Page 124 of The Oath We Give

“Not that.” She rolls her eyes, smiling. “I gave you my word to be your secret keeper. You took an oath, kept a secret. Now you can give it to me.”

“It’s my oath to give,” I say honestly. “I don’t know if you’ll believe me.”

“Silas.” She tilts her head, hair spilling out from the hood on her head. “I may suck at this emotional stuff and connecting with people. I get that. But one thing I can promise you is that no matter what, I’ll believe you. Your voice is the sound I trust most in the world.”

What a contradiction to everything I’ve heard my entire life. I meant it when I said I don’t know if it’s my promise to give her. I don’t know, and I can’t ask the person for permission because they are dead.

I don’t like assuming what Rosemary would want because no one knew her like she knew herself. But if I had to guess? Coraline is who she’d want me to share it with.

The only other person in my life who has spent their years depicted as something they’re not, living in a story that wasn’t written by our mouths.

I felt that the moment I saw Coraline. Knew that there was something in us no one else would ever be able to understand.

I look at her, knowing how much it took out of her to tell me her past. To share those parts of her with me. This is why she’s dangerous for me, not ’cause she’s got a bad track record with men but because I want to talk.

I want to take the leap of faith, to see if she’ll return the favor of belief. I’m so fucking tired of carrying this on my shoulders alone. Tired of the world seeing me as one thing and knowing who I am on the inside.

And I know she’s the one who needs to know the truth because as I sit here, looking at her, there isn’t an ounce of fear in my bones. There isn’t that rattling what-if bouncing in my head like there is with the guys. I know when I say what I’m about to say, she’ll trust.

Because it’s Coraline.

I’m the voice she needs. She’s the ears that I want to speak to.

“I’m not schizophrenic.”

Her eyes widen, and to her credit, she recovers well. It’s better than what I expected her initial reaction to be. I feel like I’ve unplugged a drain in me, and the water I’ve kept locked up begins to flood out.

It rushes out of me like blood from split veins.

“When I was twelve—” I clear my throat. “—I had been seeing a physiatrist for a few months. My parents were freaked about how reclusive I was. They thought talking to someone other than them would be good for me.”

Even all these years later, I can see the small version of myself going into those appointments, spending hours just sitting on a leather couch, playing chess and talking about nothing.

There wasn’t anything wrong with me. I was just quiet.

“I had finished my session for the day and was waiting on my mom to pick me up when I heard a girl crying. I thought she might be in trouble, so I followed the sound. Followed it until I found my doctor abusing a little girl.” I flinch, turning my eyes away from Coraline for a second, remembering the flashes of what I saw. “I panicked, so I started screaming. I just wanted to help her, gain someone’s attention so they’d make him stop. But I only ended up learning just how far vile people in Ponderosa Springs will go to cover up their secrets.”

I tell Coraline about how they sedated me, and when I woke up in the hospital, I was listening to that scum of a doctor telling my parents that they had a son who was schizophrenic.

Rage boils within my veins as I relive the memories of that moment, feeling the sting of betrayal on my lips as I pleaded for them to listen to me, a twelve-year-old kid begging his own parents to trust him.

I died that day. Not when Rosemary was killed, but that very day, I died.

The son they knew, the one they raised, was gone. I had died and been replaced with something that didn’t belong. I became a fucking corpse, and no one could smell my rotting soul but me.

The worst part? I can’t be upset at them.

Not when they had no choice. There was a medical professional telling them everything I saw that day had been a hallucination. The thoughts in my head were now tainting my reality. My mother and father were terrified for me. All they wanted was to help.

“For a while, they actually made me believe it. That I made it all up.” I rub my hands down my face. “Then I met Rosemary.”

Then I met Rosie, and everything changed.

“She was the girl you saw, wasn’t she?” Coraline asks, scooting closer to my stomach, her hands caging in my face before her nails scratch along my scalp.

I nod. “She never would’ve told me about the abuse had I not seen it. Never told me why she was seeing the psychiatrist in the first place. Rosie was good at keeping secrets. Even from me.”

I don’t know how we never ran into each other before we were fifteen, but it was like the universe knew we needed each other to survive.

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