Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
Dammit, I didn’t think this thing through, and now that I think about it, there’s really no way to keep the worst of it away from her. I’m not so much worried about the Janie situation or all the ugliness surrounding my marriage; I just don’t want her to know anything about the trafficking scam or the fact that she’d almost been taken. Later, when things cool down, maybe, but not right now.
I know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t be able to stay out of it. That’s just the kind of cause she’d rush right into without thinking, and from what I’ve learned so far, it’s an ugly, dirty business that someone with her soft heart wouldn’t be able to endure.
I want to protect her; I need to. I did a poor job of it the first time around and had promised myself that from now on and for the rest of my life, I would make it up to her. As much as I can, I will keep all the ugliness at bay and show her only the good in life. I want that so much for her because she deserves it.
She deserves to smile each day when she wakes up because the thought her words provoke in me when I listen to her talk about the way things were for her when I deserted her are almost too much to bear. The knowledge that I was the one to put a black mark on what we once had, that it was me who had broken the bond between us almost beyond repair, is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I live in fear that I may never be able to make it up to her. That there’s nothing I can give her, nothing I can do to erase the hell that I had put her through. My own suffering doesn’t compare because she’s the one who’d been wronged all across the board. She’d been innocent all along, and I had played the biggest part in causing her pain.
I can blame Janie, Mary, and all the others as much as I’d like, but the reality cannot be ignored, and that is the fact that it was me; I was the one they’d used to strike the blow. But that was only because I was weak enough to have put myself in the position to be used. After she’d spent so much time trying to warn me, to protect me from those very people, I had been the one to turn around and bite her like a rabid dog.
That fact has been tearing me up inside every day since she took me back, and the ease with which she did it, proving once again that she’s a better person than I am, is something I still marvel at. How can I not protect and cherish her forgiving heart? I will; with everything I’ve got in me, I will. I won’t let anyone hurt her again, including me, especially me. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let any of them get to her in any way.
The more time I have to think, the more I realize how fucked up this whole situation has been. Now I’m faced with all the things I tried to run away and hide from all those years, and it’s like carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Some days it seems impossible to make it all right.
It was good coming here though, because I hadn’t given a second thought to anything that was going on back home. She’s always been able to do that to me just with her presence alone. My thirst for revenge pales in comparison to the joy I feel that I have her back in my life again. I feel whole, like a new man, and like those dark grey days when I just wanted to give up are far behind me.
I looked down at her sleeping face in the crook of my arm, and the warmth in my heart brought tears to my eyes. That feeling of peaceful calm that had been missing for so long was back and better. I didn’t know life could be like this, that I could go from one extreme to the next in the blink of an eye.
I thought I’d lost everything, that at my young age, I was going to have to live the rest of my life in misery without her by my side. And it’s almost like a dream that she’s here with me now. It’s because of her that I don’t feel as bogged down as I would have in this situation. With her, I feel like I can do anything, but most importantly, I want to do better for her.