Until I Found You

eight

~ ABBY ~

I want to punch him.

I'm not a person who has particularly violent tendencies. I find words to be a much more powerful tool, and a better way of getting my point across. Regardless, I'm so thoroughly frustrated, so incredibly close to smacking the back of this man's head with the folder whose contents he just thrown in my face.

I was probably going to jail anyway, so what harm could it do really? Just one punch, straight to his perfect teeth. He's got super strength or something, right? He probably wouldn't feel a thing. Although, I've never hit anyone before and if I started now with my first attempt on him, I don't think it would fair well for my fist. Plus, any small chance that I might get out of this would be long gone.

Damn it.

When I look up at him, I see a confident and calm man. He seems so sure of himself, so relaxed in the assumption he's made. There's no second thoughts, no remorse for the fact that he just used my dead mother as a tactic in his interrogation, to prove some kind of point. He was just pure confidence, victorious even.

"You're so sure that she did it." I narrow my eyes, fixating, appraising.

"You never met my mother. You don't know what color hair she had, you probably don't even remember her name even though you read it in the that folder a few minutes ago." I comment, nodding my head towards the papers laying between us. "But you're so sure, so certain that she did it, that she cheated on my Dad with Henry Carlisle."

The name is acid on my tongue. It physically hurts to say it out loud. As if the name leaving my lips caused a hole to burn straight through my tongue, just as Henry Carlisle had burnt a hole straight through my life, taking my own mother from her family, ripping it apart without a second thought.

Steve doesn't reply. He's just sitting there, staring at me defiantly, like a lawyer who'd just won his biggest, toughest case.

"Aren't you?" I prompt him, placing my elbows on the table as I lean over the edge.

Again he doesn't respond. He continues to stare back at me, until after a moment he nods, ever so slightly.

"Why? Because some reporter looking to make some money with a huge scandal said so?" I ask, not waiting for his answer. "Because some stuck-up, asshole whose music career was going down the toilet didn't deny it?"

I don't talk about what happened to my mother with anyone. Other than my Dad and Jonah, I'm not sure if anyone knows the real story. Whenever people had made the connection between me and my Mom in the past, I'd ignore them and whatever rude comments they sent my way. For years, I'd let it slide, hearing my mother's voice in the back of my mind telling me "they're not worth it".

Maybe it's because I feel the need to correct one of the many false assumptions Steve has made since he walked into this room. Maybe it's because I've been trapped in this room for hours with a migraine so strong my brain feels like it's been used as a conga drum. Or maybe, I've just finally reached my limit of not coming to my Mom's defense. Whatever the reason, I could feel myself on the edge of the cliff, about to tell her story. It only took one look at Steve's confident gaze to send me toppling over it.

"She used to love his music. My Dad would always tease her, he used to call her Carlisle's number one fan." I begin, almost smiling genuinely at the memory before it soured, becoming resentful. "I can still hear her singing along to one of his songs, can see her dancing around in the kitchen as the three of us cooked dinner."