Her cold blue eyes stared blindly ahead, so filled with sadness that they reminded one of deep, dark oceans that hid ship wrecks beneath their icy and undisturbed surface. Every minute of every day she had to remind herself that it was for the best, that she'd done the right thing. But no matter how often her head told her heart it couldn't take away the pain or make it hurt any less. Each time his face was pictured in her memory, dredged up by some otherwise small and insignificant trigger, the image tore at her heart, crushing it until she felt it would break into a million tiny pieces.
She couldn't protect him, their encounter with Geoffrey Spender had proved that. He deserved a better life, one she knew she would never be able to offer him. He needed to live his life without fear and constantly loking over his shoulder, always aware of the invisible benevolent force that would never go away or stop. She wanted her son to have the best life possible, even if the best life meant one without her being a part of it.
At night, as she lay in the darkness of her all too empty apartmen, sleep failing to engulf her, failing to pull her deep into its very depths and offer her a brief solace from her neverending heartache and despair, she allowed the thoughts to flood over her and play like movie reels across her tormenting conscience. Movie reels that caused searing pain to rip across her eggshell heart like a tidal wave.
In the cinema of her mind she saw him call another woman 'Mama', the precious word that would never grace her ears. She saw him fall and then run crying to another woman, for her to kiss it better. Tears filled her own eyes as it hit her that she would never be that woman; she would never be the one her son ran to when he felt hurt or afraid. She would never comfort him after a nightmare, never hold him close and tell him that everything was going to be alright.
She remembered the last time she had seen him, the day she had handed him over to the social worker to be taken away and out of her life forever. His big blue eyes that mirrored hers so perfectly had been filled with confusion, his small borw deeply furrowed in consentration as he tried so desperately to comprehend what was going on, what was happening to him.
As he had been placed in the car seat in the back of the social worker's car, he had cried out and it had taken every last ounce of self controll that she possessed not to run over to the car, scoop him up, hug him tightly to her and tell him that she would never leave him again. She had stood alone in the rain and watched the car drive away and eventually out of sight with her beloved baby boy locked in the back seat.
And as she lay in the darkness of her cold and lonely bedroom, the wee small hours of the morning creeping slowly on and on, she wept for him. For her son. her little boy. Her William.