Deadly Silence (complete) Chapter 124

“What if they send me away?” Vivian whispered, fingers tightening their hold on Theo’s shirt.

“You can move into my house. Mom won’t care, and Pops would love having someone new around to tell the same five stories to, especially if you don’t complain about having heard them a bajillion times already.”

“That’s not… how it works, you know,” she told him with a small laugh.

“I’ll figure it out,” he told her, accompanied by a nod of his head. “You can live in the attic with all the dusty boxes that hold … okay, I don’t know what any of them hold, but, I’m sure there’s, like, blankets or something in at least one of them. It’ll be perfect.”

Vivian was silent for a long time, wondering if he was being serious or simply trying to lighten the mood. “Why… aren’t you worried?”

“About what?”

Letting go of his shirt, Vivian pushed herself away from Theo, which he allowed without a fight. His hands stayed on her arms, as though he needed to make sure she wouldn’t jump up and run away. “About you being in danger… because of me…”

“Oh. That.” A sheepish look settled on his face as he let out an awkward laugh. “I mean… it’s worrisome, but you haven’t actually told me how I’m in danger, so right now I’m kind of just … not really worried about it. It doesn’t seem real.”

“It is real,” she assured him, her mouth in a grim line.

“Okay, then tell me about it. You’re not going to scare me away; I’m already planning your room in the attic.”

Vivian let out a huff at his comment, but didn’t have the energy to call him out on whether or not now was the right time for jokes. Theo was too easy to talk to, and it scared her that he’d somehow gotten her to break the silence she’d kept for so long; and he’d done it so *easily*. It didn’t change the fact that telling him the truth would only put him in more danger.

If Paul knew she’d told someone about their shared past… She couldn’t even guess at what he’d do. Would he take her away, back to their home and return things to how they should have been? Would he finally kill her?

Why hadn’t he killed her, anyway? Vivian knew that’s what he wanted, because he saw her being another man’s child as a betrayal of the highest order, so why was he torturing her like this? Was this payback for her mom’s sacrifice? Because she’d escaped his clutches?

“Vivian?”

Startled out of her thoughts, Vivian glanced up at Theo, then looked away. She must look horrible, having just bawled her eyes out for who knew how long. “Just lost in thought,” she murmured.

“How am I in danger?”

Vivian didn’t know why she’d brought it up again. They’d moved passed him being in danger to the topic of her mother, and yet she’d stupidly circled back to it.

Now Theo was being insistent, when usually he was the type to just let things go when she side stepped questions, going along with whatever tangent she threw his way. Today he was digging in his heels, and she wasn’t sure if she liked it very much.

And yet…

“It’s not just you,” she found herself saying. Wrapping her arms around herself, Vivian couldn’t understand why she was still talking. It was like the flood gates had been opened and there was no stopping it, no matter how much she wished she could.

She could feel his eyes on her as neither of them said anything. Seconds ticked by, agonizingly slow, until he broke it by asking, “Miriam?”

Hearing the name of her friend, knowing what it was in reference to, hurt all the more. Vivian lowered her head, tightening her arms around her torso. “Yes.”

“So that’s why,” he exclaimed, sounding almost relieved.

Vivian glanced up to see him grinning. When he saw the frown on her face, he shook his head. “We couldn’t figure out why you would suddenly ghost us, but it’s because someone threatened us, isn’t it?”

How was he able to say all these things like they were nothing? Vivian struggled just to form coherent sentences and yet… he said it all with a crooked smile on his face.

“Why are you so happy?” She asked after a moment.

“Well… it’s not that I’m *happy*,” he explained with a shrug, “but… more relieved that it wasn’t anything I’d done that made you decide to cut me out.”

He was being so nonchalant about everything and Vivian found herself unable to understand where his reactions were coming from.

Why wasn’t he afraid?

Why wasn’t he angry?

Why was he still here, sitting on the couch with her, after everything she’d just told him?

“But enough about me,” he said, meeting her gaze. “You need to talk to your family about your mom.”

“I can’t,” she told him without pause. There was no way she could tell them any of it without losing everything. She found herself unable to cope with the thought of being thrown out of the one place she’d called home in years. This was her home, they were her family, and to lose her home and be rejected by her family… she wasn’t sure she’d be able to survive that.

“Vivian…”

“I can’t,” she repeated stubbornly.

“Do you know how worried they are about you?” He asked after taking a moment to gather his thoughts.

“…I can’t…”

“Vivian… Do you not see how much they love you? Even Laurent, who I’ve always thought of as an asshole, went full protective big brother mode when we told him you were missing. Hell, when he learned I was hanging out with you, he tried to step in and get you to stop bothering with me; probably because he thinks I’m some player who’d break your heart.

“Your dad is so wrapped around your finger it’s actually impressive; you could probably ask him for anything and he’d find a way to make it happen, no questions asked. When I saw him for the first time in the locker room, and saw how he reacted to the situation, and then handled it? He was adamant on involving the police but you got him to back down just like that.

“I can’t speak about your other brothers, since I only sorta met them today, but I’m sure they’re, at the very least, in the same boat as Laurent. So you really have nothing to worry about with them.” Theo didn’t look away from her as he spoke, and Vivian couldn’t figure out if he was joking or not.

Yes, Vivian knew her family loved her, but in her experience — excluding her mom — love was conditional. Most people who said they loved you didn’t mean it, at least not in the way she understood the feeling. Plenty of her foster families had used the word after the first month of placement, only to send her away, or be unable to continue with the placement for whatever reason.

So, yes, she knew, and understood, her brothers and father loved her, but Vivian also knew that, other than her mom, a person’s love had limits. When Paul had been her father — when they’d believed she was his biological child — he used ‘love’ as a weapon to stay in control as much as to cause pain.

When love was given with constantly changing fine print, it didn’t take long for a person to stop believing in its ability to blind others to theirs faults. .

Love wouldn’t stop her family from abandoning her the second the truth came out.