A/N: Thank you for the reviews, I loved each of them! Guest – I love that idea, I may very well use it in future chapters, to thank you very much! I'm not entirely certain if Tom Marin will make an appearance in this story, it would bring further drama especially as Hanna isn't talking at the moment, so he does have the potential for turning up in the future! This chapter is from Caleb's point of view so I apologise if it's awful, but I thought we needed more of his side of everything.
"These were the lovely bones that had grown in my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it." - Alice Sebold
Caleb sighed as he wrapped an arm tighter around Hanna, his own eyes falling to a close as he bit down on his lip and just stared ahead. She was back in his arms, right where she belonged and he knew that he should be happy about that, and he was. He was truly happy that she was safe and back with him and her mother but at the same time, it broke his heart. His mind had been playing havoc with him whilst she had been gone – he had imagined some of the worst things, and some of them had come true but she was alive. He should have been happier about that.
The man frowned as he pulled a sleeping Hanna a little closer to him, her hand curled around his shirt and he averted his eyes when his stomach lurched with that over familiar pain, wishing he could take every whimper, every hurtful moment she had suffered through, and give it all to himself. Instead, his eyes settled on the bedroom, with its dull walls and lack of decoration, noting how it was so unlike his girlfriend. Or at least, so unlike the woman he had once known and loved. She may have been different now, but his feelings for her hadn't changed, despite the time and events that had passed.
Slowly, he moved his fingers through her hair and he thought about everything – the things she had told him that had happened, the fact she wouldn't speak, the look in her eyes, the fact that three years had passed and she still wasn't home. Not in the way he wanted her to be. But he guessed, he wasn't really home either – no place was home without Hanna. And that was how he had felt for so long, like a lost boy who had no home, no family, no heart... he was nothing without her. For three years, the only thing that had driven him to get out of bed every single day, was his fear and his anger; if he ever stayed in bed past twelve, he'd list all of the things that could be happening to Hanna right then, in his head, and he'd be out of there and out of the door within ten minutes, searching for her as he did the day before, and the day before that.
She suffered, they all did, and he knew that but it was hard being on the outside, as well. The unknowing, the terror that paralysed him every single time the body of a young woman was found within a fifty mile radius. It had first happened a year after, not too far after the candlelit vigil that marked their two year anniversary, the body of a young, blonde woman had been found in the next town over. Caleb would remember that moment for the rest of his life; when Ashley had received the phone call and repeated those words to him moments later. He had emptied the entire contents of his stomach, he collapsed to the ground and the tears had fallen before he could stop them. In that moment, he had been utterly convinced that the body was that of the woman he loved, that the end had come and A had finally let her come home... in a body bag. His grief had been unbearable, the body had been unrecognisable and they had to wait for DNA records to come back to them and thus, he had spent the twenty-four hours afterwards drinking, smoking, punching walls and torturing himself with photographs of the two of them together, as he thought of all the things they could have and should have had.
At that point, he was twenty years old and she would have been nineteen; she would have been finishing her first year of college in New York and he would be there with her and instead, he was already planning her funeral in his head. He had never told anyone, but when that body had been found and he had heard of the damage that had been done to that woman who turned out to be nothing more than a stranger to him, he had already made the decision that if it was Hanna, then he wouldn't be able to carry on without her.
Those were the darkest days – and whilst he never had the deep scars on his wrist to mark those days as he had seen on Hanna's, his knuckles were littered with the smallest of scars that displayed the pain he had been in for so long. Caleb was surprised he hadn't ended up in prison, the amount of bar fights he had been in, along with the claims of trespassing, harassment and wasting police time accusations that had been thrown at him as the years passed. He hated everyone and everything other than the people who believed him, which was such a limited amount – Ashley, Toby, Alison, Ezra. A few of the other parents seemed to believe him but he could sometimes see the hesitation in their eyes because he guessed, their girls running away would be more comforting than the thought of them being locked up with a psychopath who could be doing anything to them, if they were still alive.
He knew that being in there would have been the hardest thing in the world but he also knew that there was a belief that the victims of a crime were the only ones who suffered. There was a tendency to forget the suffering of those left behind, the ones who knew nothing of the pain their loved ones were going through, and who tortured themselves just thinking about it. Every dead body of a blonde, young woman left him terrified, whenever anyone mentioned her name he felt sick to his stomach. He would always remember sitting down one night and writing a list of all the things that could have happened to her whilst she was away from him and each one broke his heart. She could have been dead that entire time and he would have never known, but he had to keep searching and keep hoping until he knew for sure where she was and what had happened. Dead or alive, he would be able to make his decision soon after about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
Living without Hanna was never really living. Caleb could barely remember a single good thing he actually did within that time, he lived off the money his mother would send him, he lived in the apartment she had bought him, but he did a bit of freelance work here and there when funds were running low and he needed gas money to search the woods in the next county. Where Hanna and the girls had been found, he had been there four times, calling their names, searching for them for endless hours before they gave up and went back home. He may have walked over where she had been trapped, he should have noticed, he should have felt her. That was the guilt he would never have been able to push aside. Maybe he never could have stopped A from taking them whilst they were on their way to the courts, but he could have found them if he had just looked harder, listened better...
