Page 93 of Sins (The Sins Trilogy 1)
She shakes her head. “No, I can’t. It’s a long story, but I’m applying for office jobs. It’ll be a good first step to become independent and lead my own life, even though Sam doesn’t like it.”
Good ol’ Sam. Trying to exert influence over her life even though he’s too cheap to pay for her own place. I don’t like it. “What does he want you to do?”
“Continue to travel around the world. Europe, Asia—it doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s not here in the States. But six years is long enough, don’t you agree? I’m tired, and I want to be home.”
“Definitely,” I say, hiding my outrage at the revelation. Six years? That’s a damn long time to force someone out of the country. Basically an exile.
And it’s worse than what I had. At least I was in one place long enough to make friends. Not her. Sam ensured it’d be nearly impossible for her to create a network of people she could depend on…
He wants her beholden to him forever.
Is this why she hasn’t been able to get in touch? Is this why she’s pretending she doesn’t know who I am? Is this why—
I stop. Why would she ever contact me when I made it clear the last time we spoke that I didn’t love her enough to let her in? How could she know that all she has to do is crook her finger and I’ll gladly jump into a sea of fire to get to her?
“Iv—Iris,” I say. My voice is too thick. I swallow a quick sip of coffee, which has gone cold during our talk. “If you had someone else you could depend on, other than Sam, would you have reached out?”
“I don’t have anybody else. That’s why Sam had to come through, even though he wasn’t particularly close to my parents.”
“How about your…friends?”
“They were young and moved on. We weren’t in the same place mentally or physically. Young friendships don’t survive everything.” She looks almost wistful, but then straightens her spine, pulls her shoulders back. “It’s okay, though. I can always make new friends. The flip side of being young, right?”
Suddenly I can’t stand that she’s talking about her past relationships like that. It’s like she’s given up on them. On us. It’s so unfair. I never got a chance to tell her I made the decision to be brave, to let her in. “You should’ve reached out anyway. Young or not, they would’ve come back,” I say, doing my best to not sound bitter. But from the slightly confused and defensive look on her face, I’ve failed.
“They wouldn’t have. I was in a coma for a year after the accident…and a mess when I woke up. By the time I recovered, it’d been years. It was just too late.”
“It’s never too late, Iris.”
“It was for me. My memory was patchy when I woke up. And what I did remember, I couldn’t trust completely. Sam sometimes had to correct me.”
“Really?” What did he correct? What the hell did he do when she was so vulnerable?
“Yeah. For example, I thought I’d graduated early, but Sam told me I didn’t—even though I could have—because I wanted to graduate with my friends.”
“Did he have any evidence for what he was saying? Pictures? A diploma?”
“There was a yearbook. From my class. I was a popular kid. It had lots of messages from friends.” Her smile is bittersweet.
Sam’s lying. He has to be.People can falsify passports. How hard would it be to fake a yearbook?
He had to have been using his position to manipulate her. How simple would it be to make a confused and grief-stricken young woman depend on you? Look to you for guidance and “truth”? And then feed her lies, knowing she’d accept them without examining them too closely?
“How about now? Are you all right now?” I ask, and hold my breath.
“I remember most of what I need to remember. All the important people in my life. Schools, friends. You know.”
What about me?I want to probe her head, see if there’s even the slightest hint of me in her past. Or was I so unimportant she forgot me completely? “How can you be sure you haven’t forgotten anything…essential?”
“Because of what my doctor told me. I had the same question, but he said all the really relevant stuff should be there…although he couldn’t guarantee it, of course. He compared my memory to a glass bowl. The injury that put me into the coma broke it into pieces, but my body didn’t want to let it stay broken. So it put the pieces back together.”
“Perfectly?”
“Ha. No. There are still holes, and certain events are out of order in my mind. Like the high school graduation thing.”
I gesture at her to continue, needing to know exactly what she’s suffered, what she’s lost, why I went from someone she loved to someone not important enough to remember.
“Anyway, the doctor said my body wasn’t able to ‘fix the bowl’ perfectly, but it re-created the bowl even if some pieces were missing or out of place. But as far as my body’s concerned, a misshapen bowl with a few insignificant missing bits is better than nothing. And I have to agree. I mean, I’m alive.”
