ROSES AND RUIN

Chapter Eight:

~Death came knocking while I was away, and even if I knew it was coming, I still wouldn't have stayed.~

September, 2015. Six years ago.

~Willow~

Six months crawled by, with each second in it feeling like a slow death of its own.

Osei’s belly grew, together with my unspoken horror of what lay inside. Proof that I was about to become an aunt, and not to some cherished child, but to the offspring of a monster who had defiled my sister.

You can't imagine the war inside me.

I loved my sister; I truly did. But at times, bile rose in my throat at the sight of her. I couldn't look at her without feeling sick. Without remembering…

It appalled me.

I tried to remind myself that it wasn't her fault. Deep down, I knew that. I had witnessed the horror unfold firsthand and had the mental scars to show for it. Yet each glance at her fragile body, the knowledge of the life growing inside her, tore afresh wounds that were far from healing. 

I never stopped to reason that if I felt this way, she was probably drowning in the feeling ten times over. At the time, I was too caught up in my own grief and rage to see clearly; too young to fully understand that, yes, I was still a child, but then, so was she. It shouldn't have mattered the years she had on me, but even so, it still felt like I was the only one left to set things right again, and that made me bitter. 

Reuben was gone because of that night; because of her. And we'd lost him just like that, with no explanations or goodbye. And Osei still wouldn’t talk to me. Not about him, or about what had happened.

Not about anything.

It was like she’d stopped believing in him, much like she had in herself, indirectly resigning me to the same idea that maybe he really wasn’t coming back and we had truly lost him forever. 

How unthinkable. 

It also infuriated me how nothing I said managed to get a rise out of her. I just… needed to know she still felt something, you know? I wanted her to care, to show anger— anything at all. But she never did. She was always just… blank. And there was nothing I despised more than the silence.

So, in my bitterness, I may have let my anger blind me to her pain, no longer stopping to consider the amount of guilt that must have been eating at her every day, ever since. Or how she probably blamed herself too.

All I could see was how she never mentioned his name, how she refused to acknowledge any of it with words; which made it seem like she didn't care at all. It became as though Reuben had never existed. The brother we both loved. 

The brother she had, in some way, driven away.

Even the times I tried to bring him up, she’d turn away; and if I successfully managed to talk about him, she wouldn't respond. Like she was trying to erase him from her memory. 

Well, I couldn’t. 

On one of those days, she’d been seated on her bed the same way she always was when I walked in— her back to me, staring out the window. Her body seemed too small and fragile, swallowed up by the oversized sweater that hung off her frail frame.

“Osei?” I called out, but there was no answer. “Are you hungry? I brought you something to eat.” 

Still nothing.