His thoughts were shaken from the sound of Hanna waking beside him, as she shifted in his arms and her eyes fluttered open. She was so beautiful, and despite everything, she was still the most perfect woman he had ever laid his eyes on. He wished she would say something, he longed to hear her voice more than anything else. He had missed her, he had missed everything and she was there but she wasn't. Her eyes were lost, she barely smiled, she never spoke, she found it hard to maintain any form of eye contact for too long and most of the time, when he reached out to touch her without warning, she'd jump as far from him as she possibly could.
Slowly, her hand moved to rest over his chest and her nose nudged against his neck and he heard her let out a small sigh as he rubbed her back. "Hanna?" He whispered, causing her to look up as she bit down on her lip and waited for him to say whatever he needed to say. He paused, and looked away from her before he spoke once again, "I just need you to know that I never stopped looking for you... it killed me every single day but I never stopped. I'm just... so sorry that I never found you, that I let you down. I let three years pass and whilst I never stopped looking, I never found you either and that is so much worse..." He trailed off and pressed his lips to her forehead as his own eyes closed in an attempt to stop the tears from falling down his pale face. He had no idea what the words that fell from his mouth were meant to convey but he wanted to fill the silence with the words that were meant to let her know what he had been doing for the past three years. The words he had never spoken before, because he had almost forgotten that Hanna wasn't the only one of them who had suffered greatly.
"I know I've said it before, Han... but I need you to remember that, no matter what happens in the future... that I never stopped looking and I will never leave your side for as long as you will have me. And I know... I know that things seem so daunting and terrifying right now and maybe you feel as though you will never be the same person again and you probably never will but I still love you. You are still the woman I fell in love with no matter what. But you're going to hear things about me or you will find out things about me that you're not going to like... or agree with. So, I just need to tell you before you hear it from someone else who makes it sound so much worse than it actually is. I spent more time with the police than I would have liked, they just seemed to be everywhere I was, everywhere doing everything except looking for you and I was just so angry, Hanna. I hated them, I hated everything, I hated that barely anybody believed me..." He let out a small laugh and shook his head, "I don't know where I'm going with this."
Her eyes looked up at him and he frowned, she had wrote those letters to him, there were so many of them and she added a new one almost every day and he appreciated it. He knew she needed to feel the same – as though he was sharing his own thoughts with her so she wouldn't be kept in the dark as he had for so long. "The first year was filled with nothing other than looking for you, I spent my time putting up posters, looking through the woods, going through every single town and asking anyone if they had seen you or any of your friends at all. And then this body of a woman was found... her name was Emily Taylor and she was blonde, nineteen years old, she had been hitching a ride back from New York and had gotten into the wrong car. She was raped, tortured... and left for dead. It was two weeks before anyone found her body and it was unidentifiable, so all those who matched the description in the near area, their families were informed and your mother was one of those people. I honestly thought it was you until the DNA test was back and I went straight back to searching but something changed then. I changed after that. Every single body that was found, I was obsessed, I would research them, I had an entire wall dedicated to every case, everything I could find on what had happened and I blurred them into what was happening with you. If it happened to one girl, I managed to convince myself that it had happened to you."
The man took a deep breath, as he tried to collect his thoughts but everything was blurring into one huge memory. The past three years were a mess, and the more he tried to talk about it, the more he was realising that nothing really made any sense – not the words that fell from his lips, not the thoughts that were in his head, not even the memories he held of the three years without her because it was just a mess. He was a mess, she was a mess, everything was a mess. "I know what you went through was hell, Hanna, I know that but... I went through hell as well. A different kind of hell, the hell that involved living without you. I just need you to know that I never want to go through that again, Hanna... I don't know what's going through your mind sometimes, but I can see it in your eyes. I can see that sometimes, a lot of the time, you don't really want to be here, I catch you staring down at your wrist and I have this fear that I'm going to wake up one day to you not being here anymore. Maybe it's selfish of me to ask you this, but if you're going to end the hell you've been through, Hanna, let me end mine at the same time, just... give me some kind of warning, okay? I can't do this without you."
Slowly, she nodded her head and gently moved to press her lips up against his before she pulled back, and he felt relieved that he had finally got those words out. "I love you." He finally whispered, pulling her even closer to him with the smallest of smiles on his faces because he had finally spoken the words he needed to, it wasn't everything that he had to tell her, there was still so much more but she knew enough for now and that just had to be enough.
