Wretched Love

More silence.

I took a breath, needing to throw up. “Your father and I obviously love you very much,” I said, Swiss’s hand flexing on my thigh at the mention of her father. “Nothing will ever change that. Your home will always be your home. You can spend your holidays with whomever you wish, wherever you wish, and you have a room here…” I looked down the hallway, where I very much hoped my daughter might be sleeping sometime soon.

If she ever spoke to me again.

“I understand if you’re mad at me,” I pressed on, still hearing nothing on the other end of the phone. “You are entitled to feel however you—”

“Are you happy?” she interrupted, and for the first time in recorded memory, her voice was unexpressive.

I blinked. Of all the things I’d expected, that question was not one of them.

I looked at Swiss once more, his jaw hard with worry. He knew that this was haunting me, that I was losing sleep over it, therefore he was losing sleep over it. He didn’t even know Violet, but he cared about her. Because she was something to me. Everything to me. A part of me.

“Yes, sweetie,” I whispered, not taking my eyes off Swiss. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. Except, of course, the day you were put into my arms.”

A knife sank into my belly with those words, with the precious memory of that day. Seeing her beautiful, wide, inquisitive eyes blinking up at me, her little fist tightening around one of my fingers.

Swiss didn’t get that. He didn’t get any of that.

And a part of me, a large part, wanted to give him that. Wanted to give myself that as an adult that was sure of herself, not as a child terrified and unaware of the horrors to come.

“You’ve been sounding different,” Violet said, still in that flat tone that stilled my heart. “For months, I knew something was going on, knew that you were different.”

I fought to swallow down the lump that had somehow lodged itself in my throat.

“Sweetie…” I began.

“I’ve got to go,” she stated coldly.

I flinched as if I’d been hit. It felt as if a bus had slammed into me.

“Violet—”

“I’ll see you at the airport. You’re still going to be there, right?” There was a frailty to her voice that I hadn’t heard in years. No, that I’d never heard. It was wounded, unsure.

I hated myself.

“Of course, I’ll—”

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, honey…”

But I was already speaking to dead air.

I stared at the phone for a long time.

Swiss squeezed the back of my neck. “She’ll come around,” he told me with confidence.

I kept staring at the phone. “Yeah,” I replied weakly, without any confidence.

I spent the rest of the night hoping, praying that I had not lost my daughter.