Chapter 8: What I Chose Not to See

Damian POV

The report sat on my desk for almost an hour before I made myself open it.

I don't know why I put it off. Maybe because once I read it, I couldn't pretend anymore that I hadn't known, at least a little, that something was wrong. Marta's handwriting was small and neat, the kind of writing you get from someone who's spent decades documenting things she couldn't fix.

Three healed fractures, left wrist, right forearm, two ribs. Scarring consistent with prolonged restraint. Malnourishment, moderate to severe. Estimated onset of most recent injuries: within the last six months.

Six months. Not two years ago. Six months.

I read that line four times before it actually landed. Somebody had hurt her recently. Not just when she first went in.

I put the paper down and sat there for a long time, staring at nothing.

I kept thinking about the drive home from prison. How she sat there with her hands folded, calm, distant, and I told myself she was just angry at me. Angry made sense. Angry I could work with. Angry meant she still cared enough to be mad.

This wasn't anger. This was somebody who learned, the hard way, that flinching cost less than hoping.

I thought about the sister I remembered,loud, stubborn, always talking too fast when she was excited about something. She used to follow me around the training yard begging me to teach her moves she was too small for yet. She cried when I left for border patrol training, right in front of everyone, embarrassing herself and not caring one bit.

That girl wouldn't have curled into a ball because I reached for her shoulder.

"Damnit," I said, out loud, to an empty office.

I found her that night in the small library off the east hall, the one nobody really used anymore. She was sitting by the window with a book she didn't seem to be reading, more staring through it than at it.

"Hey," I said.

She looked up. Didn't say anything back. Just wait.

"I read the report," I said. "Marta's report."

Still nothing. She closed the book, like she already knew where this was going and wasn't in any hurry to get there.

"Wren, I…" I stopped, started over. "I should've asked more questions. When you get back. I told myself you were just cold because you were mad at me, and that was easier than actually looking at what was in front of me."

"Okay."

"I mean it. I'm sorry. I really am."

"Okay," she said again, in the same flat tone.

That threw me more than if she yelled. I stood there for a second, waiting for something else, some crack in it, and she just kept looking at me like she was waiting for me to get to the point.

"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked. "What happened there? I'll listen. Whatever you need to say."

She tilted her head slightly, studying me the way you study a stranger who said something confusing.

"Do you actually want to hear it?" she asked. "Or do you want to feel like a good brother for asking?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"An honest one." She set the book down on the little table beside her. "Because there's a difference, Damian. One of those means you sit there and listen to things you can't fix and don't get to feel better afterward. The other means you ask, I say something small and sad enough to satisfy you, you apologize again, and we both go to bed feeling like something got resolved."

"That's not.." I felt my jaw tighten. "That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" She wasn't being cruel about it. That was almost worse. She said it the same way she'd say the weather was cold. "You didn't ask a single real question the whole ride home. Not one. You told me not to embarrass Calla. That's the first thing you said to me after two years."

"I know. I know that was wrong."

"I'm not trying to make you feel like shit about it," she said. "I'm past being angry, honestly. I just want you to actually know what you're asking before you ask it. Because I don't think you do."

I dragged a hand down my face. "Then tell me. Whatever it is. I can handle it."

"Can you?" She almost laughed, no humor in it at all. "You couldn't handle watching me flinch when you touched my shoulder. You froze up completely. What do you think's gonna happen when I tell you what actually put those scars on my wrists?"

I didn't have an answer for that. Not one that wasn't a lie.

"See," she said, quiet now. "That's what I mean."

"So what, I'm just supposed to not ask? Just let it sit there?"

"You're supposed to figure out if you're asking because you actually want to carry some of it," she said, "or because it's eating at you that you don't already know, and you want the guilt to go away faster than it's gonna go away."

"That's not why I'm here."

"Isn't it?"

I opened my mouth to argue and found I didn't have anything real to put behind it. Because some ugly part of that was true, and she'd seen it before I even said a word.

"I don't know how to do this right," I admitted. "I don't know how to fix what I did."

"You can't fix it," she said, not harsh, just honest. "It already happened. I'm not asking you to fix it. I'm barely asking you for anything anymore."

"Then what do you want from me?"

She looked at me for a long moment, something tired and old behind her eyes that didn't belong to someone her age.

"I don't know yet," she said finally. "Maybe nothing. Maybe I'll figure that out eventually. But it's not going to be tonight, and it's not going to be because you read a report and felt bad about it."

She picked the book back up, a clear enough signal the conversation was over, and I stood there a second longer before I made myself leave.

I walked back to my study and sat down across from that report again, all those clinical little lines laid out in Marta's handwriting.

Six months.

Somebody had hurt her recently. Not just during the sentence. After it, right up until the day she walked out.

I didn't know yet who specifically had done it, guard by guard, day by day. But I knew who handed her over to that place in the first place, believing a light sentence would somehow make it right.

It was me.

I sat there a long time with that fact, and since she came home, I didn't try to explain it away.