals gentle touches and sweet kisses. This night… this is just as much his fault as it is mine.

I’ll never forgive either of us.

Chapter 26

Raegan

“The condom looked odd because it had actually broken. The roughness I think…” I trail off swallowing down the sudden taste of bile. “I went to get an abortion on my eighteenth birthday,” I confess on a whisper, my eyes fixed on the horizon.

“My god, Rae,” Momma breathes. I glance at her to see her face is paler, her eyes wide.

“I went back to the clinic on my birthday where they confirmed the pregnancy. I didn’t want to. I hated it how torn I was. I planned to use my birthday money,” I hiccup as tears pool in my eyes. “When I got there, the nurse took me back and helped get me ready. I was a wreck. When they did the ultrasound before—the rest, they found that there was no heartbeat,” I rush out then blow out a breath of air forcefully.

“The baby knew I didn’t want it. It knew I couldn’t—wouldn’t… and it died. I wished it and it died.” I shake and cry violently as though a dam has broken. Momma wraps her arms around me and we sob together. For the girl I was that had to make very grownup decisions after being brutalized. We cry for the woman that I became whose solution to her own haunted mind is to push the world away. For Sylas, who has no idea and whose only mistake in life was to love me in the first place.

“Oh, my sweet girl,” Momma sniffles but squares her shoulders with a determined expression. “You’re gonna listen to me now, you hear?” Unable to speak I only nod.

“You did nothing wrong. Nothing. Miscarriages happen every day to women everywhere and you have no say so in it. You can’t stop it and you certainly can’t wish it into reality. You did nothing wrong!” she insists forcefully, shaking my shoulders slightly. “You hear me?” I merely nod my head and work at catching my breath.

“I know you said you believed god wasn’t with you that night but I know in my heart he was with you in the end. God took that struggle—the weight of that decision from you.”

I had never thought about it that way. I prayed and spoke to god during those weeks that I privately wrestled with making the choice to terminate my pregnancy. Then, I went to have it done, and I felt as though I was being brutalized all over again, not physically but mentally, emotionally. I was being raped all over again. I was put in an impossible position, wondering how much ownership I needed to claim in all of it. I had gone willingly to Josh’s house hadn’t I? I had decided to keep my rape secret, which prevented medical intervention that would have prevented pregnancy, didn’t I? I plotted and planned and lied and waited for birthday money to kill my child, hadn’t I? I had made the appointment and had showed up for it, hadn’t I? In my mind I had more ownership over my circumstance than I ever wanted to acknowledge but did, nonetheless.

Then, the baby was just… gone in the same way it had come. Without my knowledge or consent. And still, I felt as though I had lost. No matter how events transpired, or how it all shook out in the end, I stood to lose. And I did. Feeling abandoned by the sense of peace my faith normally brought me, I pushed god and spirituality out of my mind until I saw Sylas in the hospital after he’d been injured overseas. Then… I’d begged, pleaded, bargained.

God, save him and keep him.

And he did.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Momma insists once more, but it’s a gentle whisper.

“Yeah,” I