Over, Gone, and Lost

P A R T 14

Ben started getting fidgety when he realized they only had about a half-hour left in their journey before they got to the bridge. The bridge Caroline would jump off of. Caroline had no idea where they were even though she was looking out the window. She was completely oblivious to the amount of time she had left.

"If you could meet your birth parents, what would you say to them?"

"I don't know. I think I would start with a simple fuck you and see where we go from there," Caroline jokes. Ben looks over at her, thinking she is serious until he sees the smirk on her face, and then they both laugh.

"Come on for real," he says. Caroline is silent for a moment contemplating her answer.

"I don't think I would ever want to meet them. I don't know them, so it's not like I could hate them, but I think just meeting them and seeing them alive would be enough for me to hate them for leaving me to live the life I did, you know." Ben nods even though he doesn't.

"And if you were forced to meet them?" he asks, looking for a more direct answer.

"I think I would definitely stick with the "fuck you" I was joking about before, but I would also want to know why they left me and if they got what they wanted from not having to raise me," she shrugs, not wanting to think about it anymore.

Caroline never really thought about her birth parents, she saw how terrible people were to her, and she wasn't even their real child, so she could only imagine how bad her real parents might have treated her.

Ben kind of understood where she was coming from. He may not have understood or known about all the bad things that happened to her, but he had a general assumption. As a cop, he has worked with social services when a lousy foster parent is arrested. He had seen the fear in kids' eyes before for someone that was supposed to protect them. He may not have experienced it first hand, but he understood well enough to not bother her about her choice. 

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