Page 177 of Edge of Unbroken

“Yep. I see her twice a week.”

“Does it help?”

“I don’t know,” Ronan says with a small shrug and a shake of his head.

“You said you had panic attacks. What happens to you when you have one?”

“My heart races in my chest, my breathing picks up until I hyperventilate, I have cold sweats, but feel hot at the same damn time, and sometimes I get sick to my stomach.”

“What do you do when you have a panic attack like that?”

“I try to ground myself. I’m not great at it, honestly, because I’m still not great at recognizing when an attack is coming on, so most of the time it’s too late to do anything about them.”

“When was the last time you had a panic attack, Ronan?”

Ronan glances at his watch. “Umm, roughly ten hours ago.”

“Was it a bad one?”

“Pretty bad,” he agrees with a nod.

“What did you do to ground yourself this morning?”

“I called my girlfriend,” Ronan says, his voice softening.

“Did it help?”

“Instantly. She’s like medicine.” I note several members of the jury smiling. That deep love for him in my chest buries itself deeper into my bones.

“Ronan, are you on any medication for any of your mental health struggles?”

“Not right now. I was in the beginning, but I didn’t like the way they made me feel, so I weaned myself off them. My therapist wasn’t happy with me, but it is what it is.” Ronan shrugs with a rueful chuckle.

“One final question: if you had the chance to say anything to your mother, what would you tell her?”

A hushed silence mutes the courtroom, thickening the air as we await Ronan’s answer.

Ronan

I knew I wasn’t prepared for today. I mean, how could I be? As trying as my life has been, as fraught with fear and anxiety as my days were growing up, I was never forced to live in such a heightened state of stress for nine hours straight; I was never forced to remember and relive every past moment marred by violence. I was never forced to sit andwatchmy mom dislocate my shoulder and put it back in place; I was never made towatchher beat me with a broom or a whiskey bottle or a damn shoe. I was never required towatchher break my kneecap and kick me in the stomach until my spleen ruptured all while yelling at me to beg her to kill me.

I think I’ve experienced the gamut of emotions today, a revolving mix of fear, grief, pain, sadness, resignation. It went like that all day long, over and over again. Only occasionally did I feel some reprieve when the prosecutor asked me about Cat, my friends, or anything other than my shitty life. When Darren Cooley turned off the last clip after letting it run until the EMTs rolled my lifeless body out of my house on a stretcher, I was overwhelmed, shocked, and, honestly, numb. The footage showed the culmination of all the hate, the vitriol, the brutality, the cruelty, and watching it back, I’m once again incredulous that I survived that beating. Barely.

I’m depleted, desperate for this all to be over, when the attorney throws me an absolute curveball. “One final question: if you had the chance to say anything to your mother, what would you tell her?”

It catches me completely off guard, and I stare at him for a moment, my brow furrowed.

Reluctantly, I allow my eyes to move away from him, slowly sweeping to the right, to the defense table where I find my mom. I don’t know what happened in the past nine hours, but she suddenly looks so much smaller than I remember or even just this morning.

She was always imposing to me, even toward the end, when I was almost a foot taller than her and outweighed her by fifty or sixty pounds. But looking at her now—now that I’ve unburdened myself, now that the whole world knows what she’s done to me, now that I have no secrets to hide and no injuries to cover up, now that I know she’ll never put a hand on me again—she looks… fragile, childlike. And I’d almost take pity on her if it wasn’t for the fact that she looks exactly how she made me feel every. Single. Day. Of my life—small, weak, and at her mercy.

As if she can sense my gaze, my mom lifts her eyes, locking them on mine, and it’s like she takes my heart and lungs into a stranglehold as we stare at each other for what feels like an eternity. An entire world of unspoken words and emotions passes between us. Her eyes—the exact same fucking shade of green as mine—hold… sadness? Regret? Empathy?

What do I do? What do I say? Do I say anything? What would Iwantto say? Shit, whatwouldn’tI want to say?

There’s a lifetime of things I could tell her, like: You broke me, Mom. Physically. Emotionally. Every breathing minute of my life—you broke me. Piece by tiny piece, you broke me. Until there was nothing left but ruins.

Or how about I tell her that she made me doubt who and what I am, that I could be enough someday, somehow, if only I worked harder, longer.

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