Page 124 of Necessary Cruelty

Thirty-Seven

I wakeup with sunlight streaming onto my face and a restraint on my arms tying me down to the hospital bed.

My body feels like it just got run over by a truck.

I’m only awake for a few minutes before a nurse bustles in to check my vital signs and remove the restraints. Clearly, they only had me tied down in case I woke up and tried to kill myself again.

Did I try to kill myself?

They ask me that question enough times that you think I’d have a clearer answer. I remember feeling a blackness descend over my mind, so deep that I couldn’t see any way out of it that didn’t involve just being done with all of it.

All of it meaning…life, I guess.

But with the sun shining brightly on my skin through the window and several locked doors between me and Vin, it was getting easier to see the forest for the trees.

I don’t want to die. I just want to be as far from Deception as it’s possible to get without actually leaving planet Earth.

Eventually the doctor comes in, pleasant-faced but eager to get to the point. He explains that I nearly drowned and that I was technically dead when they brought me in. My heart had to be restarted at some point.

I guess Vin and I have that in common.

“What happened?” he asks.

But he really means, Did you do it on purpose?

And I don’t have an answer that will satisfy any of us. They won’t let me go until I assure them that I’ve returned to sanity, although I’ll have to be here at least a few days for monitoring.

I say all the right words, like an intelligent person would. It seems silly to ask someone if they’re suicidal when anyone who truly is would never admit to someone who might stand in their way. I guess the better question is can we still save you?

The answer is yes, at least for now.

But I made it clear from the moment consciousness returned that I don’t want them to let Vin anywhere near me. Even with the faintly coercive nature of my hospital stay, I still get a say in who comes to visit. There isn’t anyone that I particularly want to see.

Especially Vin Cortland.

He doesn’t try very hard to get in, according to the nurses. As soon as they told him that I wasn’t going to see him, he stormed off without so much as a backwards glance.

That’s what I get for falling in love with a monster.

My hand keeps straying to my belly, and I don’t realize it until I find my palm stroking there, searching for any hint of a developing bump. I know I’m not far enough along for anything to be physically different, but my mind can’t focus on anything else.

How can something be so barely real and also entirely destructive?

No matter what empty promises Vin made, college is off the table. The $100,000 he promised me won’t be enough for paying tuition and raising a child, especially since I wouldn’t have time to work on top of all that. Vin would probably help if I asked him, or took him to court if necessary, but I’m not going to do either of those things.

As far as I’m concerned, he has ceased to exist.

Just like my dreams. Those have shattered like shards of glass, and I don’t have the will left to gather them all up and glue the pieces back together.

I barely have enough will left to keep myself alive.

But it isn’t just me anymore, is it?

My palm presses hard against my belly again, pushing until it almost hurts. I just need to feel something, a stirring or a lump of tissue, anything to prove this is real.

With a start, I remember that my mother was in her last semester of high school when she got pregnant with me. I count up the months in my head, only to realize that she would have had to be exactly as old as I am when she conceived, practically down to the month.

Like mother, like dumbass daughter.

---