Page 73 of Fallen Petal

Epilogue 1

J

Petal was thirteen years old when she let me stare into her abyss.

I never asked for it, nor did I force it on her.

But I knew I could help her.

I knew I had to help her as soon as I heard her story. Even at such a young age, she’d gained notoriety for something so cruel that it’s unimaginable for most people, which is exactly why the chatter that surrounded her was so attractive to them.

Everyone knew her as the girl who killed her mother.

It didn’t matter whether it was true. It didn’t matter if it was a twist, added to make a horrible situation even more terrible for those involved.

All that mattered was that she believed it herself.

And how could they forget if she couldn’t?

It was the first and last time I ever gave credit to Robert, her father. Because he was the only one who didn’t tell the story the way everyone else did. He didn’t think his daughter had killed his wife. He knew that it was an accident, something that happened due to a series of dark incidents, and his daughter was just a small speck in all of it.

His wife was unfaithful, and she had been for years. Petal knew about it, but her father didn’t.

It was the very first thing she said when she sat down before me. I had nothing but rumors going for me back then. I was a young college student who had just moved to the area. But I already knew about my gift, because I had used it before, albeit never with this kind of precision. My psychology professor was the one who first noticed, and if he hadn’t spread the word about his observations with me, who knows if things would have ever developed the way they did.

Robert brought her to me, reluctant, but hopeful. We knew there was a risk, but to him, nothing could be worse than the state his daughter had been in ever since her mother’s death. She wasn’t simply depressed. She was barely alive. There was no room for her to mourn her mother’s death because she was tortured with guilt, numbing everything she was.

“Make her forget that night,” he pleaded. “Give me my daughter back.”

He meant it that day. All he wanted was for her to heal.

And I made that happen.

I sat down with Petal, alone, relying only on my gift for hypnosis in lieu of sedative drugs that would later enable me to control a person’s mind to a better degree. She looked so small, so fragile—and so broken by pain that I could feel it stabbing against my own heart just by looking at her.

But she trusted me. For whatever reason, she trusted me. And she told me everything.

She told me about the affair her mother had been having for years. She told me how she would see her sneak out at night, and how she would later follow her on her bike, hiding in the bushes as she watched her mother betray her family. Her heart curled to a ball of pain every time it happened, not because she felt sorry for her father, but because she felt betrayed and left out herself. She never had a good relationship with her strict father, relying on her mother’s love to make up for his austere hand at home.

But her mother let her down. She broke free from her bleak life and a joyless marriage by seeking the company of another man, leaving her daughter behind. Petal hated her for that.

For months and years, she watched her mother lie, leaving the house more frequently and for longer times, while her father remained oblivious, too busy with his shop and passing out from too many beers each night. Petal spent most of her time at her friend Malia’s house, playing house with a family that was less broken than hers.

Until one day, she could no longer bear to carry her mother’s secret in silence. She wanted to confront her.

She wanted to scare the living shit out of her mother, hoping it would bring her to her senses and return to a family that was falling apart.

It was that desire for confrontation that got her mother killed. Petal wanted to be seen by her in a moment when she cast all thoughts about her daughter aside. She wanted her mother to see the accusing look on her face as she was on her way to the lover who appeared to mean more to her than her own family.

All Petal did was to stand at the side of the road, taking a step forward to make sure she was seen, casting her mother a sinister look as tears of desperation streamed down her face.

Her mother saw her. Her eyes were glued to her daughter, while her foot remained firm on the gas. She drove without slowing down, without looking ahead—and right into another car that hit her from the side as she passed a red light, rolled right onto a crossing and traffic that did not expect her.

She died right before Petal’s eyes.

And as the memory poured out of her, I gathered it all up, hypnotizing her deeper and deeper, almost speaking in a mantra as I held her in my arms, catching her tears and soaking up her pain. Her trauma did part of the job for me, making it almost too easy to erase the horrid images and the connected guilt from her mind.

But more things had to vanish for her to live through this. Christopher is right when he says that she was never the same after. She didn’t only forget about her mother, but about him, too. About the friendship they shared, and the love that was about to blossom between two teenagers.

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