Page 33 of Free to Breathe
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” I finish softly.
She doesn’t acknowledge my apology. For her, the words mean literally nothing. “We’re done. Is there anything else?”
“I guess not.” I stare at the beautiful, creative, warm-hearted woman in front of me and feel so many emotions, with regret right at the forefront.
“Right. So glad we had this chat.” Turning on her heel, she stalks across her patio to her back door. She opens and slams it behind her.
Slowly making my way down the flagstone path, I find myself back in the driveway again. I climb into my Jeep and sit for a few minutes trying to get my bearings. Never did I expect for Corinna to say what she did.
After starting the ignition, I pull out of Corinna’s driveway and backtrack my way off the farm and through Collyer. I’m so disheartened and disoriented, I don’t even know where I’m going until I end up back at the Hudson offices. Somehow, I power through the rest of the day without any interaction with Caleb or Keene. I don’t know if I would have been able to keep any of what she said to myself.
I just know I have to.
I have to keep this promise because I broke all the others.
* * *
It isn’tuntil hours later when I’m back in my apartment with a glass of bourbon in my hand that it clicks. I’m replaying our conversation over and over.
Who else would have heard about Corinna falling at our party all those years ago? Not me, apparently, I think bitterly. I was too concerned about getting my dick wet to have heard anything beyond the moans generated in my room. Who else knew what Corinna meant to me and could have told me what happened?
Who could have helped me figure this out ten years ago before I lost her?
When I come to the realization, I stand up and hurl the glass against the wall. Not caring about the glass shards exploding everywhere, or the amber liquid leaving tracks against the wall, I realize how thoroughly I was betrayed.
Jack was my best friend from the day we joined the same fraternity together at UConn. He lived across the hall from me. He would have been the one most likely to have seen Corinna if she came out of my room.
Like my investigations, the pieces start sliding into place. Jack was my confidant. He knew how conflicted I was about Corinna. He’d seen me downstairs drinking, and he knew I had gone into that room with Addison because I passed him on my way up the stairs.
He’s known all along what happened that night. I could strangle that son of a bitch for not telling me years ago so I could have fixed this.
He knew. We talked about how much I agonized over Corinna’s cold shoulder so close to graduation. For fuck’s sake, it was Jack who suggested I try to contact her once I got settled on base. I sent him letters to give to her. Letters that I poured my heart into, assuming she would read them if delivered by a mediator instead of just tearing them up. I begged her to forgive me for whatever I had done. I begged her for a chance to be heard.
Now I wonder, did she ever get them?
Time to pay my soon-to-be-former friend a visit.
17
Corinna
After Colby leaves, I wearily drag myself upstairs to shower and redress. All of his questions were finally answered, but none of mine were. Of course not. I’ll probably go to the grave never understanding why the men in my life think of me as nothing more than collateral.
Dropping my clothes in the hamper near in my closet, I pad into the connecting bathroom. As the water’s heating, I step on the scale and frown at the number. It’s no wonder my clothes are falling off me. Even I didn’t realize I’ve lost this much weight.
I’ve always been tall and voluptuous, with a body I was more comfortable hiding even before I was taken in the middle of the night to pay off a drug debt I wasn’t responsible for. Let’s face it. I was stacked at sixteen with oversized curves that didn’t go unnoticed in the tiny South Carolina town filled with addicts where I was raised. Men had been making passes at me since I was thirteen. Puberty wasn’t kind to me. It just gave license to the assholes who thought it was entirely acceptable to shove me into dark corners to cop a quick feel.
Yet another reason I hate the dark.
It takes a certain kind of immorality to agree to sell your daughter to monsters for a drug habit you can no longer control. I just wish I’d had the chance to do to my family what Holly had done to hers…but still. At least mine are no longer alive, unlike Ali’s father, who was one of the people who kept us locked in the shipping container for sale. I don’t have to be wary about listening to the news updates on his sentence since Judge McDonald, who passed down his conviction, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court.
It’s cold and heartless, but not everyone’s redeemable. And not everyone’s parents sold them for their next hit. It’s not everyone who’s taken from the comfort of their bed and the safety of their home and told they’d be better off if they were sold by the pound, only to be thrown into a putrid shipping container in the middle of the night.
I can only hope my parents are rotting in the ninth circle of hell—treachery. I hope they’re so far from light and heat, they’re nothing.
After all, that’s what they allowed men to make me feel like I was worth—nothing.
Even as the warm water cascades over my skin, I feel goose bumps prickle up.Breathe in, let it out, I tell myself.Remember, you had Ali and Holly. And later, Phil, Cass, and Em. Who knows what the other girls in that container went back to?
