Saving Lotte Sullivan | Collingwood/Carlton

122: Had to Go, Couldn't Stay

A/N: just letting you all know that a reader of mine has alerted me to the fact that comments and votes did not go through on the last chapter. without being as annoying as possible - if you'd like to try again, please feel free to! thanks for all your support. it's been an incredibly hard three months and wattpad certainly has been a coping mechanism of sorts x

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'Ahem. *clears throat*. How old were you when they first broke your heart?

'8 years old. My father nearly knocked me out cold for talking back to him at the dinner table' He'd called me names and told me I wasn't allowed to run to mum anymore. I was simply just defending myself.

'9 years old. Mum and I had just gotten home...I found my dad, dead in the bathroom, blood everywhere. He'd taken his own life, and he was gone. And I can still remember my mother's reaction of very strong denial and depression' and it was all my fault for being a bad son.

'To have my heart broken, would imply my heart was ever completely full. I've never had a father. I don't think I was ever quite whole - growing up, everyone had a dad - and I didn't. I didn't even have a name or a photo. But separate to that, I would say...when I was a teenager, in 2017, and I found my best friend, crying and terrified in a lane way in Preston, after being assaulted. That broke my heart more than anything prior'

'I was 19. I was going through it - drama with Ella and then I found the love of my life dancing with him at the rising star awards, on MY special night, after I turned my back for two minutes. My world has never been the same since' and to add further insult to injury - they now have a child together and I'm just being used for who I am, seen as an object. To tell you the truth I wish she'd just fuck off and stay with him.

'I was 12, walking to school with my younger sister and my best friend Luke, and his sister. We were playing around - shoving each other, running after each other. I pushed him a little too hard and he fell onto the road, and was hit by a car. He died on impact. Everyone blamed me - the police blamed me - nobody wanted to know me. I just wanted my best mate back. Life hasn't been right since that moment - I'd give anything to take back that one push' I'd give anything to switch places with him.

'I was in my late teens, early twenties when my eldest child - my daughter, Ivy, was diagnosed with cancer. It hurt more than my divorce had. To see her tiny, weak little body, going through all that chemo, all that pain and sickness...only to remiss and then return in the form of brain cancer. To hear doctors say we might lose her within a matter of years. There's no pain quite like the pain of your child hurting.' And then my ex wife preventing me from seeing Ivy and our son, treating them as a method of control over me. While Ivy is dying in hospital. And Ivy slowly growing up to resent me more and more.

'I was 4 years old when my dad left for America to work, just packing up his life with his new wife and heading over there for good. He more or less abandoned my mother and I, my half brother and his family...he put in so much money, time and effort on his other children...but I was always forgotten about and starving most nights. Then to see him, almost twenty years later, being treated like some sort of cult hero when my brother took captaincy of the club. While I was being exiled as the troubled Moore, struck out for my skin colour and ultimately banished from society' He is what he did. I have no regrets hating that man.

'I see. And how old were you, when you broke their heart?'

'Oh. Um...that's a good question. That one really does make you stop and think...me, I was...I was probably...I think 23, when I told a man, on the night he'd given me every girl's biggest dream and a money can't buy experience, that I'd cheated on him with a teammate of his. My life has been kind of wild since then. I've gone overseas, I've ran away and lived interstate, I've become a mother - as much as that painful moment broke someone, I guess it set me up to become who I am today' I'm so sorry, Josh. You didn't deserve the hell I put you through. The masses are right, I am evil.