my great-grandfather was one, and that the disorder got worse with every generation, reaching its most violent level with my father. I believed it ran in my blood, that once I manifested it, I would be the worst of them all. That was why I never considered having any relationship. Until you.”
She could only stare at him, quakes starting in her very essence, spreading outward. She’d lived for a year going crazy for an explanation. Now she no longer wanted to know. Not if the explanation was worse than his seeming desertion itself.
But she couldn’t find her voice to tell him to stop. Not that he would have stopped. He seemed set on getting this out in the open once and for all.
“From that first moment,” he said, his voice a throb of melancholy, “I wanted you with a ferocity that terrified me, so when you stipulated the finite, uninvolved nature of our liaison, I was relieved. I believed it would be safe as long as our involvement was temporary, remained superficial. But things didn’t go as expected, and my worry intensified along with my hunger for you. I lived in fear of my reaction if you wanted to walk away when I wasn’t ready to let go. But instead, you became pregnant.”
She continued to stare helplessly at him, legs starting to quiver, feeling he hadn’t told her the worst of it yet.
He proved her right. “As you blossomed with Leonid, I was more certain every day I’d been right to tell you I’d withdraw from your life eventually and never enter his. I found myself inventing anxieties every second you were out of my sight, had to constantly struggle to curb my impulses so I wouldn’t smother you. I even tried to stay away from you as much as I could bear it. But I only returned even hungrier, feared it would only be a matter of time before all these unprecedented emotions snapped my control and manifested in aggression. That was why I forced myself to leave you before you had Leo. Before I ended up doing what my father did after my sister was born.”
He had a sister?
His next words provided a horrific answer to her unvoiced surprise. “He’d been getting progressively more volatile. There were no longer days when he didn’t hit my mother or me or both of us. Then one night, when Ana was about six months old, he went berserk. He put us all in the emergency room that night. It took my mother and I months to get over our injuries. Ana struggled for a week before she...succumbed.”
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