Broken ✔

Chapter Forty-Eight

Song: Woman — Rema (I find this song so funny)

*Unedited* (We're getting to the end now. I can feel it)

Four long weeks had passed. Four weeks, we'd been staying at the Faye mansion and nothing had happened. I never saw Mr. Faye. Not even once.

The night Kofi took me to the room we shared, he made me sleep on the floor. It was excruciating, of course, for my ribs. My leg had suffered some nerve damage, so luckily, I couldn't really feel the pain it would've obviously caused.

We didn't talk for the next week or so. Not even one word to each other.

He didn't stay in the house much. He usually went out in the mornings and came back at night, while I lay on that rag thing on the ground all day. Resting helped, but I wasn't getting any pain medication. I wasn't breathing deeply because doing that caused the pain to increase.

Guess who decided to take advantage of that? Pneumonia.

I probably would've had serious lung damage if Justus hadn't noticed.

A doctor was brought to examine me, and due to proper treatment and healthcare, the pneumonia had disappeared within a week. I was still quite weak after that. To prevent that from happening again, they finally gave me some pain medication. They, as in Kofi.

I can't even begin to explain how guilty he was after my pneumonia attack, since it was all his fault. The moment my pneumonia was discovered, he let me sleep on the bed and apologised, saying that he didn't want us to sleep at the same place because he was afraid that he'd hurt me during the night.

Of course, I asked why he didn't have to sleep on the floor then, and we got into a huge fight. He brought another bed into the room and slept on it while I slept on the one that was already there.

It was very awkward, how we weren't speaking to each other yet he was the one taking care of me, making sure I was taking my pain medication. Eventually, he decided to break the ice by giving me a real apology, and completely forbidding Justus from coming to visit me.

I would forever be grateful to Justus for helping discover the pneumonia early, but that didn't mean that I had forgiven him. Attempted rape was not something that could be forgotten so easily. Besides, Kofi would've noticed, just later.

Even though we started talking again, things became really awkward — for me, at least — when I got too damaged to take my own showers. Kofi didn't seem to mind at all, but every time he helped me shower or bathe, I was so embarrassed that I couldn't even look at him.

He was making fun of me, of course. Not body shaming, but he was making fun of how shy I was. It got to a time when I refused to shower for a whole day, but then my January period decided to come that very same night.

Let's not even begin to talk about that one.

It's been a trying few weeks, but Kofi and I had been able to find a stable ground. We weren't exactly friends, but there were no fights, harsh words, or silent treatment.

He made me tell him about my childhood because, it may be surprising, but my childhood wasn't exactly bad. The times when I went to bed on a full stomach were much more than when I went to bed without any food. We weren't poor enough to suffer from starvation.

Plus, when I was a kid, I had friends because we were too young to be thinking about male affection. When we started growing up, the girls worshipped me, and that wasn't even putting it lightly. Everyone wanted to be my friend.

By the time puberty had hit, everything started going downhill. That must've been when my father began his paedophilic ways and blackened Etornam's heart. That was when most of the bad memories started, so he didn't want to hear that.