I once loved someone as thoroughly as I hated myself, with no distinction between the why and the how. Young hearts are foolish like that, passionate muscles comprehending only obsession.
Mine went deeper than blood, into my soul. I woke up every day knowing I would die for him, and I went to sleep at night lulled by the depth of my adoration. I inhaled devotion and exhaled self-loathing.
Brandt Lloyd was my everything.
And I killed him.
There is no such thing as a school-girl crush. Love that pure stains the soul. It twists you. Changes you.
It defines you.
Until it’s gone.
Guilt is a festering cancer I’ve learned to live with. Its corrosion taints my charming smile and haunts my confident walk. It permeates my beautiful designer clothing.
Guilt is all I have left of him—that and the last words he ever said to me, uttered from across a buzzing courtroom: “All the king’s horses, Snow.”
The meaning escaped everyone else. Papa wrote them off as the ravings of a convicted sex offender. The judge had them struck from the record. His mother merely wept as the bailiff led him away.
But I understood him clearly. Those five little words revealed just how cruel love can be, conveying a promise Brandt Lloyd made to me that day. It haunts me still, an inevitable warning of my ultimate fate.
My betrayal didn’t merely cause him untold pain. It sparked his ire—my beautiful boy who swore to be unlike his father.
It heralded his revenge.
He delivered it simply, in the form of a sheet woven into the uppermost bars of his cell two months after his conviction. There was no goodbye. No chance to right my wrong.
Just silence. And my own whispered continuation of his final phrase:
And all the king’s men won’t put me back together again…
No matter how violent my fall.