Page 53 of Shameless Vows

“Mami… Please tell me. I don’t know. I don’t know any of it.”

She couldn’t even look at me, but she managed to explain.

“It was October. You had just finished your mid-terms. You sent a message saying you were going away with a girlfriend for a long weekend. We transferred extra money to you and didn’t think much of it until we tried to reach you about Thanksgiving plans. Your phone was turned off. We called the Sterlings to see if Malachi had heard from you. They told us you broke up. It stunned us, and that is when we knew something was wrong. Your phone was still turned off, and we left many messages. We said we were going to call the police if you didn’t call us soon. Then you called. You said everything was fine, but that you had decided to leave school. You sounded like a shell of yourself. You were cold and disconnected. We asked if you were using drugs, if you were depressed, if you had been overwhelmed by college. You said no. You said you were tired of school and wanted to travel instead. Your father was angry, but he transferred some money anyway. He said you had until the end of the year to get this nonsense out of your system and come home. You didn’t come home. You didn’t call again, but you sent us messages. Very hateful messages. You demanded money. You insisted that your father owed you your inheritance. He refused to send any more money. We traced the activity in your bank account, but it was merely ATM withdrawals in the city near your university. The Sterlings refused to speak to us, so we didn’t know what had happened between you and Malachi. We were convinced that the break-up had caused you to lose your mind, and we believed that you were holed up somewhere in the city. We had no evidence or reason to believe you were elsewhere, and the messages continued for months, so your father washed his hands of you and decided that you could live on the money he’d already sent, and you could come home when you were ready to apologize and get your act together. You continued to send messages demanding money, but we stopped responding to them. We left with your siblings for our summer holiday in Los Cabos. We were there when your father received a phone call from a sheriff in a small town outside of Monterrey, who told him you’d been arrested after an altercation. A man was dead. They told us you had called them, so all of it looked like self-defense, and you had many injuries, but you were catatonic and couldn’t make a statement either way. Your father paid them above and beyond your bail in a sort of under-the-table restitution so we could simply bring you home. He paid them a lot of money, child. Enough to make this situation go away. But because this situation exists, you absolutely cannot leave this house again. You cannot go harass the Sterlings. Malachi left to travel after he graduated, and when he returns home, he’ll begin his time in the Corwick Navy, and then he’ll have his official duties as a senior royal. None of them are part of our lives anymore. These are the unfortunate, sad consequences of your behavior. I’m sorry you cannot remember any of it. I have to believe that’s a byproduct of your regret, because I refuse to believe that my own daughter could do the kinds of things you did without conscience or remorse. Please comply with your father’s wishes. You have eliminated any options you previously had for your future. This is your life now because of the choices you made, whether you remember those choices or not.”

Mama still didn’t look at me, and all I could do was stare at her.

None of it even sounded real. I couldn’t even believe my ears. There was no way it could possibly be real, except that only two days before, I had been lying in the cold, hard proof that it was.

There was honestly no explanation, except that my prolifically faulty memory had somehow short-circuited the rest of my mind and triggered a total meltdown.

And even if there was another explanation… what my mother had just told me was the explanation my father believed, and I was at his complete and total mercy. Now that I was a college drop-out, there was no way for me to leave and provide for myself while I somehow figured out an alternate explanation. Now that Malachi was gone, there would be no engagement, no marriage, no future with him, nolifethat we had always dreamed of and planned for.

I was only nineteen, and I’d already lost everything.

I had nothing.

At least… nothing that my father wouldn’t provide for me. And he was already so fed up with me that he sounded like merely allowing me to live in his home was now the single luxury I had left.

My face was wet with hot tears of disbelief, and all I could say was, “I’m so sorry, Mami. I don’t know what happened to me. I’m so sorry.”

Her throat pulsed with a swallow, and she still didn’t look at me. “It is perhaps for the best that you don’t remember. I can’t imagine that any of it was good.”

And then, she left my room, closing the door quietly behind her.

I sat, still like a statue, in total silence, as the weight of reality bore down on me so hard that it felt like it would literally crush my bones. As I sat in a stupor, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror above my dresser, and for a second, it startled me.

The girl looking back at me looked like a stranger.

I pushed my aching body off the bed to cross the room and look more closely at myself.

I wasn’t justthin. My appearance bordered on skeletal. My clothing hung from my frame like I was little more than a hanger. My hair was stringy and dull. My complexion pasty like I hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks. Bruises peeked out below the baggy sleeves of the t-shirt, and I couldn’t tell if they were remnants of track marks from shooting up or from the altercation Mamá spoke of. Every part of me hurt, but in my more intimate places I could feel what was clearly the after-effects of rough sex. Sex with someone who obviously wasn’t Malachi. And I couldn’t evenremember it.

I couldn’t look at myself.

A hair brush sat on the dresser, and I picked it up. Wielding it like a sledgehammer, I smashed all of the glass out of the mirror, and it scattered all over the place. Shards of it sliced the bottoms of my bare feet as I turned and stalked back to my bed.

The last time I’d been in this bed was the day Malachi and I both left for our fall semesters. Only an hour before we were kissing goodbye next to the door and then having sex against the wall right before he had to go to the airfield to return to Corwick.

It was the last time I saw him in person.

Staring at the bed now, I knew the maids had been in countless times to clean the room and change the linens, so there would be no lingering scent of him. But that didn’t stop me from climbing between the sheets, bleeding feet and all, and wrapping myself up tightly so I could bury my face in the mattress in desperation to suck in oxygen, hoping that I could smellsomething.

And miraculously… I did.

I swore that I did.

He’d been in this bed thousands of times, and I swore that his scent was still lingering here in this secret, sacred space that had been ours alone.

And it was all I had left of him.

I did not cry.

Lest my tears wash away the last remaining molecules of his precious scent,I did not cry.

After all, how are you able to cry if your heart and soul are suddenly justgone?

ISLA

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