Page 71 of Quiet Longing

The Present

19.

Charli

Sixteen years later.

There was a time when I’d planned to come back to Ireland regularly. I’d imagined myself spending a few weeks every summer with the family I’d spent far too little time with when I was young. Then I’d gone to college and met Jesse, and everything had changed.

The bright future I’d imagined for myself never materialised.

Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t happen overnight. It had been more of a slow, gradual process. Before long, I was living in a cage, cut off from the outside world, isolated and alone, held away from family and friends and reliant on only one person. I’d been trapped by a manipulative abuser who had complete control of me, mentally and physically.

When I’d first met him, Jesse was charming and intelligent. He’d been a scholarship kid like me and come from a working class background in Philadelphia. We’d bonded over our similar upbringings. I’d felt like he’d understood me in the way I needed to be understood at the time. I’d been an emotional wreck; an eighteen-year-old freshman who’d just discovered the mom who’d raised her wasn’t her birth mother, who’d been pretty much in love with a boy who was setting off on a dangerous path, and who’d been cripplingly terrified of succumbing to a condition that had taken her birth mother long before her time.

I’d been ripe for the picking. Maybe Jesse had seen it in me from the very start, how much I’d needed to latch onto someone who would keep me afloat. In the end, he wasn’t a buoy. He was an anchor pulling me down.

And I’d almost drowned.

Having struggled to the surface, I could finally breathe again. I was starting over fresh in a country far away from him. A country that held a large piece of my heart. Perhaps I’d left that piece in Ireland all those years ago.

I opened the curtains and peered out into the dark evening sky. This was the very same guest room I’d slept in during that summer right before college. Another lifetime, another me. I wasn’t the same girl.

I was a thirty-four-year-old woman with haunted shadows and ghosts in her eyes.

Unlike the last time I’d come to stay with my aunt and uncle, it wasn’t summer. It was late-January, which meant pitch blackness outside at only 4 p.m. I’d arrived yesterday afternoon and hadn’t left the room since. Jet lag had a part to play, but that wasn’t the only reason I’d slept for a day and a half. I felt like I could finally rest since I was no longer on the same soil as Jesse. I could sleep after years of anxiety, tension, and fear.

“Charli, are you awake?” came Aunt Jo’s gentle voice.

The house, once a hive of activity, was much quieter than it had been when my cousins were teenagers. They’d all flown the nest, forged lives for themselves.

“Yes, I’m awake,” I called back, and she poked her head in. Her hair was shorter than before, with a few greys peppered through the blonde. She still had that effortless style, though, in her sleeveless silk blouse and beige capri pants.

“Hello, darling. It’s so good to see you up. Shall I run you a bath? I bought some essential oils.”

“A bath would be heaven. Thank you, Jo.”

“Great. I’ll get it running for you. Oh, and everyone’s coming over for dinner later. I’m not sure if Nuala mentioned, but we tend to get together most Fridays. Derek and Tristan will be dropping over, too.”

“Sounds good,” I said while my belly twisted with nerves at having to interact with other humans. I was out of practice, hadn’t spoken to my cousins in person in years. Nuala and I had only gotten back in touch a couple months ago, our interactions either through email or phone calls. “It’ll be good to see everyone.”

Aunt Jo smiled then went to run my bath. She and Uncle Padraig knew a little about the reasons for my divorce, but not everything. I’d given Nuala a rundown, too, though I’d asked they not spread the information to Derek and Tristan. I wanted as few people to know about my troubled, abusive marriage as possible. Starting over would be easier without everyone thinking of me as a victim, looking at me with pity.

I wouldn’t be able to stand it.

The only person who knew the full truth was my mom. She was the one who’d nursed me back to health, pumped life back into my lungs. Jesse had tried his level best to alienate me from her, but he’d underestimated my mom. She was a fighter, and she didn’t give up on me, not even after so many years of struggle. Thinking of her brought on a fresh wave of emotion because she was the reason I was still around.

She was the reason I had this second chance.

And in her own life, she was thriving, which gave me immense happiness. She’d remarried when I was in my second year of college to a great guy named Michael. He was a divorced grocery store manager, with three grown-up kids and a bunch of grandchildren. Mom adored being part of a large family, and she got along with Michael’s ex-wife, so the whole set up was drama free.

I stood in the bathroom, lavender-scented steam filling the room as I stared at myself in the foggy mirror. I lookedtired. It was difficult to stare at my unclothed body after all it had been through. Several broken bones, infections, bruises, and scarsthat had healed, but I still felt their presence. They made me think of a boy I knew, a boy who bore similar scars at a time when my own skin was unmarred by such things.

When I returned to America and started college, Rhys and I had exchanged regular emails. He didn’t have any active social media since that wasn’t his thing, but I’d received an email from him at least twice a month. Then one day a couple months in, the emails had just … stopped. I’d spent weeks re-reading the last email I’d sent, fearing I’d said something wrong, but I couldn’t find anything that might’ve stopped him from replying. So, I’d reached out to Nuala. She’d told me Derek and Tristan had stopped hearing from Rhys, too, and they’d suspected his training had intensified, that he might’ve been deployed somewhere with little to no telecommunication and probably wouldn’t have the means to email or call for a while.

So, I’d waited.

I’d made some friends at college and attended classes, but I’d also developed an obsession, relentlessly researching schizophrenia and worrying I was going to develop it. I’d started questioning everything I did. Analysing my thoughts and fretting that I was growing increasingly paranoid, which was also a symptom of the condition.

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