Page 168 of My Sweet Dollie, You Have to Love Me
My brain doesn’t listen, and my new stitches pull.
There’s a need inside me that says I have to be louder than the voice that threatens this will happen again and again for the rest of my life.
Oh, God. I want to die.
Beyond my screams, I hear a muffle of words come from Colin’s wife. Her lips move rapidly, but I can’t make out what she says with tears clouding my vision.
Colin’s dirty lips move to my ear, the cruel whisper somehow seeping inside. “I said, don’t keep making that fucking noise.”
A pain scrapes against my throat, starting at the right, below my ear, and spreading all the way to the left.
The noise dwindles to nothing as the pain grows worse and worse. Something tickles my chest, and I glance down at a trail of blood. My fingers travel to my throat, and I bring them to my face. The dark red kiss that stains the tips makes me lightheaded as the promise of death looms.
My eyes blink rapidly, and I focus on squeezing the pillow with my unstained hand because it keeps me alert.
“You will never talk again. If you so much as try, your little sister will suffer like you have.”
He uses my own condition against me as I continue to focus on the pillow, still squeezing. On the tears on Colin’s wife’s face that become clear as my own fall as she rushes around the room, screaming about stopping the bleeding. On the painful and cruel whispers that Colin drills into my ear.
“Do you understand?”
I can’t nod.
I can’t talk.
I can’t do anything.
Everything goes black, and I feel like I’m finally leaving here…
But what about Dollie?
CHAPTER 38
Dollie—age seven
It feels like a very long time since Ambrose walked up those stairs.
I’ve heard every scream, but the crocodile stops me from trying to get to him. The deeper water is over my head now. The bucket we use bobs by me when another scream cuts through the air.
“Ambrose!” I whisper shout.
The pain in his voice hurts my soul, and tears are pouring from my eyes. “I need you. Please, be okay. I need you.”
“He’ll be okay, he’ll be okay.” I nod, rocking myself on the tiny step.
Losing my footing, my leg slips into the water, and the mean crocodile rushes for me.
Screaming, I try to scare him away, but it doesn’t work. Only an inch away from his snapping jaw, my leg flies out of the water.
I can’t stop myself from rocking again, repeating those same words, but then silence falls upstairs.
“Ambrose?”
And a feeling comes from nowhere. A loss that I don’t know how to understand.
He won’t answer me.
He can’t answer me.
