The Risks

July: Chapter 61

"You think she was perfect." He sounded almost sympathetic, and I glared at him. "It's okay. All children believe their parents to have no faults. Molly was smart... and cunning. In my eyes, she was flawless. But you and I see things very differently. You see me as evil, a villain. You were too young when she passed, but I'm sure if you'd been given the chance to know her as you are now, you would have thought her a villain as well."

My jaw clenched, dreading that he might be right. The fact that she even fell for him at all was evidence enough that I may not have known my mom as well as I thought I had.

I opened my mouth hesitantly to ask a follow up question, knowing it would either alleviate some of my fears about my mom or worsen them.

"Did she know? Did she know that you were planning all this?"

He studied me for a long moment, his eyes brightening with guile. "I told her the very day I met her. Right after I took her back to my hotel room and fucked her on top of that floral comforter."

He was trying to get under my skin, I knew he was. So I suppressed my aggravated sigh and rolled my shoulders, showing him that he wasn't going to get the better of me.

And yet, my heart dropped. It wasn't his salacious comment about my mom. It wasn't even that he had just revealed that my mom and cheated on my dad with him –I'd suspected that.

It was the fact that she knew.

She knew.

For a second, I skimmed through justification and justification in my head –surely he didn't make it sound as bad as it was, surely he painted a pretty picture of it in her mind instead of being completely honest- but I gave up quickly, because there was no justifying it.

She knew what he was planning and she went along with it. She married him, and carried his child all while knowing he plotted to kill billions.

Who knew what she would have done it she hadn't died. Would she have turned the other cheek, looked the other way while he broke down her first born daughter? Would she have left Oakley and I behind when the world went to shit because of him? Would she have stayed by his side throughout all of the chaos he'd inflicted?

"You should have seen the way her eyes lit up," he continued, a small smile lifting the corners of his mouth. "Poor thing had been so bored for so long. What that oaf of a husband and burden of a child. She wanted something new. She wanted to be a part of something bigger, craved it like it was the only thing that could sustain her. And I was the only one who could give it to her."

"Why?" I breathed. I didn't want to hear any more about my mom, didn't want to know more about how she wasn't the person I thought she was. "Why did you create the virus?"

All I knew was what Parker had paraphrased after we'd left the Zone. But I needed a better answer. And I needed to hear it from George.

"The world was a very dark place, filled with people who put their faith into all the wrong things. So many people. The earth was overflowing, bursting at the seams with people who served no purpose. Helpless, weak people. The world needed a cleanse. Like the Great Flood. It needed to be rid of all the weak and left with only the best of us."

"And you thought you were the man for the job."

"I knew I was the man for the job," he corrected, narrowing his eyes. "When I first told Molly my plan, I admit, it was little more than an outline. But when I lost her, I put all my time and effort into the project. I had to. For her."

I swallowed back my disgust. How dare he think that he was honoring her by bringing the world to ruin? But I couldn't dwell on this, so I moved past it.