The rest of the day was spent quietly, Hanna seemed to be constantly exhausted and in turn, Caleb was as well. He could barely sleep, he spent every moment she was sleeping reading the letters she had wrote for him and as time passed, he had learned so many things that he both never wanted to know but also needed to know. Charlotte had beaten his girlfriend more times than he would care to think about, at one point, she had held Hanna's head in freezing cold water until she almost passed out before she would lift her back out again, let her breathe for a few seconds before repeating it over and over again until Hanna was so sure she was going to die. She had woken up more than once with piles of food in her room, told she would have to eat every piece of it and then go to the bathroom to throw it all back up or her friends would suffer. And that was how his beautiful girlfriend had spent the past three years of her life – beaten, psychologically tortured, forced to relieve the days she had spent torturing herself as she forced herself to throw up.
He felt as though he was torturing himself reading each word but he had to know what she had been through. That was the biggest part of his own suffering when she was gone, never knowing what happened to her and now that he knew, he wondered if it was best to be left in the dark. He was now perpetually exhausted, his sleep filled with images of her sobbing in that room all by herself, he saw the way Charlotte treated her, every beating, every attempted drowning, every time she locked her in the room, every punishment Hanna had suffered through. He saw it all in his nightmares, but in them, he was right there with her. He was next to her, there was nothing binding him, he was just frozen to the spot and watching as she screamed, as she cried, and he stood there and did nothing other than call her name.
Her eyes were closed, his fingers tangled in her hair as he read the next page of her journal, slowly his fingers moved towards her wrist, moving his fingers over the biggest scar that seemed angry against her pale skin. The words on the pages he held in his hand were the closest he had to Hanna talking to him, so he clung to every single day, imagining the way her voice sounded in his head as he stared down at the words she had written for him and him only. He had shared few details with her mother, told her everything she needed to know – how Hanna had tried to kill herself more than once, how he worried that she would try again, how not speaking had been the only form of control she had and how Charlotte had tried to beat that control from her. He took a deep breath and tried to push the look of hurt on Ashley's face from his mind, as he turned the page and bit down on his lip.
Dear Caleb,
I dreamt of you every night. I would crawl into the closet and I would curl up in a tight ball and my body was so exhausted, I would somehow manage to fall asleep. But my dreams would usually be filled with you. Being home with you, you'd wrap me in your arms and you would tell me I was safe and for those few hours, I would believe you. I would breathe you in, you would kiss me, you would hold me as close as you possibly could and I was okay. When I came back, you reminded me of those dreams... I felt safe with you, I do feel safe with you and maybe nothing is okay, but I think that maybe one day it could be.
I did something awful once... well, not once, but this really sticks out in my mind. I was taken to a room and A had a photograph of you and Emily. I had to choose between the two of you, I wasn't allowed to know what would happen to the person I chose but I knew it would never be good. A told me that I just had to press the button or all three of us would suffer the consequences. I picked Emily and I didn't see her three days afterwards, and when she did come back, I didn't recognise her. She had been beaten so badly, her face was swollen and she had spent a few days in the hole... that was that dark place I told you about, Mona spent much of her time there and so did Emily, and Spencer... Spencer more than anyone. I don't know what would have happened to you if I had chosen you... I never got over that guilt so the next time I was faced with a similar choice, I chose you. I let you get hurt the second time around because my guilt was too much from the time before. A never told me what she did to you, but she let me have a photograph of your bruised and bleeding face to let me know what I had done, the thing I had chosen. I'm so sorry, Caleb. I had so many choices to make in there and no matter what, it was always the wrong one.
Who was allowed to drink water that day? I tried to keep it even, Spencer one day, Aria the next, Emily the day after. I kept the same pattern when I was expected to hurt them; Spencer, then Aria, then Emily. Who did I love the most? Who could I watch suffer for the longest before I broke? Everything was a game, every single day we had to make a choice and I made the wrong one every single time. If the choice was there Caleb, I would have chosen myself every single time. If it was between my pain or your pain, I would choose mine because I know that I'm the cause of every hurt you have ever felt. I hate that I can never make that pain go away – I bet you wish you had never moved to Rosewood. Sometimes I wish that you hadn't, too because I want nothing more than for you to be happy. You're twenty-two years old now, you could be in a serious relationship with a normal, beautiful girl who deserves your love and attention, maybe you would have gone to college, maybe you'd be in New York, maybe you'd have a good life surrounded by good people. I'm so sorry that you had to meet me.
But I'm so thankful that you're in my life because I love you. I'm so sorry.
Love,
Hanna.
