TORTURED SOUL | abby littman

𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘆.

chapter forty

{ extremely unedited }

[ trigger warning ; parental abuse ]

THE HOURS FOLLOWING WERE A BLUR. Rowan couldn't precisely recall what happened within each hour, nor what was said, but she did remember hanging up as soon as Detective Brooks had told her the new situation that seemed to pile up in her life. She remembered walking away from Abby without saying a word and ending back at her room in Bob's house. She remembered going to the station in the morning and being escorted to her childhood home to gather the rest of her things. She could faintly recall seeing Hugo in his office, hunched over files despite being suspended currently.

That was about the last thing she could recall before blacking out, waking up to realise she was paralysed in the bed in Bob's house. Well, not technically paralysed but her body felt frozen, limbs heavy as lead with her cheek pressed against the pillow, eyes stuck on the window. Rowan had tried to recall all the conversations she had since receiving that call once she came to her senses but she came up blank each time and soon gave up once it started to give her a headache.

Abandonment was not a stranger to Rowan. It was something she had been acquainted with her entire life. It seemed to be her birthright; to be abandoned. Some children received jewellery, some money, some authority, some as simple as a name, but not Rowan. She received the overwhelming feeling of being forgotten, ignored, discarded. She received the experience of pain, the knowledge of being unworthy, the fear of anything intense, the distortion of personality, the pattern of reckless behaviour. Rowan's birthright was everything a child should be sheltered from, everything an adult dreads to witness let alone experience.

Rowan's gift of being born, something that should be a celebration of life, was a funeral for her stability, a pothole left unattended in her heart and a graveyard where her mind should reside.

It wasn't as if Rowan wanted Hugo in her life. She didn't. She knew he would cause her death if he remained in it but that didn't mean she expected to be abandoned by him too. No one likes being abandoned. No one wanted to feel the lack of worth that came with it and Rowan especially did not want to feel that because of her own father.

Hugo was not a good person or father, there was no doubt of that. But he was still Rowan's father. The only fully biological family she had left. As much as she loved Cameron, he was still only her half-brother, again connected through Hugo. It was like Paul had said in one of the past sessions, a child is wired to love their parents. Hugo had already broken that bond with the start of the abuse but, even then, he still stayed. He didn't abandon Rowan when he had so many chances to do so. He stayed.

Until now.

Hugo joined the list of people who abandoned Rowan and somehow it hurt more that Hugo had done so than it did with Cameron. Rowan couldn't explain why, she wasn't sure herself and she was too tired, too drained, to try and figure out the logic behind it. If she did try she may get something along the lines of Rowan being the only connection Hugo had left to the woman he once loved and lost and yet he still gave it up completely, not a shred of regret coming from him.

Rowan didn't understand.

She understood why Grace left. Grace left to save her own life. She was drowning in that house, her soul being chipped away day by day, and she left so she didn't become a shell of the person she used to be. She had been trapped, forced into a role she didn't want until she built the courage to leave.