a? The family… all of it… were you even making my birthday up to me?”
“Making what up, Abigail?” She put his arm around me, on my fucking shoulders. “The cake you smashed all on your own, or the hair you cut from Gemma’s head? Which part of that should we make up?”
Before this summer, that would have destroyed me. Before Theo, I would’ve thrown myself at her feet for approval.
Theo always poked the sorest parts of my soul. The parts of me I didn’t want to acknowledge. My mother didn’t love me, or, worse, no one can love me. He made me look at those parts and question why the wound existed and who had put it there.
It was cruel and horrible, but the thing is, if you didn’t acknowledge a wound, you can’t heal. It sits there and gets infected. It grows and it takes over. A wound on your soul changes who you are. If you didn’t love yourself first, you can’t love anyone.
I thought my grandpa loved me. It had taken one word from Theo to change it.
That isn’t unconditional.
Theo was cruel and heartless, and somehow the only one who loved me unconditionally.
I shoved her off, stepping far, far away from her and Ned.
I rolled my lips, focusing on breathing through my nose and not the ache in my chest.
“Do you even care the man you want me to marry has been stalking me for over a year?” I asked, for the first time genuinely curious.
Was I going to live like this forever? With a man who thought I was his property, with a mom who saw no problem selling me to him, and whose affection hung like the sword of Damocles.
Ned shifted, smile tight on the press approaching.
Gray and Gemma had put their phones away, watching us. Though my and Gemma’s relationship was better, and Gray had been decidedly less of a dick, I still didn’t trust it. Old fear scraped at my gut, worried at how they might use this information against me. At the same time, I wasn’t going to let it stop me.
I was done hiding, through pretending, finished caring more about reputation than well-being.
“You know who he is. You’ve seen everything. The evidence—you saw how he treated me. Is our name really that important?”
“Where is this coming from?” Mom asked through clenched teeth.
I saw my future crystal clear and blinding in my mother’s tight smile. Loveless, cold, married to a name not a man. Children who fought for scraps of affection. If I was lucky, I could hold on to the memory of Theo.
“He drugged me. He drugged me, and he probably would have raped me if Theo wasn’t there.”
“Always with the melodrama,” my mom sighed.
Just a month ago I would have given in to this marriage, given up and into a life that was less than in so many ways.
“Nothing I do will ever be good enough for you,” I whispered. “For this family.” She probably couldn’t hear it above the seagulls and crash of the waves, but it was more to myself than her.
Because that was when I finally understood she would never love me the way I needed. None of my family could. We were all too fucking broken. We were jagged facsimiles of a family. When we tried to love one another, we cut.
Tansy Crowne honestly didn’t see the problem with marrying me to someone like Ned for the rest of my life.
It was what she’d had to do, after all, what we all were expected to do.
But that was the moment I did.
“Fuck you all.” I tried to rip the tiara off, but it had been bobby pinned to the point of superglue. I yanked and yanked until my hair ripped out. “Fuck this family and fuck you.”
If I could’ve thrown the tiara at Ned, I would’ve.
In the end I walked away, tiara still on but lopsided, my head aching.
I ran past the paparazzi clamoring for a photo. I ran and ran, under the pier and down the beach, until my heart would give out, but eventually I escaped them, hiding behind the pier’s wooden columns. I watched as a few vultures sprinted by me, assuming I’d gone toward Main Street.