♡ ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ꜱᴀʏ ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ♡

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(Darry's POV)

I had never seen Cary so distant.

Even when Mom and Dad died, she cried for days. But that day, she stayed silent, picking at her dinner as she stared at her plate. We tried to talk to her, but we never got any response. She just stared, as if paralyzed.

What Jonathan did to her was more than physical. It left her so emotionally scarred that she was speechless and emotionless, bad news not even making her cry. I partially blamed myself for it. I should've known that he was trouble from the first time I met him, only a month after Mom and Dad died.

Cary had been promising for months that she would bring him to the house so that we could meet him. Though it was mostly for Mom and Dad, I was dying to know who it was. She seemed crazy about him. I knew she felt guilty for not introducing him before they died, but it wasn't her fault. None of us thought that would happen.

So when she brought him over for dinner on a Saturday night after work, I knew it was mostly out of the sense of necessity that guilt brought her.

He seemed nice for the most part, but Dad always said I had a good sense of reading people, and Jonathan made me ever so slightly uneasy. He looked at her in such a way that some people would call love, but I saw deeper than that. I couldn't figure it out until later, and I hated myself for it.

I would realize later that he looked at her not with love but with lust. He only wanted her for one thing, and that was control. He wanted her to be his little marionette, doing whatever he wanted at the drop of a hat.

I never voiced my concerns to Cary. I'll regret that until the day I die.

I remember how she would come home some days after being with Jonathan—she was jittery, flustered. She would lose focus at the dinner table, and when we asked her what was wrong, she would chalk it up to it being a bad day at work or not getting enough sleep. I believed her at first, but as it went on, I started to get suspicious.

I knew I was right when she came home that day in August in hysterics. I can still hear her strained voice, so desperate and raw I could've bawled.

"I can't do this anymore, Darry!" She sobbed as she sat in a heap in Soda's arms. When she said my name, it was like a plea for help. It broke my heart.

She told us that he had been hitting her for months, but she was too scared to do anything about it. Gently, we talked her through it, until finally she announced she was breaking things off with him. I was over the moon, thinking that he wouldn't be able to hurt her ever again.

I was terribly wrong.

I wished I could just wrap her in a bubble and keep her safe forever. She was too pure to be going through something like this, had too beautiful of a soul. She didn't deserve anything but the best, and sure didn't deserve to be a Greaser and my kid sister.

She went to bed that night without saying so much as good night. Soda and Ponyboy looked at me sadly, as if begging me to do something. But I didn't know what to do. I was still just a kid, just 20. I didn't know anything about how to raise teenagers, much less how to deal with situations like this. Mom and Dad would know, not me.

And that night, as I laid in bed, I cried. I cried for the first time in years, letting out months of frustration and pain. "Why?" I asked quietly to the ceiling. "Why did you have to leave us? Why so soon?"

And for the first time ever, I prayed. I prayed to God for all of this to stop. I prayed for Cary to be okay again.

I prayed for Mom and Dad to come back.