At first, I thought it would be so easy to go ahead and just tell them the truth, but then doubts creep in. I want him so badly to be the person that I thought he was that I almost can’t come to terms with who he really is.

“Ma’am, what is his name?” a detective asks.

I can tell that they are growing impatient. Josephine puts her arm around me and asks them to give us a second.

“What’s wrong? Why won’t you tell them?”

Tears start to stream down my face.

“I just never thought that he would ever do that to me. I thought that he was someone I could trust. I waited so long for him to get out of prison and then out of that coma…” My voice trails off as I gasp for air in the middle of my sobs.

But touching my neck, I flinch.

“He tried to strangle you, Olive,” Josephine says in her soothing, kind voice.

I nod.

“He tried to rape you. He would have succeeded if you hadn’t shot him. He deserves everything that’s coming to him.”

“I know that’s true. Of course, I do.”

“So, what’s holding you back?”

I swallow hard. When I look up at her, I lose myself for a moment in the blue of her irises. There’s a deepness there that makes my whole body shake.

“You can do it,” she whispers into my ear.

I open my mouth to say it but another cop interrupts me.

“His name is Owen Kernes and he’s her brother,” he reports.

“Your brother tried to rape you?” the detective asks.

“Yes, but he’s not my biological brother.”

Didn’t I say that already? I wonder.

Suddenly, I have an out of body experience. I find myself telling the story or part of the story of my life but it doesn’t feel like it’s me saying it. Instead, I’m just watching this lost little girl with a blanket around her shoulders tell a bunch of strangers in uniform things that she hasn’t told anyone before.

As the detectives turn their attention to Wallace, I pull away from Josephine and walk toward the ambulance.

Someone stops me from climbing in but not before I yell, “Why did you do that? Why did you do any of that?”

Owen doesn’t respond.

“Why?” I scream, pounding my fists on the back of the ambulance.

“‘Cause nothing matters without you, Olive,” he says slowly. “Don’t you get that?”

“No.” I shake my head.

“I don’t have a life without you,” he says.

The paramedics close the door and someone moves me out of the way. Big tears rush down my face, and I sit down and bury my face in my hands.