Chapter 3
1206 Words
In a way that felt strange and new.
I ate while my father sat across from me, his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, watching me like I might disappear if he looked away.
"The ceremony," he finally said, "was six years ago last week."
"Mom told me that."
"Did she tell you why Aaron left?"
"No. She said he broke up with Alie three years ago, but she didn't explain what happened."
My father set down his coffee cup. I noticed his hands were shaking slightly. "Aaron told everyone that he had discovered information suggesting the child Alie claimed to be carrying wasn't his. To prove that, he needed... he needed to discredit you."
I put down my fork. The food suddenly felt heavy in my stomach. "What do you mean, discredit me?"
"He made it very public that you had been unfaithful to him. He spread rumors about you. He showed people photographs that made it look like you were with another man. He was trying to prove that if you could be with someone else, then it was possible Aloe's child was his."
"But I wasn't unfaithful. I'd barely spoken to him before the ceremony."
"I know," my father said quietly. "Everyone who actually knew you knew. But the people on the periphery, the people who wanted to believe the drama, the people who enjoyed seeing someone fall from grace—they believed Aaron. By the time the truth came out, the damage was done."
"What truth?" I asked.
"That Alie had lied about being pregnant. That there was never a child. That she had manipulated Aaron into hurting you for her own reasons. But by then, the community had already turned its back on you. And you..."
He stopped. He looked away for a moment.
"I broke," I said, understanding without being told. "I couldn't handle what people were saying, so I broke."
"Your mind shut down. The doctors said it was the most severe case of trauma-induced dissociation they'd ever seen. Your body continued on without your consciousness inside it. You ate and you slept and you breathed, but you weren't... present."
I absorbed this information slowly. So I had lost six years to protect myself from a truth I couldn't handle. My own mind had locked itself away rather than face what people I'd trusted had done to me.
"What about Aaron and Alie?"
"Alie left the territory about a year after everything fell apart. She realized she was going to have to face consequences for what she'd done, and she wasn't willing to do that. She's somewhere in the city now, living a normal life, I believe. As for Aaron, he remained. His father wanted him to make it right. Aaron tried. He's been in therapy—he's apologized to your family many times. He's changed his behavior. But apologies don't undo what happened. And they don't undo what you lost."
I thought about this for a moment. "You said I have a choice."
"Yes."
"What choice?"
My father leaned back in his chair. "You can stay here. You can try to rebuild your life in this territory, around the people who failed to protect you. It will be hard. People will have feelings about your return. Some will want to help. Some will want to pretend nothing happened. Some will still believe Aaron's lies.
"Or," he continued, "you can leave. You can go somewhere new, somewhere that doesn't hold these memories. You can start completely fresh. Your grandmother has territory in another region. You'd be welcome there."
"You're giving me a real choice," I said. "Not what everyone else thinks I should do. What I actually want."
"Yes. You've lost enough without me trying to control what happens next. Whatever you choose, I'll support it. But I want you to know something first."
He stood up and walked over to me. He put his hands on my shoulders, and for the first time since I'd woken up, I understood that my father had been devastated by what happened to me. Not because it reflected badly on him or the family. But because his child had been hurt, and he'd been helpless to stop it.
"You are not defined by what they did," he said. "You are not less-than because they hurt you. And if you stay, the worst thing you can do is live in a way that proves them right—living small, living scared, living like you deserve to be less than. If you stay, you stay big. You stay whole. You build something so complete, so good, that they become footnotes in your story. Not the main characters. Just... people who happened to hurt you once."
I looked up at him. "And if I leave?"
"Then you leave with my blessing and my support.
But I think," he said carefully, "that leaving is running. And I think you're stronger than that."
I spent three days thinking about it.
I sat in my childhood room. I walked through the territory. I tried to remember what it felt like to belong to a place before everything broke. And I realized something: I didn't have any memories of actually belonging here. I had memories of preparing to leave. I had memories of being groomed for a future that never came.
On the fourth day, I told my father I wanted to stay.
But not the way people might have expected.
"I'll stay in the territory," I told him, "but I'll go to university. That city where Aunt Marie lives? I want to enroll in the fall. I'll come home for summers and holidays, but I'm not staying here full-time while I figure out who I am. I need to be somewhere new, somewhere that doesn't know who I was supposed to be."
My father nodded like he'd already known this was what I would choose. "What will you study?"
"I don't know yet. I'll figure it out. But I want to study something that helps me understand people. Why they hurt each other. How they heal from being hurt. Something like that."
"Psychology," my father said.
"Maybe. Or something else. I have time to figure it out."
"You do," he agreed. "And you'll be brilliant at whatever you choose. You always were. You just needed to remember that about yourself."
Before I could leave for university in the fall, there was something I had to do.
I had to go to the place where the ceremony had happened. I had to stand in that space and understand, in my body and not just in my mind, that I had survived it.
My father offered to come with me. I told him no. This was something I needed to do alone.
The ceremony grounds were exactly as I remembered them. The same stone altar. The same grounds where hundreds of people had stood and watched my life change in the span of a few minutes.
I stood in the middle of the space, and I waited to feel something. Rage. Sadness. Betrayal. Anything.
What I felt instead was a kind of clearness. An understanding that this place was just a place. It was a physical space that held
- Writer
