Page 170 of Edge of Unbroken

“Did you tell anyone about this incident on August 13th?”

Ronan shakes his head, not looking up. “No.”

“Why not?” the attorney asks like he has so many times today.

Ronan just shrugs. “It wasn’t anything that hadn’t happened before. It was just… life,” he says, his words heavy, and I can see the effect they have on my friends, mom, Frank, and Penny sitting to the side of me. We’re all beginning to understand that the vicious abuse Ronan has been describing all day, the beatings that have garnered such strong reactions from the jury and the audience, were an everyday part of life for Ronan. A dark, hidden, and painful part of his life.

“Do you remember your mom apologizing for hurting you?”

Ronan looks at him with a frown on his face. “Not specifically, but she obviously did. She apologized all the time.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. It was always like that. She’d hurt me and then, once things had calmed down, once we had gotten some distance, she’d either pretend nothing happened at all or she’d randomly tell me she was sorry, that she didn’t want to always hurt me. And then she’d inevitably tell me what it was I did to set her off and that if only I did what she told me she wouldn’t have to keep hurting me. It was just… bullshit.”

“Where did you go after this particular incident, after you took out the trash and got in your car?”

I, of course, know the rest of story; I know where Ronan went, how he spent his evening.

“I went back to work for another couple of hours,” Ronan says. “Shane had to close Murphy’s early for something. I don’t remember exactly.” He sounds utterly exhausted.

“Did you go back home after leaving work?”

“No.”

“Where did you go right after work?”

Ronan hesitates. I raise my eyebrows at his delay because I know he came to pick me up.

“I went and bought some weed,” he admits, and my head snaps to Vada, then to Shane.What the hell?Was he high that night? No, I don’t think so. I’ve had friends who smoke, and I’d know if Ran was high when we were together that night. Or would I?

“Did you consume any of it that night?” Darren Cooley asks.

I listen intently, and to my relief, Ronan shakes his head. “No; I never smoked it. I threw it out a few minutes after buying it.”

“If you threw it out, why did you buy it in the first place?”

“As a crutch. I smoke sometimes when it feels like everything is getting a bit overwhelming. It just kind of… takes the edge off I guess.”

I can tell he feels like crap admitting this in front of everyone, and I look over at Frank, trying to gauge his reaction to his youngest son’s admission of using drugs to cope. But Frank’s face is all empathy and no judgment, and I feel so much gratitude for him. He may not have been around to protect Ronan, but he’s still a good dad.

“Why did you end up throwing it out instead of smoking it?”

“Because I realized I needed to be fully present that night, despite whatever happened at home,” Ronan says, conviction in his voice.

“Can you elaborate on that? Why did you need to be present?”

“Just… I needed to be sober for my girlfriend. She had her own shit—sorry,stuff”—he looks at the judge sheepishly, but the gruff-looking older gentleman just gives Ronan a comforting smile—“going on, and it wouldn’t have been fair to her if I got high or wasn’t sober. I wanted to be there for her.”

Ronan’s words find their way directly into my soul. The fact that he decided against numbing his own pain to be one hundred percent present with me, to help me deal with my anguish, is the epitome of sacrifice. I know without a shadow of doubt that even if the world was completely upside down, Ronan would be upside down right along with me. And I vow right then and there to do the same for him, no matter what.

Mr. Cooley finishes his walkthrough of that day, briefly questioning Ronan about his mother’s comment about Ronan’s bloody lip and black eye. Ronan keeps his response to the bare minimum, only divulging that “some guy was putting hands” on me without my permission, but otherwise keeping the more painful details to himself. Adam doesn’t come up again, and I can’t even put into words how much I love Ronan and his protectiveness.

The attorney backtracks, returning to the time roughly a year prior to August 28th, and meticulously takes Ronan, the jury, and the audience through the surveillance footage, which captured so much unspeakable abuse, both physical and verbal. Ronan was spot-on in his description that things were starting to feel different, his mother’s violence more frequent, her hits harder, more relentless, more painful.

It’s clear that Rica had no trouble coming up with ways to inflict pain. Regardless of the means employed to inflict physical injury on Ronan, the words that would accompany the abuse were always the same. They relentlessly hammered home that—in Rica’s eyes—her son was a worthless, irrelevant screwup who, no matter what he did, would never be good enough, would never be worthy of love, affection, or anything good in his life.

I barely breathe when the prosecutor begins to show surveillance footage from last summer, when I stepped into Ronan’s life, when our relationship blossomed, when our love for each other grew stronger day by day. He plays back a moment from the Saturday I first met Ronan—May 1st—and he and Steve inadvertently broke curfew. I know now how Ronan got his bruised jaw, which I noticed days later.

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