Unstoppable by Melody Grace

Author:Melody Grace [Grace, Melody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Women's Fiction, Contemporary Women, Romance, Contemporary, Contemporary Fiction
Amazon: B00NFT4WPC
Barnesnoble: B00NFT4WPC
Goodreads: 20922821
Publisher: Melody Grace Books
Published: 2014-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

18.

Ryland doesn’t say a word, but he doesn’t flinch away either. He sits right beside me, holding me tight, waiting for the rest of it, for everything that’s still unsaid.

A strange relief washes over me. He’s still here. He hasn’t pulled away.

“After that, I just…I couldn’t take it,” I tell him, needing to get it all out while I still have the courage, while his body is warm against me, and I feel like I can finally speak. “The next months, I can’t even remember them. I pretended like I was OK for my brothers, for my friends, but inside, I was numb. The guilt, it pulled me under, until I could barely breathe. And then…”

I pause, because this part is almost the worst of all.

“And then I didn’t want to keep breathing.”

There’s silence.

The thing about depression, I learned at Pinecrest, is it’s like quicksand. It’s normal for so long that you don’t even realize you’re sinking until it closes over your head and it seems like there’s no way out. I would have done anything to make the pain stop, to end feeling so wretched and used up.

A bottle of pills. A glass of whiskey. Looking back, I can’t believe I would go so close to the edge. But nothing about it made sense. I was possessed by a grief bigger than myself, a darkness I couldn’t understand. It seemed so simple at the time, that’s how far gone I was. That ending it all was clean, clear.

“I realized too late,” I say, hollow. “No,” I stop myself. “Too late would have been another half hour. But I knew the minute I swallowed the pills that it was all wrong. Like I’d been sleepwalking for months, and just woken up. I called 911, told them what I’d done. I woke up in the hospital,” I add quietly. “They pumped my stomach. They found me in time.”

Ryland is silent for a moment.

“Did you really want to die?” he asks gently.

I swallow. “I wanted the pain to stop. I didn’t think further than that. It seems crazy, I know, but I didn’t put it together until the end, that making the pain go away would make everything else stop too. And when I realized…” I trail off, remembering my horror, the shame and panic. Waiting, desperate, for the paramedics as the darkness slowly wrapped around me and pulled me down into the depths.

I’ve never been so scared in all my life.

Ryland exhales a breath I didn’t know he’d been holding in. He’s still encircling me with his arm, but now he angles his head to look down at me. His expression is shadowed in the dark, but I can sense the tenderness there.

He’s still listening. He hasn’t run from the worst of me.

“And rehab?” he asks.

“My brothers were scared out of their minds,” I admit, shameful. “They decided I needed help. And I did. It was good for me,” I add quietly. “I needed to make sense of it all, to untangle all my guilt and anger over Connor.

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