Every time I’d said it, I had been adding another brick to the wall she was trapped behind.
I’d told her to go home. But I had never once asked why she looked so frightened every time she tried.
“You made her believe,” I said slowly, “that if she left you, you might hurt yourself again.”
Daniel sobbed harder. “I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I wasn’t trying to—”
“Did she believe it, Daniel?”
He said nothing.
“Did she believe it?“
The answer came out so small I almost missed it.
“Yes.”
I stood up. I was shaking all over. Not because I wanted to scream at him, though part of me did. It was because, in one single moment, the last two months looked completely different.
Emma hadn’t been sitting by my son’s bed purely out of love. She’d been chained there by guilt.
