Part 2 of "The Three of Us"

211. Something Must Be Said

Ok guys im back, i am a little better now and it was not covid so yay!

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Guys Anne describes some of the assault in her letter so just like be aware if that could bother you I don't want you to read it if it might

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For the first time in her life, Anne had written a letter without the word Dear to begin it.

She had nearly begun her letter Dear Billy, simply out of habit, but stopped herself just in time. Her letter was not one of wrath or vengeance, but there was certainly no place in it for pleasantries.

Billy,

No doubt you're surprised to find this in your letter box. I'm rather surprised myself. I have no desire to make contact with you, but I felt I must. Soon you will see why.

I am marrying, and in starting a new chapter of my life I felt a need to close the previous one. So much of my life has been taken up by upset, you know, and I do not want that to follow me into my new life as a married woman.

Whether you will be so good as to read this I do not know. I may be wasting my time. If you do decide to read it, please do not take it as an invitation for further contact. You have no reason to need to speak to me and I would prefer you didn't.

Your mother mentioned you will be marrying before long. If you have not told your fiancé about your past, you ought to now- before the marriage license is signed. I expect you do not have any inclination to tell her; it doesn't benefit you in any way to do so. But it is something she must know. She needs to know the whole story, from start to finish, told plainly and without you trying to paint any of it in a better light. If you truly believe that what you feel for her is love, you must give her the benefit of having the truth, and the freedom to decide whether or not she can live with it.

Moving on, I want you to know how your actions have altered the course of my life and of those around me.

When I was younger, and all of this was new, I did not want you to know how much you had impacted me. I wanted you to believe that I didn't spend even one moment thinking of you. I wanted you to believe that I was not- could not- be afraid of you, and that you were wholly insignificant to me. Why? Because I did not want you to feel even the slightest bit of power. If you felt power, then you had won. And so I pretended you didn't matter in the slightest.

But now, after time has passed by, I feel differently in that regard. Instead, I worry that by pretending you mattered little, I let you off far too easily. You may still to this day believe that you did not affect my life in any permanent fashion, because I tried so hard to make that true. The truth is, Billy, the truth is that you deserve to be explicitly aware of all that you have done and all that you are responsible for. You caused significant damage and it is only right that you should feel the weight of that damage.

And so I am going to tell you the ways in which you hurt me.

A weak man would give up reading right now, throw away this letter, and continue his life with the belief that he is not at fault, because that is the far easier path. A better man would not. A better man would take a breath and keep reading; opening himself to soul searching, and choosing to own his role in the events that follow.

When I walked to school that morning I truly had no knowledge of what intimate relations entailed. I thought I did, and I had some sort of fairy story in my head. That morning would end the fairy story. You caused me to learn in painful and graphic detail the ways in which a man could oppress and violate a woman. And I wasn't even a woman. I was just a little girl.