Page 34 of Won't Back Down
“They committed me in the first place on the grounds that I was suicidal.”
“What the fuck? You were never suicidal.” I paused, realizing I didn’t know for certain. “Were you? I didn’t think things were that bad.” I cursed myself. What did I know about the details of her pain? Maybe it had been that bad.
But Willa only shook her head. “No, but that was the only way they could make sense of me being in the water that night. And since I couldn’t remember—still can’t remember—how I got there, I didn’t have any way to argue. That in and of itself might have been okay. In truth, it should have been maybe a 72-hour hold for evaluation. But what should have been 72 hours turned into nearly two years.”
Rage tore through me, every bit as vicious as the storm whose teeth I’d snatched her from. But she didn’t need that from me, so I fought it back until I could keep my tone level. “How?”
“I don’t know exactly. It started out as treatment for the trauma I’d been through. I had serious holes in my memory, and they were working with me, trying to fill in the gaps. They tried all sorts of things. Hypnosis. EMDR. Virtual reality. Drug therapies.”
“They gave you drugs for traumatic amnesia? Is that even a thing?”
“There actually are some used for victims of traumatic brain injuries. Which, technically, I had because of the cerebral hypoxia. We don’t know how long I was without oxygen before you revived me.”
A lifetime. That’s what it had felt like as I’d fought first the sea to get her back and then the fates to give her breath. I had my own lingering trauma around that night. But this wasn’t about me.
“Nothing seemed to work, and my parents pushed them to keep trying other things. The treatments got more experimental. When I said I wanted to go home, I was told that it was all for my own good. Really, I think my parents just wanted them to fix me. I’d never been what they wanted me to be, and I was so much worse after drowning.”
This had all happened because I hadn’t gotten to her fast enough. Because I’d helped her sneak out at all.
Willa’s hand closed over my clenched fist. “No. This is not on you. I know you’ve blamed yourself all these years, but I’m not going to keep telling you if you’re going to take this on yourself. This is not your fault. If you hadn’t helped me sneak out that night, I would have found another way.”
I choked down the self-recrimination and loathing. “I’m okay.” I wasn’t. Not even close. But she’d had to live through this nightmare. I could survive hearing about it. “Keep going.”
“My behavior was considered erratic, prospectively dangerous to myself and others. And I suppose it did look like that from the outside. My anxiety was through the roof. I was in this totally unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people. I kept having PTSD flashbacks. I had a few escape attempts, attacked a few orderlies in the process. That was when they started keeping me drugged for compliance all the time.”
I’d already imagined seventeen ways to disable and torture Willa’s dad before she continued.
“Eventually, I figured out how to hide my meds under my tongue until I could dispose of them in the toilet. I knew how they expected me to behave, and I mimicked that, analyzing the staff, trying to figure out who was on my side. I managed to convince a nurse who was a new hire to mail a letter to my brother. Jace didn’t know any of this was happening. My parents had told him I’d been sent to boarding school. He came to get me immediately, and as he was over eighteen and family, they couldn’t stop him from checking me out and spiriting me away before anyone was the wiser. I owe him my life for that. I don’t know how much longer I could have lasted in there.”
She might as well have stabbed me directly in the heart. The fuckers had kept her caged and drugged for two years. They’d put her through hell for two years. I wrapped my arm tighter around her, pulling her close. “I’m so sorry they put you through all that, Wren. If I’d known?—”
“If you’d known, there wouldn’t have been anything you could’ve done.”
“We’d have found a way to jailbreak you. Somehow.”
One corner of her mouth lifted. “I don’t doubt y’all would have tried.” The faint smile faded. “Did you know I had no idea Gwen was even missing until Jace got me out?”
“Seriously?”
“I went from the beach where you pulled me out to a hospital on the mainland. And from there to the facility where they kept me for two years. I never came back to the island, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone from home.”
“So the police never questioned you about that night?” In the days and weeks after her disappearance, I thought they’d questioned practically everyone on the island. Certainly everybody who’d been at that party.
“I don’t know if they even tried to get to me. It was well documented that my memory was shot, so I wouldn’t have been able to give them anything either way.”
“It must have been devastating to find out about her like that. To have to deal with it as if it just happened. Because for you it did.” Gwen had been one of her closest friends. She and Gwen and Gabi had very much been the Three Musketeers.
“It haunts me that I can’t remember. What if I saw something that could’ve helped with the investigation?” I could see the depths of guilt in her eyes. God knew I understood it.
“You can’t give in to that kind of guilt. It’ll eat you alive.”
She glanced up at me and arched a brow. “Spoken from the voice of experience?”
“Yeah.”
With a sigh, she tipped her head to my shoulder. “I did try to push myself when I came back. To try to remember. It didn’t go well.”
There was a wealth of pain and trauma in those few words. What additional suffering had she put herself through in the name of trying to find out what had happened to a friend?